I dug up a few articles from 2004-5 about the launch of Kirkus' paid review program, in case anyone is interested in reading some of the early reactions. (I didn't find any more recent commentary, so I suppose this is old news.) As you'd expect, nearly everyone thought it was a bad idea.
Ron Charles in the Christian Science Monitor
David Milofsky in the Denver Post
Edward Wyatt in the New York Times
My favorite revelation was a quote in the Times from Jerome Kramer, managing director of the company that publishes Kirkus: "If someone is desperately unhappy with the review and wanted it to be removed from KirkusDiscoveries.com, I imagine we would do that."
Satisfaction guaranteed! That's what I want from my book reviews. (At least this presupposes that the review could be negative.)
If these books are worthy of review, Kirkus should write about them in the magazine. If not, they shouldn't be charging these people to bury a review on their website.
I'm wondering where I was in 2004/5 to have missed this. I've had Kirkus reviews. Some, I think, went up on amazon. Now they are an embarrassment. Unethical is precisely the word for this.
Posted by: I.J.Parker | September 12, 2007 at 01:54 PM
In all fairness, supposedly the Kirkus Discoveries reviewers will (or do) give negative reviews. But, I gather, they spell your name right.
And now... this is obnoxious and you should feel free to ignore this. But you've been tagged.
Yes, this is sort of like a blog chain letter. The deal is that you're supposed to list 7 random facts/habits about yourself on your blog. Then tag 7 other bloggers by emailing them and telling them, "tag, you're it." and then link to their blogs. Annoying, yeah, and absolutely no penalty if you ignore it. But it gave me an excuse to link to some fun blogs (including yours). So ... there you go.
Posted by: Clea Simon | September 12, 2007 at 04:52 PM