No thanks to FTC issues

Can you spot the potential FTC problem here?

 One of the things that you have to learn as a book reviewer is what the Federal Trade Commission wants you to disclose. The FTC rules governing bloggers is simple: One, you must disclose any money, discounts, or free products and services that you recieve from the author and their representatives; two, you must give an honest review. That is it--it is that plain and simple.

Unless someone decides that they want to see you burnt at the stake. Then, the rules can become a living nightmare. Ok, maybe the person I am about to talk about doesn't want to see me burnt at the stake; but they still want to see my authority as a book reviewer and Golden Dawn expert burnt to the ground--which feels the same to a book reviewer and writer.

At the root of the problem is the fact that a certain GD writer a few years ago started to brag that their masterpiece was selling on eBay for a thousand dollars apiece. Now, the book had officially been out of print for several years. But I figured considering that he was claiming that it was selling for such a high price that it would be worthwhile to do a review of it. After all, I had a copy of the book that I brought when it first came out.

Besides when the book first came out, the author got a wheel barrow full of bad reviews--as in a dozen one star reviews. The positive reviews that he got were all five star reviews. Yes, one is correct to suspect that maybe everyone reviewing the book was biased. I figured that the book needed a review from someone that was neutral--as in someone that had no stake in the Golden Dawn trademark lawsuit.

So I gave the book an honest review. I found that I did not believe the author's claims that such a book was needed; it is designed for a magician to use without a lick of training; that cost the book one star. And I found the book to have enough mistakes in the rituals that it could not be used for the purpose of allowing completely untrained magicians to use it out of the box; every ritual needed to be doublechecked; therefore I took another star from my final assessment. Bottom line, I did not think that the book belonged on every magician's shelf, and that there were too many mistakes to trust the book without having enough training where the book would no longer be needed in the first place.

For those keeping score at home, this means that I gave the book a three (out of five) stars review. As I said before, he recieved a dozen one star reviews. But out of all his reviewers, he has spent the most time trying to overturn my review. In fact, I have never seen anyone spend this much time and energy trying to prove that a review was part of a conspiracy against them--ever!

Now, part of it may simply be the fact that it was one of the articles that I used when testing the waters of the pageview markets. I used the same dozen articles on several sites to gauge how good (as in "what will I earn here") various pageview sites were. But I suspect that a large part of it is simply the fact that as a neutral, without any connection to anyone in the court case, my review was actually the most damning of the reviews.

Since I have done the review, periodically I get told that I am a member of conspiracy hell-bent on destorying his Order. Now, for many years, I tried to play nice...clear up to last year when one of his Order members told me that it was ok for them to destory my reputation because I did not belong to his Order. Because of being told that, I have gotten involved in a couple of projects that support the legal defense fund that the other party in the case has set up (to recover the costs from the first case, and help defray the costs of any further case...a case that the author in question seems determined to cause).

And this brings us to the events of the last couple of months.

A couple of months ago, the author in question decided to reissue the book in question. And he openly asked for people to point out mistakes in the book. I volunteered a mistake that I found in a recent research project, but I did not provide him with a full list. After all, he wasn't paying me to be his fact-checker. I do not do free editing.

When he hears this (see the jpeg above), he "hires" me without me submitting a bid for the job. He claims that I am obligated to prove that his book is flawed. He also makes it a condition that I attend his convention in a month and a half--where the person who told me that it was ok for them to destory my reputation will be (I had already stated that even if I did not have bill collectors calling me that I probably would not want to attend).

I tell him to talk to his lawyer because there is a legal reason I can't do the job. (Go ahead and look at how he "hired" me.) His response is to tell me that his lawyer saw no legal problem, and that it must be because I signed a contract to help destory his Order.

I suspect that his lawyer did not see how he "hired" me, or that it is a legal trap to try to sue me.

Because there is no way that I can actually fulfill his conditions. One, I do have bill collectors calling me over a student loan default. Two, I am self-employed--I have better things to do with the money I collect from jobs than attend his convention (even if a certain person would not be attending). Three, he is trying to get me in trouble with the FTC.

Now, this is a man who, when the FTC came out with their rules governing bloggers and online book reviewers, claimed that he knew the FTC rules better than I did. Therefore, he should be able to see the FTC nightmare contained in his job request. Basically, he wants me to revise my assessment of his book...or at least, provide him with proof that will allow him to claim that I was dishonest in my review.

Now, legally I do not have to prove my assessment of his book to him. If the FTC wants my proof that his book is flawed, they can ask for it. And it would be illegal for me to change my mind, and my review of his first edition--a fact that I think that he knows. But he does not care about FTC rules when they are in his way, only when he can use them against someone else.

It is just too bad for him that the FTC often decides not to go after the individual reviewers, but rather after the employer (aka the person paying for the job). In his world, my refusal to do the job proves that I am involved in a conspiracy. It will never occur to him that I did him a favor by refusing to do the job. If he presses me too hard, and I do the job and then revise my review, I am positive that someone in the GD community will report him to the FTC. In fact, I am not sure that he is completely on safe legal ground even at this moment--between this and last year's events (he encouraged people to give another author's entire product line one star reviews), I think it is only a matter of time before the FTC has a good look at him.

And for the record, even if he does fix all the mistakes in the second edition, he still hasn't convinced me that the book is actually needed. After all, if magic was that easy--as in you could learn it from a book that reads like a car manual--then we would not need esoteric Orders in the first place...which would make his Order completely useless. Therefore, the best he can hope for is a four star review...and we all know that anything less than a five star review proclaiming him the greatest thing since white bread will just be a sign that there is a conspiracy determined to destory him--as if the man's actions and behavior are not enough alone to cause people to loathe his guts.

Labeling my nonfiction word counts

In the interests of "truth in advertising" I have been trying to find descriptive terms based on word count for my non-fiction work. I figured that fiction has a loose set of terms based on word count, so one should exist for non-fiction. Well, so far I have not find a set of terms. In the lack of anything more definite, I have decided to use the following terms for the shorter pieces of non-fiction.

Short article: less than 500 words
Article: 500 to 2500 words
Long article: 2500 to 5000 words

As for the longer pieces, I still have no clue what to use. For instance, I cannot figure out at what word count a non-fiction piece properly becomes a book.

I do know some fuzzy facts, such as a standard 192-page paperbook contains from 40,000 to 50,000 words, and that book size in the print market was often determined by the nearest hundredth page marker, and print publishers were concerned with spine size (which is why you could not write a hundred page book in the print market).

I have thought about doing an estimated page count, but given the fact that word count per page on printed books vary (standard range is 200 to 350 words per page), I am not sure that will work for my ebooks either.

Labelling my fictional word counts

There following are the labels/terms for the various ranges of word counts that I am going to be using for my fiction ebooks in the descriptions that I write up for my ebooks.

Micro-flash: up to 100 words
Flash fiction: 100 to 500 words
Short-short: 500 to 2,500 words
Short story: 2,500 to 7,500 words
Novelette: 7,500 to 17,500 words
Novella: 17,500 to 40,000 words
Novel: 40,000 to 110,000words
Epic: over 110,000 words

During my research, I also came across the term "drabble" which is for a fiction piece of exactly 100 words; I doubt that I would ever use it.

Confused about what I need to disclose

Despite several hours of research (trying to understand) on the FTC change in the disclosure laws, I am still no closer to actually knowing if I need to disclose the fact that I belong to an esoteric Order when doing my occult book reviews.

If I understand the law change correctly, most of my stuff would fall under CMP. ly 0 classification, and my involvement in an esoteric Order does not have to be disclosed at all.

The only disclosures required are if I was given a copy of the book I was reviewing, or got paid by the author or publisher to do the review, or owned stock in the publishing house. The change in the disclosure laws seem to be concerned only with material gain and interest.

(For those who do not know, recently I was accused by David Griffin, the head of an esoteric Order that resorted to the use of lawyers to try to put other Orders out of business, of creating politically motivated book reviews. Supposely if you do not agree with the opinions of his membership's opinions about a book, you are guilty of political warfare. There was also the fact that I did not think his own book was the best thing since white bread---and the fact that his Order was bragging about his book selling for a thousand dollars on the used market is not an acceptable reason to do a new review of an out-of-print book.)

I asked the administration and writers on Helium if they knew the answer. I really would like to know before the first of the year, considering I am going to be making my full disclosure statement live then (I am still twiddling with it). As for Associated Content, they seem happy with compliance with the CMP. ly system.

Been working on my full disclosure statement

Over the last few days, I have been working on my full disclosure statement, or what is going to pass for a full disclosure statement in my universe.

I have been avoiding cobbling it together for awhile. I understand why the government wants to see bloggers and the new media to have one, but I also think that they vastly underestimate the intelligence of the average interent reader. I think that most readers can spot the paid advertisements.

The reason that I am cobbling mine at this point is that I have been accused of creating book reviews to match the "politics" of the esoteric Orders that I belong to. I think that is just an excuse to disguise the fact that this person does not want any voices talking about Golden Dawn unless they control what is being said. Those who know me realize that if I suspect that you are trying to control the media, then I get a little annoyed with you.

The interesting part, or at least the part that is making the writing of my full disclosure statement hard, is that I know that any disclosure that does not scream "I am so biased that I should be kicked out of the union" is going to be viewed as an outright lie. There is also the fact that the more I work on it, the more stuff that I am having to include, and the more off-the-wall it gets.

Yesterday, my current critic took me to task because I used "they" in a statement, and I did not cite something. Only one of those facts is the truth; the other will be changed as soon as this person realizes that I did actually cite my source. (That is one of the joys of dealing with this person; they go back and rewrite their stuff to make it look like they knew the entire time the shortcomings of their arguments...I pdf a lot of this person's stuff just to remind myself what the original statements said.)

Here is the copying of my own words that he did:

And I would like to point out that Nineveh Shadrach implied that they want us to construct this square. "Count yourself fortunate [to know about the Qaf square], but this fortune is merely a potential. It can only really become a full reality in your life, if you create the magic square and release its power" (xii). Why say this if they did not want us to actually do it?

Now, I will admit that I am guilty of misusing the word "they"...sort-of. I may or may not have been taken to task by a literature or journalism teacher for using "they" instead of "he" here.

Personally, I think it is clear that Shadrach is "they." I am not so sure that it is clear that I wasn't completely sure if Ninevah was a "he" or a "she," so I defaulted to a neutral term.

(We really need better neutral terms in English.)

The other accusation was that I did not cite the page number of the quote I used. Huh? I guess that my critic does not know the MLA rules because the page number is obvious (the 12th page of the introduction; yes, the publisher uses roman numerals here). So I had to put all the various citation styles that I occasionally use in my disclosure statement.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem that they are going to have with my disclosure statement, other than the fact that I am positive that my crimes are completely different than what I am being accused of (it is not politics that drive my writing, it is Google Lust), is going to be the fact that I treated my full disclosure statement like a joke. But it is the only way I was going to tolerate writing it, and my regular readers are going to be able to tolerate reading it.

*sigh* It is times like this that I find myself wondering why I thought my choice of profession was a really good idea.