Book fairs - unfair?
Doug Johnson,
The Blue Skunk Blog,
May 16, 2021
Doug Johnson here is talking about physical book fairs where publishers like Scholastic set up tables and students file through and buy the books they want. The results are inevitable. "Every year there are little kids who pick out the books they want only to find out they don't have money in their account." So yeah, they're unfair. But I would like to widen my scope to include the free marketing book publishers receive on radio (eg. Writers & Company), the advantage they earn from podcasters who interview people who publish books (you know who you are), the preferential placement their content enjoys on Amazon or Apple, the exposure they get during conferences. These publishers, meanwhile, select authors with name recognition (by that, I mean names like 'MIT', 'Yale', etc.). It's not just the book fairs - it's an ecosystem of privilege, and schools and universities play along because, from time to time, the publishers offer them a small fee for product placement.
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