Interview with Jennifer Szunko, director of paid-review service Clarion Review
Rory Litwin:
I’m talking with Jennifer Szunko, Clarion Services Director. Jennifer offered to be interviewed for Library Juice to talk about Clarion’s services in doing paid reviews for authors and publishers.
Thanks for being willing to do this interview. Jennifer, can you explain a bit about what you do at Clarion, and how it is different from Foreword Magazine, which I understand is the parent company?
Jennifer Szunko:
Thank you for inviting me.
For the past 14 years ForeWord Reviews has offered pre-publication reviews of good books from independent publishers in our print magazine. Like most magazines, it is supported by advertising. Ten years ago, librarians were asking for more reviews than what we could accommodate in the magazine and with the explosion of books being published we were receiving hundreds of books each month that we just could not fit into the magazine–the Clarion Review fee-based service was born. I manage the orders that come in for books to be reviewed for a fee and work with the same pool of reviewers as we use in the magazine.
The reviews in our magazine are all pre-publication and are all for good books–those reviews are all very positive. But there are millions of authors that would still want a review but their books just didn’t qualify–either due to the publication date or the editorial content didn’t align with the magazine’s calendar, or the book just hasn’t captured the attention of an editor. That is when the author will order a Clarion Review.
RL:
Thanks for that description. Just to clarify, when Foreword Magazine was new and before Clarion Review was started, did Foreword Magazine offer paid reviews?
JS:
No, we have never charged for reviews that appear in the magazine. We only started the fee-based review service to accommodate the “overflow” of requests from authors to get their book reviewed. And it offers librarians many more reviews–all of which are archived with Bowker’s Books-In-Print online, Baker & Taylor’s Titlesource 3, and Ingram’s iPage, in addition to Google Books and the Foreword Reviews Website.
RL:
Interesting. Where else might librarians or readers encounter the reviews?
JS:
The authors will also use the review (if its a positive review) in the marketing of their book, on the back cover, or on their own Website. All of our reviews reflect an honest and unbiased look at a book, however, we only publish reviews of the best books in the magazine. You will find everything from a one star to a five star review on our website. The difference between the reviews in the magazine and a Clarion Review is that the Clarion Review gives a critical analysis of the book–useful information for librarians and booksellers.
RL:
So it is possible for a paid review to receive a one-star rating? I can imagine that that would result in some unhappy customers.
JS:
I recently pulled a report of all of our reviews and found an almost perfect bell curve. We have mostly three-star reviews but we about the same amount of one-star reviews as five-star reviews. And the two and four star reviews are balanced, too. Its never easy delivering a negative report to an author but more often than not they appreciate the honesty. With digital technology, it’s easy to implement many of the changes that are mentioned in the review; so the author ends up producing a better book. So everyone wins!
RL:
Thanks for the info on stats. That is reassuring. About how many paid reviews do you publish a month? And just to clarify, you’re talking about paid reviews there, right?
JS:
Yes, the Clarion Reviews are purchased by the author and those are the only reviews that receive the star rating. We publish about 70-90 reviews on our website each month and share those with the licensees I mentioned earlier. We do give the author the opportunity to “kill” their review if they feel it is too negative. Most recognize the value of a professional review so they don’t go that route.
RL:
Even though the highest proportion get only three out of five stars. That is a more credible system than I thought, I have to admit.
I think it’s to Foreword’s credit that Clarion Review is open about selling paid reviews. However, I wonder if there is any disclaimer to that effect in the reviews that are published through these licensees, and whether at least Clarion is identified as the source.
SJ:
Clarion is identified as the source on all the reviews that we write for a fee. Our integrity is extremely important and if anyone thought the reviews were somehow compromised because of the fee, we wouldn’t have survived this long. All of our reviews are objective opinions about a book, and there has been some reticence by a few publishers or authors who prefer to do business using an outdated business model, one that can no longer support itself due to declining advertising dollars. I don’t know any librarians who criticize the paid review service. Librarians are the reason we added the additional review service; they want as many quality reviews as they can get and look to us as a trusted resource. Our brand speaks quality and they can depend on us, and they are the biggest users of subscription services at our licensing partners…who are also dying for all the reviews we can provide them–regardless of whether the funding comes from ad dollars or a straight up fee.
RL:
Are you familiar with the review service BookNews?
BookNews also produces brief reviews that are published by book jobbers for the benefit of collection development librarians, though I suppose they may focus on the academic market. Their reviews are all solicited; as a publisher I receive requests for titles from them for review. I believe their source of funding is the book vendors themselves. I don’t know about the quantity of reviews that they publish, but I do know that they select the books that they choose to review.
JS:
Interestingly, ForeWord was the first to offer a fee-based review service and took a great deal of grief for it for several years but now we are one of many. To get around the stigma of a “fee-based review” other companies call it a publicity fee or a marketing fee but when you get to the bottom of it –we are all offering a professional service and professionals are paid to deliver a professional product. The BookNews model sounds more like the model for our magazine–our editor solicits for books based on our editorial calendar.
RL:
Regarding the question of the disclaimer… While Clarion Review is out there advertising paid reviews, do you think that most librarians or readers will be clued into that fact when a review is credited as coming from Clarion? I think this is an important point, because even if the highest proportion of reviews are mediocre, there has to be a market effect on the reviews Clarion gives in order for the service to be financially successful. Yes, authors want credible reviews, but they also want reviews that will lead to sales, which is the purpose of it from their point of view. Normally, or at least in the “outdated business model,” the appearance of a review usually constitutes a recommendation in and of itself. If it weren’t for the fact that so many of the paid reviews come from self-published authors, I think the bell curve you cite would be less troubling. I do find it a little hard to believe that given the nature of the customer base that so many books would be judged as being basically pretty good.
JS:
That’s an interesting position. Its not an argument that I have come up against. If you look up the word review, I think you will find it to say something like a critical analysis and not a recommendation. So maybe that is where the distinction lies. Clarion reviews reflect strict editorial standards and positive consideration is given to well-written and produced books–anything less than that must be mentioned in our reviews. It probably helps that there is at least a one person buffer between the reviewer and the author–the reviewer has no emotional stake in the transaction. We don’t hesitate to have a reviewer rewrite a review that sounds too much like an attempt to sell the book–we exist to provide honest information on books. That doesn’t always make us popular with authors or publishers.
RL:
What is the profile of the authors and publishers who use the paid review service? Do well-known publishers use them? What is the proportion of self-published authors using the service, as far as you know?
And regarding the judgment of quality, it is a relative thing. It just seems to me that in a paid review situation, if there are a lot of self-published authors, in order to maintain a bell curve the standards are going to have to be lower than they would be in a selective review source.
JS:
Good point about the self-published author as a big part of our client base. We have seen a tremendous improvement in the quality of the books from self-published authors in the past two years (and we have been doing this for ten). Remember that we do offer the option to “kill” the review and it is more likely that a one-star review will be put to death than a five-star review; the numbers do skew a bit in that sense.
RL:
How many reviews get killed relative to the 70 to 90 published a month?
JS:
ForeWord has always only reviewed books from independent publishers. We have not reviewed books from any of the Big Six or their imprints.
RL:
What about the proportion of reviews going to self-published authors versus books published by small publishing houses? (Small publishing houses being selective by necessity.)
JS:
I have not tracked the number of reviews that are “killed” each month but I would guess more than half of the one and two star reviews do not survive. So, yes we do actually write many more negative reviews than five-star.
RL:
Of the one-star reviews that do not survive, are you counting them in the bell-curve cited earlier or not?
JS:
Reaching the small press market with the Clarion product may well be our biggest challenge but we have kept very busy with self-published authors which make up about three-quarters of our fee-for-review service. The landscape is changing quickly and with the exponential growth in book production–authors and publishers are looking for ways to get noticed. That is true for self-published authors and those that have a contract with a small publishing house.
The bell curve that I mentioned earlier is only the reviews that are actually posted on our website.
RL:
Regarding the stats on the one-star reviews, that is encouraging from my point of view.
I have something to disclose that leads me to a question. About ten years ago I was very active in the group Alternatives in Print, which was a part of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of ALA. A major focus for us was advocating alternative press publishers, which for us meant small publishers publishing books that we felt were kept out of the mainstream market because of their political viewpoints. A big part of what we wanted was for books from these publishers to be more widely reviewed, and we were looking for ways to accomplish that. We were often asked for advice by these small publishing houses about how they could get their books into libraries, and reviews were a part of the answer. I think it was in that context that I first had contact with someone at Foreword Magazine, so I believe that I am probably one of the librarians you’re counting as asking for more reviews from these hidden sources. From my point of view, however, what Clarion is doing is not exactly what I was asking for (just to speak for myself), in that what I was talking about then had to do with the commercial nature of publishing, and the role of money in the marketing of books to libraries. What we were advocating in AIP was for a more non-commercial review sector that would compensate for the advantage that major publishers have in getting reviewed, by virtue of their economic power. The publishers we tended to advocate were publishing a lot of anti-capitalist books, and to them I think something like a paid review service would be anathema. Our analysis about the distortion in the market had to do with the political nature of the books we wanted to advocate, whereas for you I would imagine it has to do with the place of the little guy in the overall scheme. How would you approach small press publishers who may have a bias against something like paid reviews for these kind of idealistic reasons? I mean, to someone with that kind of a point of view, it smacks of the Better Business Bureau pay to play scandal.
JS:
I do think we are on the same page in the end–librarians want to be notified of the true contents in books and authors want visibility and an honest evaluation. This is true for all publishers, but you’re right: the bigger budgets get the bigger splash. Foreword is about the little guy and bringing attention to good books. My question would be…how would a small business owner support their staff if all of their product was offered at no charge? In the ideal world we could charge an extremely high rate to our 15,000 librarian subscribers for the privilege of reading our reviews–in reality, we would not survive. Instead we choose a per piece model so we can offer the quality we demand at a fair price to our customer. Every Clarion Review is worked on by four editors before it is returned to the publisher or author–that type of commitment to quality comes at a price. We never set out to be all things to all people but we do have a growing body of publishers and authors that value our service. There are non-commercial review sources but they are inconsistent and their quality is questionable–they don’t have anything to lose. We guarantee our quality and stand behind our reviewers opinions.
RL:
I disagree that non-commercial sources of reviews tend to be unreliable. Being in academia, where all the reviews are produced non-commercially, from my perspective the situation is the reverse of what you say. As a librarian who has worked in all types of libraries, I would just offer that in my opinion there is no demand for reviews of a great number of self-published books. I see nothing wrong with a business model that requires reviewers to be more selective; including more small press titles can easily fall within that framework if there were stronger regulations against the kind of pay to play practices that result in reviews not being given in sources like PW or LJ where the publisher doesn’t purchase ad space. I have never seen a need for the reviews that result from a pay to play review service. But I can only speak for myself – obviously you have access to more objective information about the market for reviews.
So, I have offered my opinion now. Before we say goodbye is there anything else you’d like to add?
JS:
Just that I have enjoyed our discussion and its a very exciting time in the publishing industry and we are thrilled to be a part of it all.
RL:
I want to thank you for all the information you provided about Clarion Review. I learned a lot from our conversation and enjoyed it as well.
Readers can get more information from the ForeWord Reviews website or the Clarion Reviews website advertising their services to authors.