Dwindling book reviews hurting publishers
The main problem is simply letting the world know that a book exists – “there are so many new books coming out, it’s a constant struggle,” says Douglas Gibson, publisher and chief executive at McClelland & Stewart. “The bad review is better than no review at all. Traditionally the newspaper review has been the main way to alert people and continues to be – that may change over time. The Internet is an interesting new opportunity to get at specific markets.”
B.C. publisher Karl Siegler, owner of Talon books, which specializes in poetry, plays, fiction and translations, says he looks to the Internet rather than newspapers for reviews of specialized titles. “The reviews Amazon solicits and publishes are of more exotic books. I am quite happy with what happens there. We get more and more requests from people who have seen our Web site and the dotcom sites like Barnes & Noble and Amazon in the U.S. The best way of promoting books is word-of-mouth and the Internet sites tend to be the closest of that kind of discourse.”
Marc Coté, is owner of Cormorant Books in Toronto, which last year published nine titles. “The Vancouver Sun ran reviews of three of them, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and the Toronto Star, also reviewed three, the Globe & Mail reviewed five of nine, and the National Post did zero of nine,” he says.
Enter Integration Research.
thanks jordon