Bethanne Patrick (Book Maven Media), Ron Charles (Washington Post), Sarah Weinman (Publishers Marketplace), Bob Carlton (Kirkus Reviews)
Patrick: freelance critic and author. A number of places are developed a Rotten Tomatoes for books.
Charles: fiction critic and book reviewer for Washington Post. Chief challenge is findability for both authors and readers. Media complex does not work well. Biggest challenges is the competition by other media news – tv news, celebrity reviews. Is a constant battle to get space. It was hard in print and still hard to get space on the web. Fewer and fewer people showing up at the old gatekeepers gates. Literary reviewing is an art in itself but there is a lot of pressure from the “star” system. Big difference between recommendations and literary reviewing. Very few critics left compared to a few years ago. Newspapers fired their critics but are running fine reviewers through syndication. When shut down “Bookworld” section found that reviews, which were moved to various sections of the paper, are actually being read more. Does a series of YouTube reviews. Takes about 6 hours per minute to do for a total of 20 hours. The audience is much bigger than the print reviews. 20,000 people following, far more than ever read his newspaper reviews. Five years is too long to look ahead in the book world. More optimistic now. Editors want reviews that have some relationship to the current reviews. Reviewers have produced boring reviews for decades, and people are starting to push back. Need reviews that are not just summaries of books. Live and die on our struggle for attention and can’t get and editor’s attention with a review that says “this book is ok”. Editors tend to want extremes.
Carlton: author and VP and Publisher of Kirkus reviews. Readers have emphatically said that they want reviews. Surveys have shown this and readers want more ebook reviews. 30% of readers made ebook decision based on review online. For Kirkus the ship in authority is a big problem Smart Bitches, for example, may have more authority than them for their subject. Kirkus is thinking of itself of a curator of opinion rather than giving advice from on high. Volume of books currently published has literally broken the gate. So many books published that it makes narrowing of the focus of reviews more common. Much flatter and noisier world that it has been in the last 20 years. Sis ome reviews almost required technology to do. Reviewing iBook kids story apps. Impossible to find anything in the App Store. Took traditional process of reviewing narrative and combined it with review of the aesthetics of the app. This being done online. Their challenge was to review the technology along with the story. Get a lot of commenters saying that “these aren’t books”. They review for the story line itself and for the visual presentation. Found that people wanted to discover storybook apps on the iPad, not just on the website, so are coming out with an app to discover children’s’ books. Finding that there is real need for this. For a moment in time Borders was a fabulous curator. People are starting to be boutiques online and reviewing very limited genres. Readers have been taught to expect to find good advice online and this challenge still has to be met in books. Kirkus will continue to do reviews and will also curate reviews from other online sources. Trying to build a network of bloggers to help readers discover books. Kirkus has 300 freelance reviewers around the country for the traditional reviews. Kirkus wants to have a point of view.
Weinman: Publishers Marketplace and a book reviewer. In the digital age everybody is a critic and everybody may have an equal weight. The challenge is authority as a Twitter post may have as much authority as one of her long form reviews. So many book blogs devoted to reviews shows that reviews are still important. Who is the gate intended for? Each reviewer and site has a different niche. Heartened by proliferation of sites that are devoted to long form reviewing. Need people who can review multimedia with some degree of authority. Like to see the revival or refreshing the blog “Potty Mouth” which sifted through the self-publishing chaff. People still looking for really strong voices and those voices will be heard. Many online publications don’t summaries or “book reviews” but want an essay or editorial. The want the reviewer to speak to the specific audience of the publication.
