For a Halloween occasion again once I was in graduate college, a pal of mine dressed up as his imagined first ebook.
He wore a big cardboard field, roughly the scale of ebook, lined in paper made to appear like a ebook jacket, with the title and his identify on the entrance. On the again have been over-the-top, gushing blurbs for the ebook from a number of of the best-known residing philosophers.
The costume was a piece of genius—and in keeping with “Martha Nussbaum,” so was “the ebook”.
I recount this story in gentle of stories of a brand new growth on the planet of philosophy publishing. It’s not that authors are being requested to put in writing their very own endorsements, however some publishers are outsourcing this significant piece of promoting to the authors, by asking them to seek out individuals to put in writing their endorsements.
One thinker with a couple of books to his identify wrote in about it:
Sure distinguished publishers have determined to cease asking lecturers for endorsements that is perhaps placed on the again cowl of educational monographs. Authors themselves are nonetheless invited to ask colleagues to offer endorsements, however the press now not does this straight.
He asks a couple of questions on it:
How will we as a occupation really feel about soliciting such endorsements? Is it off-putting for a thinker to ask mates or non-friend colleagues to offer them with an endorsement for his or her forthcoming ebook? Or ought to all of us settle for that with the altering panorama, we’ll be pleased to obtain such requests? How ought to a prudent creator method this for their very own ebook?
It appears to me that the issue is not only that it’s off-putting. Sure, it places each the creator and the individuals the creator asks for endorsements in a probably awkward place. It additionally diminishes the informative worth of the blurbs. Positive, due to their perform, the blurbs are going to be optimistic it doesn’t matter what, however that doesn’t essentially imply uninformative. That so-and-so was prepared to say one thing optimistic about this ebook (and that they mentioned—or didn’t say—such-and-such) may inform us one thing, if we didn’t assume this was just because they have been requested to by the creator.
Moreover, since completely different authors, particularly at first of their profession, know completely different individuals, the observe of getting them ask mates and colleagues they know for blurbs signifies that those that studied with or have been launched to extra well-known individuals may have entry to simpler endorsements. Why amplify that type of unfairness with ebook advertising and marketing?
Additional, this appears to be one other route by which publishers can get lecturers to do work totally free. If a writer asks me to evaluation a ebook manuscript for the needs of both assessing or advertising and marketing the ebook, I’d anticipate the writer to pay me for the work. But when my mates ask me to do it, I received’t be asking them to pay me.
Dialogue welcome.
