Yesterday, I saw some interesting discussion on the state of Blogger/Publisher relationships that focused on who has the “upper hand” (my words not anyone else’s) in the relationship.  Spurned by an awesome post by The Book Smugglers the conversation centered on some important issues that a Book Blogger Convention panel they attended this year brought to their minds.  This conversation then, as most do, spilled over on to Twitter where people were further chatting around about how they interpreted the situation.

So, even though I haven’t had the opportunity to comment on the post (which I will) and I didn’t see the Twitter conversation until it was pretty much over I thought I’d chime in on a related issue here and see what you all think about some hot button issues.  Because, even though I don’t feel obligated or beholden to publishers I do feel that my relationship with them is more of a partnership than one of us having more control or power over the other. They come to me as an outlet to spread the word about their books, I go to them to feed my interest in being so.  I personally don’t feel as though I’m being dictated to in any way when a publisher asks me to post a review on a certain date or within a certain time frame.  In fact, I kind of prefer it.  I’m a goal oriented, deadline driven girl who needs a timeline and knowing that something needs to be done by a specific time suits my personal preferences.  I understand that is not the case for every blogger and appreciate that not everyone agrees with me.   Because, really, what works for you doesn’t always work for me and vice versa.

Which brings me to one of the larger issues at hand.  I commented on Twitter a couple of days ago that I’d seen rumblings about and attempts to organize book bloggers into some kind of membership organization.  As part of this conversation, the dreaded concept of standardization came up.  The person I was having a conversation with (a really interesting and good conversation, btw) was commenting that such an organization might strive to generate and maintain a set of standards for bloggers to be able to measure themselves against.  I’ll add that we also talked about legitimacy and quality but what stuck out to me was this whole idea of standardization.  In my comments back to the idea of this I pretty much said anytime anyone has mentioned standardization (and btw, this person was not advocating for it just sparked the conversation on it) for book blogging the world pretty much exploded.  People don’t like nor do they want (as evidenced by my example referenced in the paragraphs above) to be told what to do or how to do it.  Sure, I think it’s safe to say that we want to have the conversations, we want to see opinions, get advice, brainstorm and spark creativity but really who wants someone to tell them what to do with their blog?  Be it publisher, author, or other bloggers.  Certainly not me and I hazard a guess not you either!

So….all this to say, I’m interested to hear people’s thoughts on these subjects.  How do you view publisher/blogger relationships?  Does standardization of blogging practices creep you out as much as it does me?  Is a book blogger membership organization worth the time and effort?  I have clear opinions on all of it but I know mine iare not the only ones and I’m interested to see what I may be factoring out of the equation that could possibly be worthwhile.