A must read! Highly Recommended!

Forget it, no recommendation here (oh hell why not: I've only just started reading Michail Bulgakov's 'Master and Margarita' but I already love it. Maybe it's the witty dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus? The site is one I just discovered, it looks promising but I haven't gone through that yet, I'll do that after finishing the book).

But what I wanted to talk about, was an article I read in the newspaper today, an article about recommendations and booklists. Now I know they're all a fraud, but perhaps somewhere I had an ounce of hope left that some recommendations were actually based on the quality of a book. Not true, I am afraid. It turns out that a place on WH Smith's 'recommended' list can be bought for 50,000 pounds (more than 70,000 euro). For that price, your book will also get a prominent place in one of the 524 WH Smith stores. Quality doesn't count. Waterstone's and Borders work the same way. If you want the store to pretend they really like the book, you're going to have to pay. Chances are the people you talk to haven't read the thing at all, but will tell you it really is a page turner (if the publisher pays extra) and unputdownable ('ka-Ching!' goes the cash register).
Come Christmas, prices will rise to 50,000 pounds a week, by the way, and seeing that 30 to 40% of all booksales happen then, a place on the 'recommended' list will probably lead to a bestseller. So how do you write a bestseller? You don't, you pay to have it marketed as such, and your wish will be fulfilled.

Did you ever see those mini-reviews in Waterstone's, where a member of the staff recommend a certain book? Fake and paid for as well. The wrappers around books telling you how people love it? Bought and paid for.

So if you want to buy a book, don't trust your bookstore to recommend you one. But then, we all knew that already, didn't we?