Publishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly (PW) is a weekly trade news magazine published in the United States for publishers, libraries, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continually since 1872, it has featured the slogan, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". Now, with 51 issues each year, the emphasis is on book reviews. The journal was started in the late 1860s by bibliographer Friedrich Leypoldt and went by many names until Leypoldt settled on The Publishers' Weekly (with an apostrophe) in 1872.
Publishers Weekly covers topics such as publishing, bookselling, marketing, merchandising, and trade news, as well as author interviews and regular pieces on rights, people in publishing, and bestsellers. It aims to help everyone involved in the development, production, marketing, and distribution of the written word in book, audio, video, and electronic media.
The book review section of Publishers Weekly was established in the early 1940s and has grown in prominence throughout the twentieth century and to the present day. It presently provides prepublication evaluations of 9,000 new trade books each year in a wide variety of genres, including audiobooks and e-books, and has a digitized archive of 200,000 reviews. Reviews often appear two to four months before a book's publication date, and until 2014, when PW created BookLife.com, a website for self-published books, novels that were already in print were rarely reviewed.
These anonymous reviews are typically 200-250 words long, and the review section can run as long as 40 pages, filling the second half of the magazine. Before, an editorial team of eight editors sent books to more than 100 independent reviewers. Some are established authors, while others are subject matter specialists in certain genres or themes. Although some books may take a week or more to read and evaluate, reviewers were paid $45 each review until June 2008, when the magazine reduced the amount to $25 per review. In another policy shift that month, reviewers were given credit as contributors in issues that included their reviews. There are now nine review editors mentioned in the masthead.
Website: publishersweekly.com
