When I was Fiction Editor at the late Hungry Mind Review, we hired Garner to write for us. He in turn hired me when Salon started up. I reviewed Ethan Hawke’s novel. When Dwight got it, he said he was sorry, he’d pay me, but couldn’t run it. Why? I hadn’t liked it. He said he should have “hired a Hawke-head.” This was at the same time I was ghost-writing reviews at Elle, where I was told to find out what everybody else was saying, then do a variation on that. Every time a reputation is reviewed and not the book, every time consensus wins out over dissent, the foundation of book-reviewing is weakened. That it’s near collapse now does not surprise me in the least.
And of course, the loss isn’t just amount, but attention. Attention is needed to take books seriously enough as something worth reading and writing about. Encouraging to see The Metropolitan Review trying to recapture that attention.
The problem is that my experience with you has shown that your editors are not very responsive to writers. If you do not communicate better with the "content providers," you will not survive.
When I was Fiction Editor at the late Hungry Mind Review, we hired Garner to write for us. He in turn hired me when Salon started up. I reviewed Ethan Hawke’s novel. When Dwight got it, he said he was sorry, he’d pay me, but couldn’t run it. Why? I hadn’t liked it. He said he should have “hired a Hawke-head.” This was at the same time I was ghost-writing reviews at Elle, where I was told to find out what everybody else was saying, then do a variation on that. Every time a reputation is reviewed and not the book, every time consensus wins out over dissent, the foundation of book-reviewing is weakened. That it’s near collapse now does not surprise me in the least.
And of course, the loss isn’t just amount, but attention. Attention is needed to take books seriously enough as something worth reading and writing about. Encouraging to see The Metropolitan Review trying to recapture that attention.
The problem is that my experience with you has shown that your editors are not very responsive to writers. If you do not communicate better with the "content providers," you will not survive.