Normally, the NYTBR’s “Inside the List” sidebar is supposed to be about, well, books that are on the bestseller lists. Or perhaps the extended list. But for whatever reason, Dwight Garner decided to highlight Mark Childress‘s website and his prediliction for keywords to make said site more Google-friendly. But his newest book, ONE MISSISSIPPI, “[hasn’t made] it onto the Times list thus far,” says Garner, “though the book is doing pretty well in our rankings from independent bookstores.”
Which begs the question: what the hell? Especially when a quick stroll through Childress’s site today reveals no mention of keywords anywhere on the site – except in the page source, which reveals the following keywords: “Mark Childress, Crazy in Alabama, novelist, Tender, Gone for Good, A World Made of Fire, V for Victor, Southern novelist, American writers, Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith, Crazy in Alabama, Alabama writers, Southern Living, Southern writers, fiction writers, novelists, Elvis, Presley, Elvis Presley, Elvis fiction, Elvis novels, big frog chicken, Alabama, children’s books about the South.” But none of the triple repeats and exclamation points Garner cites.
Which begs another question: what was Garner doing poking around the page source for Childress’s website? Is this his idea of fun and games or amusing himself out of extreme boredom? Because with all the potential stories that could be mined from any number of bestseller lists, this seems a tad, well, odd.
Ron adds: Seriously, WTF? Search engine optimization, quelle horreur! Even if, to take the most charitable interpretation possible, Childress and/or his webmaster really did have the material Garner quoted in the site’s source code and cleaned it up before the Review hit people’s doorsteps, since when is SEO a crime? Or is actually wanting people to find your website one of those distressingly commercial things of which real literary writers would never dream? OK, maybe Antonio and Melanie are a bit of a stretch, but all the other terms are ones for which “Mark Childress” would not be an unreasonable topic upon which one’s research might land.