Episode #248: The Power Of Persuasion Can Be Insidious Indeed

For those of you who enjoy the Elf ruling the world from a Shelf, I bring you his cereal. Sugar Is Good Food.

The title of today's post can mean a multitude of things. For those of you who have a genuine sense of humor, you'll immediately get the gist. For everyone else, today's post is about how the arts & entertainment sector can surreptitiously remove your hard earned dollar from your locked wallet without you being the wiser.

But first, a writing update that features, rather annoyingly, a setback. My current saga, conveniently titled here as Hot Mess, has been forced to expand to one more volume. Between last week's post and the writing of this post, I've been forced to concede that in order to bring everything to a proper conclusion (including uniformity of content), I need to drift into one more volume. This pain is still fresh, and it's something I will elaborate on in a future post. 

With that out of the way, let's jump to the topic at hand: persuasion in the arts & entertainment field, with a specific look to books.

Oddly enough, this topic came to me in a roundabout way. I was settling down with a gently used book that I had purchased from my public library a few weeks ago {"Drunk" } and had posted a picture of here boasting how you can find a non-fiction book about any topic under the sun, and one of the main reasons why I had acquired the book were the jacket blurbs that were touting the praises on how good this book is.

Within the first thirty pages, this book performed a complete 180 from what it outwardly presented itself to be. Outwardly, it presented a picture of a fun-filled historical romp through the millennia about drinking. Inwardly, it presented a detailed picture of social/behavioral sciences indicative of what the various people of the world did when it came to producing/consuming/regulating fermented drink. All well and good, but this book was more suited for a college level social sciences course than as a book for the masses {aka literary non-fiction}.

Usually I've been pretty good about weeding out reading material that says one thing on the cover but says something completely different on the inside, but this time, I fell for the hype without researching to see if the hype lived up to the product. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I'm just a gullible kind of guy {modern twist, so sue me}.

I'm often seeing this more and more when it comes to browsing both the new book selections at B&N or the gently used book selection at my public library. Lots of hype that I take with a large boulder of rock salt because why would a particular author have (at least with non-fiction) have so much hype about their book that contains a topic more suited for pop culture as opposed to not.

Now, I have seen some good hype geared towards books in certain non-fiction genres where the content ultimately lives up to/exceeds the hype (e.g. certain historical events/periods, sports and true crime), at least in my personal opinion. But I've also been the victim of where the hype thoroughly masqueraded the dullness/zoning out capabilities of the book itself (again, looking at you the literary genre).

The reality of good hype/bad product is that the person who created the perceived bad product will almost never have the opportunity to win that particular reader back. Reputation is everything in the literary world, and unless you're someone who has churned out quality product and can get away with the occasional lemon, one perceived bad tome is very hard to recover from.

Sad to say, I only purchase books based on the reputation of a writer who I have either interacted with personally, or peripherally in another format (e.g. a podcast host who writes a book in their particular field of knowledge). For general reading, the public library remains my go-to source of material.

So my friends, have you fallen victim to this insidious issue when it comes to the written word? 

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