by Chaz Bufe, publisher See Sharp Press
Your Amazon and Goodreads reviews matter, probably more than you realize.
There has been a drastic decline in the numbers of magazines and newspapers over the past two decades, and an even more drastic decline in the number that carry book reviews. The number of daily papers in the U.S. dropped roughly 15% over the past quarter century, and a great many of those remaining have reduced or entirely eliminated their book review sections. (This is in line with their overall reductions in news and feature coverage during the same period due to huge, presumably Internet-caused, revenue drops.)
The status of weekly papers is perhaps even more dire. Forty years ago there were independent weeklies in almost every major and mid-size city in the country, and a great many carried reviews. Since then, those that survived have been, and are still being, gobbled up by media conglomerates, the New Times chain being emblematic. That chain bought weeklies in half of the country’s largest markets, and the New Times papers I’m familiar with (and probably all of the rest) do not review books.
The situation here in Tucson is a case in point. In 2010, Arizona’s oldest daily newspaper, The Tucson Citizen, went under. The remaining Tucson daily, The Arizona Daily Star, now devotes only a half-page to reviews in its Sunday edition (no space at all in the others), and the formerly independent Tucson Weekly has been bought twice over the last 15 years by small media conglomerates. It used to carry weekly in-depth reviews of books by local authors. No more. Following its most recent sale, it stopped carrying book reviews and almost everything else that made it worth reading. It’s now little more than an advertising sheet of use only as bird cage liner (which is, literally, what I use it for).
Magazines are in somewhat similar shape. Circulation (especially news stand circulation) has been declining simultaneously with the ascent of the Internet, and revenue has been plummeting: from $48.3 billion in 2007 to $27 billion in 2015. Two specialty magazines, Guitar Player and Bass Player, owned by the same company, are a case in point. From their glory days in the 1990s, their circulation has dropped by roughly half, and a few years ago they combined their staffs in a cost-cutting move. The end result of all this is that magazines have cut back their coverage, and it’s harder than ever to get reviews. (Bass Player and Guitar Player are exceptions to the rule, and are still very good about reviewing books.)
Compounding all this is the explosion in the annual number of new books over the past 25 years or so. The number of new titles reported by Books in Print, the best source for information on physical books, more than doubled over the last 15 years; the current total of new print books exceeds 300,000 per year. Add in e-books, and the number is likely over 1,000,000. (No one really knows how many e-books are published annually.)
Add this all up, and you have far more books competing for far fewer reviews in the remaining magazines and newspapers (the situation is similar with online review sites, which are overwhelmed), and for what little shelf space remains in bookstores.
The number of independent bookstores, where readers in decades past could discover books that received few or no reviews, has declined drastically over the past half-century. At present, they account for only 10% of the book market. So, that channel for readers to discover books has all but disappeared.
To make matters even worse, the large-circulation magazines tend to ignore books from small presses and to review primarily, often only, books from the half-dozen conglomerates that dominate the book publishing industry, and both television (and syndication-dominated) radio talk shows tend to book only the authors published by those same conglomerates.
What’s left for small publishers? Reader reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, Kobo, B&N, and other online retailer sites.
If you read a book that you like issued by an independent publisher, please consider writing even a one- or two-sentence review for Goodreads or any of the online book retailers. It’ll help both the author and the small publisher. And it’ll help other readers discover books they would enjoy.
Your reviews are more important than you think.
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