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Reviews Don't Come Cheap
February 29, 2008
“Anyone with a few bucks could start producing [reviews] tomorrow,” said an anonymous agent earlier this week to MediaBistro’s Ron Hogan.
Really? I’ve been in the book reviewing business for a long time, including five years as nonfiction editor at Kirkus and more than eight years here at PW—and I know it takes more than a few bucks to produce 6,000 reviews a year. That’s one reason why Amazon cut its own review department: reviews are very labor-intensive and costly. Information may want to be free, but it isn’t—it’s expensive to produce.
Not only is it labor-intensive for the editors, but you need hundreds of freelance reviewers who are experts in a wide range of subjects, from modern European history and science to music and mysteries.
You can’t gather a team like that overnight, nor can you gain overnight the credibility that PW has earned over the course of decades.
Nor would an upstart review service be licensing re-views to Amazon or touting books to AARP members anytime soon—PW does both an
d I suspect even Mr. Anonymous Agent appreciates it. What do you think?
Your Girl Friday will be on vacation next week, back on March 14. By then, I hope to have finished reading Métro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light by Gregor Dal-las (Walker, May). So far, Dallas’s tale is more dark than light (catacombs, guillotines, danse macabre). Still, it's fascinating and I wish I’d had it before I went back to Paris for two weeks last November.
Posted by Sarah Gold on February 29, 2008 | Comments (1)
