Don't buy Joanne Penn's How to Market a Book

At the meeting this past Sunday, I mentioned how books for indie publishing are different than books for small businesses.  One of the things I mentioned is the centrality of money and research to small business publications.

Since I am revving up to indie publish, and spurred on by the conversation, I got a copy of Joanna Penn's How to Market a Book.  It is very well received on Amazon.  It has 5 stars with 134 reviews.  This depresses me.  Broadly speaking, I think this is precisely the sort of book that has been sold to writers over the years, saying it will help them get published but offering nothing of substance.

Most of it is personal anecdotes, which is a very far cry from data.  In particular, it doesn't answer the question of how many people did everything Penn did and failed.  What is the actual success rate?  What are the real financial, business and personal risks?  Penn doesn't talk about them, doesn't do much research at all, and often simply brags about her success.  She also repeatedly tries to sell the reader other books about the subject of her book, or directs you to other media instead of presenting it in her own book.

I'm about a quarter of a way through it and . . . it sorta stinks.  It starts off with a lot of the same cheerleading that you'll find in any marketing book.  But then something weird happens . . .

In a normal marketing book, they'd start talking money.  The only place Penn talks about money is estimating that it will take between $500 and $3500 to have your book professionally edited.  For actual marketing?  She bangs the drum of what she ridiculously calls "co-eptition", a clumsy portmanteau of cooperation and competition, but actually meaning cooperation - that an indie writer is best served by networking with other like-minded writers for success.

While I think that's a good idea for reasons artistic and social, she only offers her own experience as proof of this model.  This is one of the really serious departures from a how-to book on a small business model.  If a book on small business said something like that, they'd have some research to back it up.  I understand that indie publishing is a new field, so there aren't a lot of trade organizations or government data about the field, and it isn't like places like Amazon are opening their data vaults about indie publishers.  But one of the key jobs of a writer writing a non-fiction book is research, especially a non-fiction book.

Sure, I get it, you've succeeded.  (And much of the book reads like an extended commercial for her novels, I should add, which is also quite a bit different than a good book on small business.)  But it's bad reasoning.  The question is not whether Penn succeeded, but the extent to which her success was based on a specific plan of action that can be repeated by other indie publishers.

So, every time she tells some little anecdote from her success story, I roll my eyes.  Yeah, I get it, you succeeded.  Good for you.  But what are the NUMBERS?  The data?  What methodology did you use?  What arguments are you making?

Additionally, my scam-o-meter is going off, big time.  When a person tells me that, due to technological advances, you don't need to spend money . . . ?  That's a very slight variant of get-rich-quick schemes that are old as dirt.  When someone comes to me and says that they have a system through which you have to do something not very hard (network online) to get financial rewards?  I look in serious askance, particularly when they don't have verifiable data.  I just find it incredibly hard to believe that money doesn't really factor into success in marketing.  I mean, sure, I find it easy to believe that a publishing house style full court press doesn't work due to differences in the business model, but the idea that money is removed from the equation altogether seems beyond belief.

Some of the advice is good - such as the importance of understanding keyword searches - but her advice is, basically, "Read these other books."  Again, it smacks of a distinct lack of research.  Why the hell did I buy YOUR book if you're just going to tell me to buy someone else's book?  Isn't it Penn's job, as the author of a book that's literally about marketing books, to distill that research into usable form to assist your readers in accomplishing their goals?  I think so.  And it is commonplace in books about, y'know, real marketing and small business.

The short answer - it looks like Penn scammed me.  As I can afford it, fiscally, and have the kind of mind and education that is on the lookout for trickery, I won't waste too much of my time with this drivel - but I feel sorry for people who are lured into the promises of easy success and spend their time following instructions like "network with blog sites", without being given any concrete, specific advice what that means or where to go, instead of the nuts and bolts of real marketing in the digital age.

I will also point out that Penn repeats over and over that there are no rules, that the field changes constantly, that there are no guarantees of success.  All of this is true, but the frequency of the reminders feels like a cooling off process - where the author gets up your hopes and then covers their ass so when you try her advice and it fails, she can just say, "Oops, I guess things changed.  So sorry."

***

Going through various price strategies, Penn gives no concrete data.  So, a lower (or even free) price for a book at the start of a series MIGHT be a good idea.  Her "research" amounts to one interview with one writer.  What is the general effect?  I guess that would take research and that's hard or something.

She ends the section on pricing with advising a person to read another book . . . which is part of her strategy, I suppose.  "Co-eptition" in part works by inserting other people's works into your own.  But this has the net effect of reducing the value of Penn's book and creates a scam.

Again, this is a common scam.  You buy something and then learn that to get what you really want?  You've got to spend more money!  It would not surprise me if the book on pricing suggested yet more books to buy to get the information one needs to make rational marketing decisions (perhaps closing the loop by referring Penn's book) . . .

Which, while we're on the subject, makes me think about one of Penn's premises - that you should be ethical in your marketing.  I mean, I am not stunned that a person claims ethics and then engages in bait-and-switch tactics, luring you in to spend more money to get what you need from the book you bought.  The first thing unethical people do is appeal to ethics, after all, assert their honesty.

Let me speak to Joanna Penn: bait-and-switch isn't ethical, Joanna.  If you buy a car and find you've go to spend extra for the fuel tank, well, no one does that because it's unethical bullshit.

***

Chapter 3 is about short-term marketing.  The header is "no platform needed."  Hmm.

The sections about long-term and short-term marketing are the make-or-break parts of the book.  If you're reading these words, it's because part 3 and 4 broke the book.  I don't care if there are personal anecdontes in other sections so long as these sections provide useful information.

No stories.  Not recommendations for other books.  Information.

Let me go read part 3.

Done!

Nearly the first thing the author does is buy reviews.  At the book's start, Penn says it's terribly UNETHICAL to buy reviews, but in part 3, well, she describes how she gave out free books to people on her mailing list, asking them to review it ONLY if they liked it.  She included a smiley face, so I guess it's not trying to buy reviews . . . ?

No, let us be clear.  She is giving away merchandise for positive reviews.  If buying reviews is unethical, this is unethical.  She calls it a "soft pitch with no pressure".  It is not.  It's trying to buy positive reviews.

(The ethical way to handle it, by the by, is simply to give out the books without mentioning reviews one way or the other, or a general call asking for a review.  By specifically asking only for positive reviews, she breaks the code of ethics she spoke about in such big letters earlier in the book.  I mean, sure, her readers don't have to give a positive review, but that's equally true of any reviewer who gets something for their review.  They CAN just take the money and give a crappy review.)

While unethical by her own standards and a mere anecdote, she says that 30 percent respond with 4 or 5 star reviews.  She does not mention if any give bad reviews - but I suspect few if any do, since she's specifically asking them NOT to review her book unless it's a good review.

She then says, in big ass bold letters that "Sending free review copies is totally normal and accepted in the publishing industry."  So it's okay because someone else is doing it?  Plus, these aren't merely review copies.  If that was the case, sure, but she's specifically asking for only good reviews, she's asking that people with bad reviews do not review the book.

She goes on to say that it's okay because she hasn't paid them.  Unless, y'know, a free copy of the book might count as "payment".  (Hint: it does.)

And the horror keeps going on.  She says that this only works with fans of your genre, and that you want honest reviews.  Unless, of course, they're bad ones.  In that case, she doesn't want them.

She includes a link to an article about targeting Amazon's top reviewers.  So, y'know, once again I've bought a book that references me to something else instead of giving me the data that I thought I had paid for.  She then goes on to talk about an Amazon premium option - giving a link to an interview she did with someone else instead of, I don't fucking know, WRITE A SUMMARY OF THE INTERVIEW.

Hellfire and damnation, this woman is a horrible writer!

Then she goes on to talk about book bloggers, how to contact them and such.  This part isn't so bad, but again, no numbers.  But, again, a link to a thirty minute interview Penn did with someone else.  Really?  I thought I bought a book and apparently I bought an advertisement for other products!

Then there's a section on "what not to do."  She beats the drum, again, about not buying reviews after starting the chapter on how she buys reviews.  It's unethical!

. . .

Okay, I know this thing is getting long, but here's the thing about ethics and advertising - I don't know where the line is but I do have some thoughts on the subject.

It is increasingly commonplace for companies to buy ads that look like copy.  It is not illegal, at least not in the US.  We have a very high level of freedom of speech, here, and specific jurisprudence (Citizens United!) that says spending money is identical to freedom of speech.

I do not think that because something is legal that it is automatically ethical.  But, on the other hand, I'm not sure why big, powerful companies can create ads that look like copy but individuals can't.  To me, that sounds hypocritical, or at least extremely naive (I believe that Penn, in his regard, is naive; it isn't like she did a lot of research into advertising norms as practiced on Madison Avenue).

So, where's the ethical line with marketing?  I dunno.  But I do know when you're giving away a book for free and asking people who don't like it to not review it, you're actually buying reviews.  So I know that Penn is being a hypocrite.

Ahem.  Moving on:

In 3.2 she finally gets to paid advertising.  Oh, joy.

She suggests paid promotional sites that have lists of avid readers who might be interested in your book.

On the other hand, she says one ought not buy email lists, calling them a scam.  Eh.  Spam works.  It's not illegal.  It's not even fundamentally unethical.  Americans have the right to communicate with their neighbors for commercial purposes.  It's the reason why spam isn't flatly illegal, it's the reason why mailing lists aren't illegal, or door-to-door salespeople.  There is no legal way to distinguish between people who engage in mass mailings (electronic or otherwise) or door-to-door activities who are there "legitimately", since certain kinds of speech are strongly permitted (religious and political, for instance) and because people's standards differ.

Penn's ethical biases are childish.  I understand that a person might hate spam.  I do, that's for sure, and I don't see myself using it, but she beats the drum of ethics time and again in ways that are absurd.

While offering no real proof, she provides more anecdotes about how she used paid promotions successfully.  She then goes on to talk about what Bookbub is and . . . says she has no idea if it works.  That it's expensive, requires a monthly fee, but each author has to decide if it works for them.

Again, data?  Fuck that shit.

Then she gives a fairly extended anecdote about her one experience.  It starts with the obligatory cooling off, saying that there's a large number of factors that go into things and an given person's experiences are likely to be different than hers.

That's why you need to do research.  Instead of just taking your experiences and writing about them, you attempt to create a representative sample, collate the data and present THOSE results.  That's what I actually paid you to do.  If I wanted anecdotes?  Jesus.  The Internet is FULL of anecdotes!  I did not buy a book for ANECDOTE!

Neither should you, by the way.

It's a crappy anecdote, too.  It's about her experience with Bookbub and she gives a very little data on how much she made - though only in the first two days of the promotion.  She gives some Amazon and Kobo stats for both the peak and a week after, but no numbers on total sales or money made.  Weaksauce.

Then she dismisses Facebook paid adverts by saying she's not a fan.  Again, anecdotes offered instead of data.  She mentioned Goodreads paid advertising but only mentions it, then Kirkus Reviews, a quote from one person who did well with it (that's what qualifies as research to her - she got one quotation, done and done!) and another anecdote on her experience with Kirkus (weakly negative).

Then she speaks about her experiences with traditional media.  It didn't work for her.  She gives reasons why she thinks this is the case, but without attribution, though some of it seems legit (not targeted enough, too long between seeing her and the opportunity to buy her book, no specific call to action - sounds reasonable, sure, but where's the data?).

Then Penn talked about hiring a publicist.  To me, a competent publicist would seem a godsend - someone who can efficiently and skillfully do the marketing tasks that a given writer might stink at and certainly has no experience with.

Almost nothing is given beyond a suggestion that you do your research and budget carefully to maximize your chances of successful.  I get the feeling that Penn hasn't used a publicist (no anecdotes!) and, as ever, no research.  She points out that it's expensive relative to the other techniques in the book.

VERY disappointing.  Even in my minimalist research at this point, I'm aware there are a bunch of different kinds of publicists.  Particularly, in this day and age there are a number that specialize not in traditional media but digital media, but also many others besides.  To characterize a publicist as someone who operates solely in traditional media is to do a serious disservice to their service, as well as to lead the readers of Penn's book astray.

This is keeping in context with her researchless style.  If she has never used a publicist, well, since she does no research, why should she look into the success and failures that other people might have had with publicists?  Creating representative samples isn't in her wheelhouse, apparently.

She spends, for instance, a LOT more time on getting a good photographer than a publicist.  Really?

Then she talks about a press kit, gives a few websites about them, and how to contact the press.  The amount of effort she puts into this is slightly strange given her attitude towards traditional media . . . though the reason becomes clear when she gives her multi-page success story about her press releases.

Remember, she can't guarantee doing what she does will be successful, but she really likes telling you about her personal experiences!

She also talks about her experiences with TV and radio.  Now we're in the world of outright bragging.  Around about her section about press releases, there is no longer any context about how this improved even her own sales.  She made no attempt to link her experiences with the press, TV and radio with anything so pedestrian as sales spikes or anything else.  She devolved into pure braggadocio.

Needless to say, not what I wanted to read.

Almost no talk about how much things cost or, really, any data at all.  Overall, her advice on short-term marketing is both "do as I do" and "don't expect it to work", personal stories that she seems to know don't mean very much, but yet are the focus of the chapter!

***

In chapter four, we get to long term marketing with a "platform".  It starts out with backlash against the idea of having a platform (I suspect I'm part of that backlash - a lot of it seems to offer much and return little, but always allowing a person to spend more and more time in the minutae of social media networking).

Since I think she's going to mention it a lot, Penn really loves the work "karma".  I dislike the way it's used in English, because it smacks of orientalism.  Karma is a Hindu and Buddhist religious concept about the accumulation of one's deeds on one's soul and the effects this has over multiple generations.  It is not "what goes around comes around", though it is used that way with great frequency.  I feel that's insensitive, if not racist.

That said, I have some interest in this section.  I am an engaging public speaker.  I would very much like to get up on stage and tell people who awesome and clever I am, convincing them to buy my books, stuff like that.  I expect to get some anecdotes, though.

It's worse than I thought.  It is clear that part of the reason Penn suggests this is because she likes it.  It's fun!  I'm told this repeatedly.  I'll make friends!  I have friends.  It's totally worth it!  Why?  Uh, because she likes it.  It is magic, she says.  She literally calls it magic.

It is not.  She calls herself an introvert, but I think that we need a bunch of new terms.  For a person such as myself, who constantly struggles against competitiveness, social media can easily become an incredible drag.  Strangers barging into my life, expecting to be taken seriously, who I often find are fucking morons.  I get competitive, then I get mean.

I don't think this is very strange.  Interacting with a large and shifting group of strangers is challenging.  Much in the same way that some people are better at groups, some people are going to be better at social media.  I greatly prefer speaking to large bodies of people than getting attention from strangers because of some post I wrote.

I am also very aware that during Penn's rhapsodizing praise of platform, there are no numbers attached as regarding publishing.  WHY a person selling books should create a platform is unclear for an indie writer (she rightly points out that traditional publishers love that kind of stuff, though having looked into that there's no good reason why for them, either - I think it's a legacy issue, harkening back to the days when speaking engagements and such were the only way for a writer to reach an audience).

Penn does say that having a good platform can become a business onto itself.  She gets speaking gigs, for instance.  She attributes this platform to her being a full-time author-entrepreneur.

But this is weak.  I mean, I speak well.  I would love to supplement my income with speaking gigs.  I'm seriously considering both interviews and podcasts because I think I'd be good at them and there's enough intrinsic joy in them that I would want to do them regardless of their "success".

(Interestingly, and I think this is a big lacuna, at no point does Penn talk about other kinds of marketing.  She doesn't have T-shirts, coffee mugs or other merch for people to buy relating to her books.  Hmm.)

Afterward, Penn talks a little about brand management.  She talks again about authenticity.  She fuckin' loves that word like crackheads love the pipe!

Let me be clear.  Authenticity doesn't mean very much.  I don't mean that a person shouldn't be authentic, but in the sense that the word has little meaning in a promotional sense, except as something you wish to inculcate into your fanbase.

OK, that's not actually clear.  What I'm trying to say is that it's great to have people think you're "authentic" but there's no real standard of what that is, artistically.  It is, at best, sublime.

Not to mention the little problem that maybe you're an asshole.  If you're "yourself" but you're a jerk?  Maybe you should try to be someone else, someone, I dunno, more marketable.

And, indeed, a lot of the advice is irrelevant of any authentic experience.  So, for instance, I should be authentic but also stay focused.  But . . . I, Chris Bradley, am authentically diverse.  I like different things.  Today, it's writing about this terrible marketing book.  Tomorrow, it might be something about my cats, or something political, or a recipe I like.

See?  Be authentic but consistent, stay focused . . . I guess it helps if you're that kind of person.

Otherwise, fake authenticity, I guess.

Then there are the calls to spend more money on other books as well as the inevitable interview podcast.  Because this book isn't about actually providing you with data, but bragging and advertising.

Then there's a very long section about pen names.  I'm not sure why, probably because it was easy to write.

I also think Penn dances around the gender issue instead of gripping the bull by the horns.  The truth is that it's harder being a woman than being a man in most cases.  (Though in the case of, say, paranormal romance author, being a woman is a pretty solid plan.)  But to say that, after going on and on and on about authenticity is hard.  If you're lying about being a man because you write science-fiction, are you being authentic?

It's a touchy issue and she handles it poorly is what I'm saying.  For my money, I would have preferred a simple practical guide.  I wasn't looking for ethical advice from this book, but marketing advice.  Whether or not it is authentic or ethical or anything else to craft a nom de plume but the marketing reasons to do so.  Whether an author then wants to ignore that advice because they find it distasteful can and should be up to them, I figure.

Then there's some stuff about websites, but it was so banal I skipped it.  If you're going to have a website, it's probably best to hire a pro.  Knew that!

Then, she suggests an email list.  This part isn't bad, probably because Penn's career has been strongly influenced by her mailing list.  She's clearly anti-spam (which is fine, as I am, too, though in a truly useful marketing book I think that spam should be addressed as a potentially useful marketing technique; I do not pick up how-to books for ethics but data and options).

Really, she should have started out with this.  It is easy to do and a vital tool of direct marketing.  I accept that every author should have one as being obviously true.

Then she talked about blogging.  It's a good idea because it changed her life.  Once again, who cares?  Penn's personal story isn't the point to this!  I bought a book on marketing, not her life story, not a biography!

I dislike blogging as marketing - I mean, I hate it - so I won't be doing it and mostly skipped the section about how it changed her life.  Maybe if I had some confidence it would be about more than her personal experiences blogging, including research data about its efficacy, I would have slogged through it, but she's a terrible writer who should suffer in the pits of hell for her affronts to nature and humanity.

Indeed, I then stopped.  Clearly, there isn't much here for me since I'm not looking for ways to make ending my own life easier.  It's a terrible, nasty, boring book that doesn't redeem itself by providing useful research or data.

It is, unfortunately, typical of its breed.  Indie publishing is likely the right course for me, but the books about it seem designed to take advantage of people.  This is pretty normal in the publishing industry, though - a fair bit of publishing is about lying to writers, after all, and taking advantage of their hopes and inexperience to make a quick buck.

Thoughts on All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr

I just finished All The Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr.  The short version?  It was okay.  It didn't offend me and I don't think I wasted my time reading it, but I don't think it was really my thing.  It was too literary.

I'm not even passionate enough about it to say too much what I did or didn't like, save in rough.  There are some pretty words and some superficial meanings.  Lessons were learned, but they were lessons I think every reasonably intelligent human already knows - war is terrible, innocents suffer, not all Germans in World War II were evil, hideous and pointless things happen in war and afterward the survivors go on.

If you like symbolism, you'll probably like this book, though.  There's a whole lot of lights a person can't see and ways of interpreting this metaphor.  You can really sit back and think about all the light we can't see.  If you like wrapping yourself in metaphor, you'll probably think more about this book than I did.

To the extent that I am confused by it, though, is that I have absolutely no idea why some quest to find a potentially magic rock was involved at all.  I understand why the potentially magic rock was there - I guess you can't have magical realism without some of that - but the bad guy's quest to use it as his philosopher's stone seemed tacked on because otherwise the love story would be too insipid for words, I think.  It could have been done better, even within the construct of the novel, I think.  Which is a fairly slight critique.

My bigger critique is that I feel that the novel did nothing to link the kinds of stupidity that happened then to any modern stupidity.  This book was written in the particular context of a time and place - this time, this place.  To write a novel about war and do nothing to bring it home that we, today, are engaged in a number of military conflicts around the world seems cowardly.  But the novel is very clear NOT to do that, even though it contains passages that are very modern, none of those people notice the Vietnam War or the modern wars on terror.  No comment was made or, I think, implied about anything modern, except to suggest that the evil dies with us and our good lives on.  As one of the people who read the book with me said, "The book doesn't judge either side."  I pointed out it wasn't a particular virtue to refrain from judging Nazis - they were the bad guys - and that it's okay to judge war since it is so terrible.  I will add, here, than a failure to judge war is itself a judgment.  By taking a "shit happens and life goes on" approach, well, that smacks of nihilism, or would if Doerr were making a point.  But he isn't.  He's just ignoring it, which I find chicken.  That's my serious critique, but I doubt most readers will care about it.

You can google the title to read about the particulars.  If you like that sort of thing, you'll probably like the book.

Review of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Mischa Glenny

I'm reading McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Mischa Glenny. The book is about organized crime in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, not just in the former USSR but everywhere, and the book has this really . . . weird narrative about capitalism. Basically, while describing the horrors caused by the plutocratic and criminal states that arose post-USSR, Glenny chalks it all up to the necessary growing pains of an emerging capitalist society.

The crazy thing to me is that . . . at the time of this dude writing this book, the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries are still total nutcases. The book was published in '09 and it takes about a year to go through publication, so it was probably submitted in '08, which means the bulk of the writing probably went on before the Great Recession. But it wasn't like '07 was some stellar year in Eastern Europe.

While it is true that the criminal elements in Russia are weaker, now, power in Russia has been replaced with Putin's dictatorship – which one might say is at least as criminal as the crooks it replaces. And Russia and most of the Eastern Bloc is experiencing rates of poverty that made the Soviet Union look downright affluent. Sure, now the stores in Eastern Europe have stocked shelves . . . but only an incredibly wealthy elite can buy anything. An improvement for the rich, but not so much for the tens of millions of Russians cast into abject poverty. Not to mention the one sterling communist education system is in shambles (not to mention the flight of the intelligentsia from Eastern Europe, draining the education system further), lack of health care where once everyone got it, so forth and so on.

But the most damning numbers, for me, come from life expectancy. In Russia, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, men could expect to live to 72 years of age. It's now . . . 59. Capitalism has shortened male Russian lives by thirteen years, replacing communist longevity with violence and alcoholism.

I'm not going to say that if the USSR had continued to exist that things would be better than they are, now. There's simply no way to know that. It's a facile game to make those kinds of predictions. But Russia seems yet to have repeated real, material benefits of capitalism a full generation after the fact. There was always an elite who lived luxurious lives, does it matter if they were communists or capitalists? It seems to me that it was under the communists that the Russian state did bettter – lower rates of crime (even including the state's brutality), longer lives, better educational and employment opportunities for the overwhelming majority of people.

If Gorbachev had put his considerable intelligence and energy into invigorating communism than with perestroika, well, who could possibly say what would have happened? Perhaps things would have fallen apart even worse, though I have trouble imagining how without there an all-out war. But this is what we do know – for tens of millions of people in the former Soviet Union, life is worse now than then. They have worse education, often no access to medical care, certainly no form of retirement. For many others, life is more or less the same in terms of quality of living. And for a tiny few, things are a lot better as they are living the capitalist fantasy of tremendous wealth. You'd think, since this is the case, that maybe constantly cheerleading capitalist as the means away from poverty might . . . not be a clever thing to do. There seem to be many more signs that capitalist is a Russian curse and not a blessing.

But, nope. The narrative is set. The crime and corruption, and now, I suppose, tyrannies of the former Soviet Union are the birthing pains of a better world. Even though those pains seem likely to continue indefinitely, that the birth may never occur (and, in general, that kind of dividing line is also facile – at this moment EVERYTHING CHANGED; usually it was an incremental process that doesn't resemble the neat narratives of historians and especially journalists). Even though the gulf between the rich and the poor is literally at the highest point since . . . the events surrounding the October Revolution.

Reading the book, though, it's clear that Glenny has very strong feelings about Russia. I mean, duh, his name is Mischa. I'm gonna read into things, here, and say he has a Russian background. When describing the Soviet Union, though, he talks about how gray and dreary it was. When describing post-Soviet Russia, well, now it's a very lively place.

I think this is because for Glenny, it is a far, far more lively place. If you're a reasonably affluent Western journalist flying into Moscow, I'm sure that things have improved pretty dramatically for you in Russia. Glenny says as much, talking about the clubs, cuisine, girls. What he seems to entirely miss is how, sure, now Eastern Europe has all of these things, including billionaires, but it has had a very, very dramatic cost to the people who weren't the winners of the capitalist lottery.

Not just the gangsterism (though that is hard to ignore), but the way the former communist nations have ravaged educational and health care systems. The way that critical services have been obliterated with no hope in the next couple of decades of something to replace them. Not to mention how Eastern European nations, once at full employment, are now burdened with very high rates of joblessness.

More broadly, there is this notion that capitalism brings wealth. I've said it before and I'll say it, again – while it's undoubtedly true that the richest nations in the world are capitalist, so are the poorest. Glenny seems to buy into the reasoning that if we only give capitalism a chance in Eastern Europe, things will get better. It's only been twenty years!

There are two flaws in that reasoning that . . . I don't think one can easily dismiss. The first is that after twenty years, there's no way to say what would have happened if communism hadn't fallen. Now you're in the realm of science-fiction, trying to compare alternate time lines. It has all the difficulty of trying to imagine what would have happened if the Confederacy had succeeded in gaining independence. Many interesting scenarios could be imagined, but none of them have the least basis in fact.

Second and this is the doozy, there are poor countries that have been both very capitalist and very poor for a very long time without a lot of hope of things improving in the near future. While I certainly hope that Eastern Europe turns itself around, there's no reason why it shouldn't go the direction Bolivia or Haiti or, well, pretty much all of Africa.

South America and the Caribbean are a very interesting test bed. Not only is much of the area capitalist, it is more conceptually capitalist than places like the United States. In much of the region, there is almost no regulation (or if the regulation exists, it's pretty notional with the states so weak that they can't enforce it – which is why so much cocaine somehow manages to escape Columbia so consistently). If you describe a capitalist's idea government, it would sound a lot like Columbia – where the central government is so weakened that businessmen can do as they please. And they are. But what doesn't happen is the wealth is distributed to the poor. Indeed, as the coke barons grow in power, the lot of people in their territories diminishes to the point where much of the country is in virtual slavery. I suspect the only reason it isn't actual slavery is that if the coke barons owned the workers there might be some sense of obligation towards the people they oppress.

There's no reason to assume that Eastern Europe won't go in that direction rather than, y'know, becoming a bunch of Japans and South Koreas – the Slavic Tigers. All through South America and Africa are countries with abundant natural resources, countries that are conceptually quite capitalist, but since the minerals extracted from those places enriches foreign companies and a tiny local minority, one does not see a rise in quality of life for the people of those nations. Frequently, they're worse than before, because you have armed thugs demanding that they engage in those businesses (diamond mining, cocoa production) that serve the wealthy elite and their foreign masters instead of businesses that would provide them with a growing economic base (developing local industries, a tax base capable of supporting universal education and health care, stuff like like). There are plenty of examples – the main bulk of capitalist nations, really – that say that the kind of economic chaos that Eastern Europe finds itself can endure . . . indefinitely. Longer than communism, certainly.

But people who challenge the narrative that capitalism is unvarnished good all the time don't tend to sell many books.

Also very interesting is that, in every case the author makes about the rise of organized crime internationally, is that a big part of it was fiscal deregulation. Glenny's narrative goes, “Well, you had these countries like Israel and India with strong collective social traditions but then deregulation and government privatization came into vogue and mob violence broke out in a big fucking way.”

So it stands even more remarkably that such a strange intellectual lacuna should exist – Glenny repeatedly refers to gangs in the former USSR and Eastern Europe as providing private security services that the police could not handle, those necessary handmaidens to capitalism, but the deregulation and privatization of government that happened in the 90s and has been one of the persistent goals of capitalism. When they finally got what they wanted (in part, I feel, because after the fall of international communism they had no ideological rivals and did not need to soften their rapacity for fear of a communist uprising in poor nations), it lead to the Great Recession and a large rise in the number of gangs and the level of violence. Yet, at no point does Glenny suggest that maybe this is a structural problem with capitalism, itself. Which is strange because, y'know, he does everything by blame capitalism by name – he simply lists the facts but without the least bit of indictment of the organizing principle behind those facts. In short that the deregulation of business and privatization of government has been driven by capitalism.

If the book took an entirely apolitical stand – simply describing the facts and letting the reader infer them – well, I wouldn't like that, either, but at least it would have the air of neutrality. But Glenny isn't neutral. He is repeatedly capitalism's cheerleader in a book that describes the very horrors of capitalism, itself.

He eventually does mention, briefly, that this crap does threaten the foundations of globalization. Glenny mentions that everyone knows how money is laundered and some countries, like the US, could really curtail money-laundering havens by putting sanctions on those countries, or the world could get together and create international banking regulations including the teeth to enforce them.

But licit business also uses these havens to avoid taxation. There is tremendous pressure from the business interests that fund elections and control economies to allow various tax havens – and, thus, money laundering – to continue.

I think he shies away from the horror of it, though: the capitalist ethos is incompatible with any restrictions on what can be commodified or the manner in which markets are acquired and kept. In the perfect capitalist world, anything goes. Gangsterism is the fundamental model of capitalism: anything to make money. That's what they think they want. Glenny doesn't want to say that, no one does. They have this fantasy where a system built on human greed and personal ambition finds some kind of rational boundary. That they will “learn” to moderate their greed and ambition to avoid the social chaos created by murder and mayhem as normal business tools. They'll put them away because it's bad for business.

Sure, it's the rational actor fallacy, but it's also the capitalist fantasy – that people will see, as we do, not to do business that way.

I wonder if the book will move into a discussion of the violence of licit businesses, y'know, how mining and oil companies are really big on murder and always have been, not to mention the arms business, or the chocolate business which is built on slave labor. Not even stuff like the horrors of forced immigration and the coyote trade, where business turns a blind eye, but the acts of violence perpetrated by the businesses themselves. That is what really ties it all into one package for me – that businesses are quite willing to kill and enslave quite directly if they can get away with it, in ways no different from any organized crime ring . . . except, I imagine, a little more plausible deniability created by a larger number of intermediaries speaking a more rarified language. You won't catch too many oil men saying, “Kill that sonofabitch” but merely opining to their security professionals that it would be great if that Nigerian tribal lawyer went to a place from which he would not return. Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest!

While McMafia is an interesting book, I think it is inherently flawed by the author's inability to address the structural problems of capitalism even as he describes many of them. Insofar that the rise of international gangsterism is linked to capitalism, it is only capitalism's “growing pains” until the nations that have embarked on this capitalist adventure learn to deal with their new system of government. This is true even in countries that have been conceptually very capitalist for as long as the United States. Because it is Glenny that brings up capitalism's role in crime, his inability to analyze capitalism beyond mere boosterism for it rankles quite a bit. To understand gangsterism requires, I think, an understanding that gangsters are the epitome of capitalism – everything is a commodity, even life and death. Slaves are a commodity as are assassins. You sell what you can, for as much as you can, without any limitation on the products you sell or the techniques employed to acquire those goods or secure your markets; violence is certainly permissible. To this you would need to add the realization that businesses behave in the same way when they can – that the mobster mentality is alive and well in corporate boardrooms all across the world who have no qualms about corrupting governments, using mercenary killer to enforce company policy, lie, cheat, steal and kill. They can and are doing all of these things, except they have offices in Maryland. Without that kind of analysis, the book is entertaining but ultimately hollow.