A couple of months ago, BookPage asked me to review American Dirt. The advance copy arrived with a letter from the publisher, which in hindsight is honestly one of the more disingenuous things I’ve ever read.
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Through very careful language, the marketing copy for American Dirt implied that the author not only had a personal connection to the material, but that her husband himself had an even more direct connection, being an illegal immigrant himself.
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BookPage has a no-negative-review policy. So I found the one thing the book did well – it’s fast-paced – and wrote about that. A few weeks later, I learned the marketing copy was all bullshit. There is no personal connection. The author’s husband immigrated here from… Ireland.
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When I found out, I rewrote the review. The folks at BookPage had a meeting of their own, and decided they too had been taken for a ride. But they wouldn’t run my new review, because it violates their no-negative-review policy.
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As a result, they’ve wiped any trace of the original review from their web site. A somewhat forgettable book that in any other year would have come and gone is now the subject of attention that isn’t being given to countless authors who deserve it more.
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And all of this because some publisher decided this book had to be a phenomenon at any cost. I hope these folks are aware of how much long-term damage they’ve done, and I’m sorry I helped them do it.
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Thanks for this. PS. I wrote the Am.War review for the Elliott Bay Book Co. newsletter & after your event there you left me a signed copy. Belatedly, thank you so much! My coworkers said you were great. It was nice to see you in my feed.
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Thank you so much for taking the time to review it. Elliott Bay is one of the most beautiful bookstores I've ever visited, and your coworkers were very patient with an author who at that point had done maybe two bookstore events in his life.
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TBH while it's awful all around, I'm a bit alarmed by Bookpage having a no-negative-review policy and that just being normal? Like, this is where all those quotes by established authors come from - they essentially exist to mine for any positive quote, however small?
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This particular incident seems to have been extreme, but it feels like the logical outcome of having an outlet with a "positive reviews only" policy in the first place. They're not trying to inform readers or review books, they're trying to manufacture hype.
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