Fines for Reviewing Books on Blogs....

I was sent a link to an article that talks about new guidelines for reviewers. Evidently if you get the book for free and then review it, and you don't disclose that information in your review, you can be fined up to 11 thousand dollars!

The new guidelines go into effect in Dec of this year.

Here is a link to the article - short and sour though it is: Fines for Reviewers Article

I can't believe this is true, or why they would want to do that. What does that mean, if your best friend gave you the book for free you can't be trusted to review it? Perhaps you won it in a contest and got it for free from a totally different author than the one who wrote it ~ that's still free... and you're still keeping it (or you should be allowed to). I think perhaps they intended this to stop people from writing overly positive reviews, but seriously... is that really such a serious crime in our society?

Is it some underground crime industry I don't know about? To me it seems like there are lots of people who even get paid to write reviews on books that admit they never even read them at all. That, to me, is more of a crime- than people who actually read the book- voluntarily giving their opinion- whether or not it was given to them by the author.

Good books are simply good books. Most people will not write glowing reviews for a book they hate. They will simply not write a review at all, or try to find something small that was positive and mention that. There are plenty of bad reviews done by the general public that will more than outweigh the few good reviews that people may feel "guilted" into because the author is a friend or they got a book from them.

It certainly isn't a cottage crime industry that is worth 11 thousand dollars. Maybe instead of chasing evil review-writing bloggers - they should should spend time catching real criminals - like politicians or thieves (or are those the same thing?). {wink}