Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Publishers Weekly is Now Charging for Review Submissions
I’m only going to tackle one story today, but Publishers Weekly charging for review submissions is a sneakily interesting topic. Apparently this started a couple of weeks ago, but it only came across my personal internet transom late last week. Before March 24th, in the whole 100+ year history of PW, you could submit your book for review consideration for free. Big publisher, indie, self-pub whatever. Yes, you might be thinking, that seems so normal as not to really be all that interesting. And you would be right. Hold that for a sec.
Now, the state of play at, and I don’t think I am exaggerating here, the most important trade-facing review outlet is this: to submit your book for consideration, you either have to have a $950 site license or pay $25 to submit your book for review consideration. Not a review mind you–just to be consider for a review.
Now, I have no insider knowledge of the inner workings of PW, but I do know something of the economics of covering books as a business proposition. And it is tough sledding, to say the least.
For the publishers that crank out the vast majority of books that get sold in a year, getting a $950 site license is a trivial cost (assuming they don’t already have one). The pre-publication awareness that getting a review in PW can generate is more than worth it and a service of and in itself.
So I think one thing we can say is that this is not a play to squeeze a whole bunch of money out of the Big 5 or even the next 15-20 largest publishers, all of whom should really be grateful PW exists and fork over their 1000ish smackers with aplomb.
No, I think this move has two other salubrious effects for PW. First, there are probably some marginal dollars that will flow their way, from small publishers and independent authors especially. I have no idea how much (I would love to know little birdies out there), but in this day and age of big tech platform media dominance, finding a new, sustainable, non-advertising revenue source is both clever and necessary.
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Secondly, I think this also has the secondary effect (perhaps primary?) of reducing the number of submissions. PW already cannot/does not want to review every book submitted. There tens of thousands of new books every year and with self-publishing and LLMs being a durable part of the book ecosystem, that number will only rise. (The other piece of the review submission guidelines that is interesting, though perhaps has always been there, is the requirement that two physical copies are submitted. This is also a useful roadblock for AI-generated garbage clogging the submissions (at) pw or whatever woeful inbox groans under their general email receipts).
If I were them, I would absolutely do this and would have kicked myself for not doing it five years ago. Because, and I say this with more admiration for people who make things than I can express, if you do not believe enough your book to pony up the equivalent of a movie ticket and a popcorn on a Saturday night for the chance to have PW write about your book, then PW shouldn’t be bothered to consider it either.
Now, if Kirkus and Library Journal and the NYT and others all suddenly decide this is a good idea and hey actually we would really like to do this too, well it does get pricey pretty quickly. So maybe a few of those Meta dollars or Amazon ad dollars will need to come out of those marketing budgets and flow into media outlets that actively participate in and are interested in furthering the book making and reading business. There are worse outcomes.
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I will not read all of these books. I might not read five of them, but I am interested in them and glad they exist. And it is a good reminder just how many books there are for us out there.