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Originally Posted by Quoth
Not quite. ARC reviewers reviews should be embargoed till a book is released.
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I thought the point of ARCs was marketing, to get people to purchase on publication. Once a book is released, it's like yesterday's newspaper; they might as well wait on reviews by puchasers.
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And it should be 100% clear if a review is not from a random retail purchaser, if if it's a confirmed purchase.
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No, no, no. That just works in Amazon's favor and against the small local seller!
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I do think all ARC reviews are more appropriately private to the publisher before print run and never public or else the temptation is to have it as dishonest marketing.
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Again, no. There's no point to ARC as feedback, short of something egregious which should have been caught earlier anyway. By the time the ARC comes out, the deal's been done, the money's been spent, the book is ready to go.
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Originally Posted by JSWolf
I've always said the reviews should not be allowed before the book is published. Also, I think no reviews should be allowed for an ARC unless the book is said to have been read.
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One, DNF is a perfectly legitimate and useful reaction.
And, most especially, you really trust people to be scrupulously honest about having read a book, if that's a condition? In light of all the flagrant dishonesty that's caused this brouhaha? You think one of these fake reviewers who trashed the competition would have stopped at having to affirm a book's been read and thought, "Oh, no, I couldn't do
that." There's no eyeroll emotie big enough.
Goodreads is fine for my purposes although I wish it didn't market so aggressively and pointlessly. Granted, I don't have a horse in this race as I don't read genre fiction, especially current genre fiction. Still, it's easy enough to parse reviews and realize what's going on. False information is still information and tends to rebound in an unintended manner as it did here. Subtle enough not to be obvious is also subtle enough not to affect outcomes.