Reviews

[The Blue Lotus]

The New York Times > Books > An Honest Book Review From Kirkus? Only $350

I had always been told reviews are unapid to ensure there was no bias. How do you feel about it?

 

[Devor]

The New York Times > Books > An Honest Book Review From Kirkus? Only $350

I had always been told reviews are unapid to ensure there was no bias. How do you feel about it?

I don't like it, but my displeasure isn't on the question of honesty. There are plenty of internal controls that a well-run company, with a good reputation, can employ to ensure honesty. No, I don't like how many people will submit lousy books and pay to have their work trashed. I think that's unprofessional.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

I don't like it, but my displeasure isn't on the question of honesty. There are plenty of internal controls that a well-run company, with a good reputation, can employ to ensure honesty.

Like Wall Street has controls to ensure honesty?

Anytime money is exchanged pressue can be brought to have a desired or desierable outcome for the payer. In the lit world that could be bad. Reviews could lose that which makes them useful.

If your book lands a NY times "glowing" review that publicity alone drives sales... Now if one can rub the right elbows and grease the right hands you can buy said "Glowing review" so what's the point in taking the time to craft the perfectly rendered words?

Just my take mind you.

 

[Graham Irwin]

As the artist, you should never pay anyone to look at your work. If you are in the small-time stages of publishing (like me!), go for reviews from friends and co-workers. They work just as well on Amazon.com, where volume is more important than anything. I don't see why I should pay someone to review my book when that someone is probably funding their own writing career by reviewing my book. The publishing world is cannibalistic!

 

[Devor]

Like Wall Street has controls to ensure honesty?

Wall Street is in the business of finance; it's a complex industry with many archaic regulations and inexperienced regulators, filled with middlemen, uncertainty, layers upon layers of sales, and educated well-run companies which still can't keep up. There's science, risk, greed, fear, and unbelievable pressures, as well as many of the most ambitious, angry, deceptive people in the world. Contracts and deals abound. People go in, spend about ten miserable, over-worked (oh yes), over-paid years of their lives trying to game the system and make money on the little discrepancies and errors and weaknesses and hunches that they can spot in the market and in the actions of others. I was told, openly, by my finance professor in class, "There are people who view the market as gambling. Our job is to identify those people and figure out the best way to take their money."

No other industry can be compared to Wall Street, the problems are endemic. But yes, there are a great many companies in any other industry with superb internal controls to maintain honesty and integrity within their firm.

By the way, a common, frequently recommended practice for potential investors to consider is to buy SPDRs ("spiders," basically a micro-share in the S&P) because over time on average, Mutual Funds do about as well as the S&P but charge transaction fees which eat into your returns.

 

[The Blue Lotus]

Point taken I was actually asking if you meant the controls were like that of a wall street corp.
I should have been more clear. My mistake, forgive me.

 

[Telcontar]

It's suicide to the ones offering it, to be honest. Reviews drive sale because they tend to only review books worth reading in the first place, or rather review books that lots of people might see. If you can buy a review for your son's fantasy novel about vampires falling in love with weredragons, then people are going to stop reading the reviews. It doesn't matter if they rightly thrash the bad novels. They shouldn't have been reviewing it in the first place, and it will reflect poorly on them.

 

[boboratory]

Devor,

Are you licensed to give investment advice? You just get done telling people how complicated Wall Street is, and give them advice?

As for Reviews, the argument of buying reviews comes down to are you buying publicity by having their "name" review your work. It's a marketing expense, not a review.

Wall Street is in the business of finance; it's a complex industry with many archaic regulations and inexperienced regulators, filled with middlemen, uncertainty, layers upon layers of sales, and educated well-run companies which still can't keep up. There's science, risk, greed, fear, and unbelievable pressures, as well as many of the most ambitious, angry, deceptive people in the world. Contracts and deals abound. People go in, spend about ten miserable, over-worked (oh yes), over-paid years of their lives trying to game the system and make money on the little discrepancies and errors and weaknesses and hunches that they can spot in the market and in the actions of others. I was told, openly, by my finance professor in class, "There are people who view the market as gambling. Our job is to identify those people and figure out the best way to take their money."

No other industry can be compared to Wall Street, the problems are endemic. But yes, there are a great many companies in any other industry with superb internal controls to maintain honesty and integrity within their firm.

By the way, financial advice to all: Buy SPDRs ("spiders," basically a micro-share in the S&P), and skip the Mutual Funds. If you want to go advanced, you can buy SPDRs which skip whole industries you think might be doing poorly. Invest long term, pull out and switch to treasuries as you near retirement, but on a high. That's it.

 

[Devor]

Devor,

Are you licensed to give investment advice? You just get done telling people how complicated Wall Street is, and give them advice?

As for Reviews, the argument of buying reviews comes down to are you buying publicity by having their "name" review your work. It's a marketing expense, not a review.

You are right, I overstepped a little, and I will adjust the post accordingly in just a moment.

I went to NYU Stern, studied in Economics and Marketing, and I have friends who work on Wall Street. The industry itself serves a powerful and productive role in the economy, make no mistake, and I think the slow recovery is in large part due to the fear and hesitance of the financial industry to play that role amid the current business environment. I didn't mean to demonize particularly - in fact the point was to explain why wall street has so many failings in contrast to other industries which deserve more respect than they often get - but the industry in and of itself does have all of these pressures and more. It attracts a larger percentage of greedy, cutthroat people, and it places them in high-stress situations. And the complexity of the industry provides opportunity. That's low-integrity, high-skill, high-pressure, and opportunity, all of the necessary elements for corruption.

 

[Chilari]

I wouldn't mind getting paid to do reviews. But I don't think author paying reviewers is the way to go, it brings up all sorts of questions about honesty and integrity. Getting paid by a magazine which gets money from advertisers and sales, that's fine. Getting paid by the author introduces a problem.

The free review copies I get from publishers and authors are fine, though - I can't review it without reading it, and this way the author/publisher, who after all is getting something out of it in the form of visibility, is giving something, but without the financial element it's not as bad.

 

[BWFoster78]

I never really considered using Kirkus until I found a list of their top indie scifi and fantasy novels of 2012. I read one of the top listed books and liked it, ended up buying more of her books. I thought, "Okay, maybe there's something to this site."

Then I read another book from their list.

Let's just say that, if you're an indie scifi or fantasy author who submitted a book to be reviewed to Kirkus in 2012 and didn't get on their best of list, your book either completely sucked or you should be really mad that that book beat you out.

After reading more about it, it sounds like the quality of Kirkus reviewers are wildly variant. I can't imagine it's worth it to pay that much money and chance getting someone incompetent who doesn't even understand the genre rate your book.

 

[phillipsauthor]

As an author and a reader, I know that I don't trust reviews that are clearly monetarily paid for. Free review copies are completely different - I actually trust reviews more when it says that the reviewer received a copy of the book in exchange for an objective review; I know that it wasn't the author's friends/family who wrote it, then.

I have a friend in the publishing industry, and she also made me aware of the phenomenon of people paying individuals to write awesome Amazon reviews even if they haven't read the book. You can find these suspect reviews, she says, by identifying the 3-5 sentence 5-star reviews that don't talk about specifics of the book and just say "it's great! You should buy it!", written by an individual who has written hundreds of other reviews on other books. If you look at their profile and find that their other reviews sound suspiciously similar to the review for the book in question, drop that author fast, because they're paying people to artificially inflate the quality of their book reviews.