Publishers Weekly
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Publishers Weekly is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents. Published 50 times a year, it carries the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling."
The circulation as of 2004 was reported to be approximately 25,000, including 6000 publishers; 5500 public libraries and public library systems; 3800 booksellers; 1600 authors and writers; 1500 college and university libraries; 950 print, film and broad media; and 750 literary and rights agents, among others.
Subject areas covered by Publishers Weekly include bookstores, book design and manufacture, bookselling, marketing, merchandising and trade news, along with author interviews and regular columns on film rights, people in publishing and bestsellers. It attempts to serve all involved in the creation, production, marketing and sale of the written word in book, audio, video and electronic formats.
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[edit] Book reviews
The book review section, added during the 1940s, grew in importance over decades and currently offers opinions on 7,000 new books each year. These anonymous reviews are short, often no more than 220 words, and the review section can be as long as 40 pages, filling the second half of the magazine. This requires a book review editorial staff of eight editors who assign books to more than 100 freelance reviewers. Some are published authors, and others are experts in specific genres or subjects. Although it might take a week or more to read and analyze some books, reviewers are paid only $45 per review. Since reviews are scheduled to appear one month or two months prior to the publication date of a book, books already in print are seldom reviewed.
Now titled "Reviews," the review section was once called "Forecasts." The "Forecasts" editor for many years was Genevieve Stuttaford, who greatly expanded the number of reviews. She joined the PW staff in 1975, after a period as a Saturday Review associate editor, reviews for Kirkus Reviews and 12 years on the San Francisco Chronicle staff. During the 23 years Stuttaford was with Publishers Weekly, book reviewing was increased from an average of 3800 titles a year in the 1970s to well over 6500 titles in 1997. She retired in 1998.
Texas novelist Clay Reynolds[1], in The Texas Institute of Letters Newsletter (February, 2004), gave a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the policies of PW and other review publications:
- You were right on the money with regard to the impact reviews in Publishers Weekly (PW), Library Journal (LJ), Kirkus Review (KR) and the New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) have on publishers and sales; what you may not know is that I also write or have written for all of them. I’m approaching 700 reviews, by the way. I no longer write for KR and LJ, as their policies forbid anyone from writing for PW or one of the others (except the NYTBR), and the work they offered was steadier and more reliable. I’ve now done 87 reviews for PW (given three stars in all that time). For years, Sybil Steinberg was the Forecasts Fiction Editor there, but she retired about two years ago, and the position was taken over by Deena Croog. Sybil ran a tight ship and taut operation. Deena, who sounds as if she’s about 13, is a little less well organized, but she’s a tougher nut to crack in some ways. What’s interesting about the PW reviews, though, is that copy is sometimes altered before printing. On a few occasions, I’ve had opinions utterly reversed from what I wrote. I’ve questioned this, but I’ve never received satisfactory answers. I keep doing it because it’s good work and satisfies the university administration. I’m thinking of “retiring,” though, when I hit number 100.
First published in 1872, the magazine today is part of Reed Business Information's Publishing Group (a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, which includes Variety and Daily Variety, as well as the book publishing trade outlets Criticas, Library Journal and School Library Journal. For most of its history, Publishers Weekly, along with the Library Journal-related titles, were owned by R. R. Bowker, the founding publisher. When Reed Publishing purchased Bowker from the Xerox Corporation in 1985, it placed Publishers Weekly under the management of its Boston-based Cahners Publishing Company, the trade publishing empire founded by Norman Cahners, which Reed Publishing purchased in 1977. The merger of Reed with the Netherlands-based Elsevier in 1993 led to many Cahners cutbacks amid takeover turmoil. Nora Rawlinson, who once headed a $4 million book selection budget at the Baltimore County Library System, edited Library Journal for four years before stepping in as editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly from 1992 to 2005.
[edit] Sara Nelson arrives
Beginning January 24, 2005, the magazine came under the direction of a new editor-in-chief, veteran book reviewer Sara Nelson, known for her publishing columns in the New York Post and the New York Observer. A senior contributing editor for Glamour, in addition to editorial positions at Self, Inside.com and Book Publishing Report, she had gained attention and favorable reviews as the author of So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading (Putnam, 2003), in which she stirred a year's worth of reading into a memoir mix of her personal experiences.
Nelson immediately began to modernize and streamline Publishers Weekly with new features and a complete makeover by publications designer J-C. Suares. The many alterations included added color (with drop shadows behind color book covers), Nelson's own weekly editorial, illustrated bestseller lists and "Signature," longer boxed reviews written by well-known novelists. The switch to a simple abbreviated logo effectively changes the name of the magazine to PW.
She also introduced the magazine's Quill Awards, with nominees in 19 categories selected by a nominating board of 6,000 booksellers and librarians. Winners are determined by the reading public, who can vote (from August 15 to September 15) at kiosks in Borders stores or online at the Quills website.
In the past, the front covers of Publishers Weekly have been used to carry advertisements by book publishers, and this policy was changed to some degree in 2005. Although new PW covers now display illustrations and photographs tied into interior articles, these covers are often hidden behind a front cover foldout advertisement. The visual motif of each cover is sometimes repeated on the contents page.
