Comments on: I never wrote for Kirkus, but these guys did

By: joseph barbato

joseph barbato — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:42:32 +0000

I’ve reviewed for Kirkus for the past two years. I found it to be a thoroughly professional operation. I wrote what I wanted, and as interestingly as I could make it. That last part was important: they insisted reviews be interesting to read….Also, there’s a big difference between honest and negativity. Kirkus was honest. Its reviewers had no need to pull punches. PW depends on advertising from the book publishing industry. You will rarely see a book eviscerated there. Kirkus depended on subscriptions ($450 a year) for income. It’s readers were decision-makers who really wanted to know whether a book was any good.

By: Mark Athitakis

Mark Athitakis — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:57:06 +0000

Just as a point of clarification: I was receiving $50 per review from Kirkus. Not exactly rolling in dough, but at least it was folding money. Nobody gets into book reviewing for the money anyhow.

I don’t doubt that Kirkus was regularly dismissed as a joke “within the industry.” But that may speak to how little Kirkus cared about the opinion of “the industry,” and thank heavens for that—Kirkus’ audience was booksellers and librarians and book-review editors who were looking for opinions that were divorced from the needs and interests of “the industry.” By calling Kirkus a joke, “the industry” may have been finding a way to insulate itself from the fact that magazine didn’t much care what “the industry” thought.

At least that’s how I saw it from my perspective. I never received guidance on how to come down on a book, never got told how PW came down on a book, never had a review rewritten or edited to be more negative, never had a star chipped off a starred review I filed. Regarding that last point: I gave starred reviews to about one in every 10-12 books I received. I think if we’re all being honest with ourselves, we can agree that only about 10 percent of the books out there truly qualify as excellent. No?

By: James Curtis

James Curtis — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:24:48 +0000

I, for one, won’t miss Kirkus at all, nor, do I suspect, will most publishers or authors. Just before my first book was published in 1982, I was warned about Kirkus by the director of advertising at HBJ: “Something you should know about Kirkus–however they think Publishers Weekly will land on a book, they’ll say the opposite.” And through the years, that’s proven to be exactly the case. Their priority was always on being first, never best. One tended to imagine them all sitting around an office that hadn’t had its windows cleaned or its walls painted since 1910 wearing green eyeshades, the mummified corpse of Virginia Kirkus leaning in a corner.

The conventional wisdom had it right–the reviews were written by “large passels of smug know-nothings who used their anonymity as a blunt instrument.” Time and again, I’ve heard Kirkus described within the industry as a “joke.” The gold standard for pre-publication reviews has always been–and will continue to be–Publishers Weekly. I’m frankly surpised Kirkus and their $5 freelancers lasted as long as they did.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:01:20 +0000

I learned to treasure Kirkus’s pans of my books:

“What Grayson lacks most seems to be patience and follow-through; after offering an outrageous premise or a few jokes, he doesn’t know what to do — so he merely repeats them…as a storytelling craftsman, Grayson has a long, long way to go…his autobiographical hand isn’t so shy to show itself, but it does nothing with the raw material.”

“Grayson’s two story collections…together suggest the literary equivalent of a kid’s messy room: cozy for the kid, junk strewn everywhere, but a little horrifying to anyone standing at the doorway…pitiful indeed are many of these stories–cheap, silly, little more than names, puns, and jokes…juvenile literary clowning.”

“…a bewildering, unsatisfying work of nonfiction.”

What I loved most about Kirkus is that these reviewers were disinterested. Bloggers never are, and so even their raves don’t count as much for me as the anonymous hard-working reviewers at Kirkus. I’ll miss them.