Walter Duranty’s Holodomor Coverage And Pulitzer
Walter Duranty, who served as its Moscow bureau chief from 1922 through 1936, has been criticized for a series of stories in 1931 on the Soviet Union and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work at that time however, he has been criticized for his denial of widespread famine, most particularly Holodomor, a famine in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s in which he summarized Russian propaganda, and the Times published, as fact: “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine”.
In 2003, after the Pulitzer Board began a renewed inquiry, the Times hired , professor of Russian history at Columbia University, to review Duranty’s work. Von Hagen found Duranty’s reports to be unbalanced and uncritical, and that they far too often gave voice to Stalinistpropaganda. In comments to the press he stated, “For the sake of The New York Times’ honor, they should take the prize away.”The Ukrainian Weekly covered the efforts to rescind Duranty’s prize. The Times has since made a public statement and the Pulitzer committee has declined to rescind the award twice stating, “…Mr. Duranty’s 1931 work, measured by today’s standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short. In that regard, the Board’s view is similar to that of The New York Times itself…”.
The 6 Best Book Review Sites
Are you looking for websites with the best book reviews online?
This post is for you.
Contents
This list of best book review sites it not for all kind of books.
It indeed focuses on non-fiction books.Specifically, for the types of books that will help you grow, learn, and move forward in life.
Albeit some novels might also fit in that category, most do not. So all the sites focusing on reviews of novels, romances, and generally reading for readings pleasure, are not included here.
What Are Professional Book Reviews
Professional book reviews are written by critics who work for credible institutions, such as respected magazines, newspapers, online publications, blogs, and paid services like BlueInk Review. Readers can be assured the reviewers have a solid background in the genre they are reviewing and are knowledgeable about the craft of book writing.
Pros
Cons
- A professional review reflects only one persons opinion. Again, reading is a personal event and one mans treasure is anothers trash. Professional book reviews can be hard to come by, so you dont have the advantage of hearing from many voices. If you get a reviewer who simply doesnt like your style, it can feel devastating.
- They can be difficult to obtain. As newspaper and magazine books pages increasingly disappear, fewer books are being reviewed. Bloggers, too, are overwhelmed with queries. Self-published books are rarely chosen for review in any case, due to the overwhelming number of traditionally published books that demand attention. Paid services were established to even the playing field, but they can be expensive, so it can be difficult to get more than one or two.
- They dont affect your ranking on Amazon. Professional reviews are displayed in the Editorial Reviews section of your Amazon page. While they are impressive and important to include, they dont impact your ranking on Amazon the way crowdsourced reviews can.
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Some Review Sites To Consider
Free reviews:
About this posts authors:
Shelli Johnson has been writing for as long as she can remember. She worked as a sports journalist and an editor for many years before finally following her passion and pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing. Her award-winning novel, Small as a Mustard Seed, is available now as an ebook.
You can find Shelli on Amazon, , Twitter, Goodreads, BookBlogs, and her website.Alice J. Wisler writes southern novels from her home in North Carolina. Her most recent is A Wedding Invitation. She also teaches grief-writing courses both online and at conferences. You can find her on Amazon, , , Goodreads, and at her blogs: Patchwork Quilt and Writing the Heartache
Important Things To Consider With Lulu:
- Royalties. The author receives an 80% royalty for print books and a 90% royalty for eBooks after sale.
- Cost. Lulus ebook conversion, publishing, and distribution services are free, but they sell a variety of author services including editing, cover design, formatting, promotional services and book marketing.
- Resources. Lulu is a plethora of education, information and houses a large platform to help authors with every step of the publishing process. Lulu has its own bookstore to sell and distribute books.
Lulu is a one-stop-shop for everything and, with the services they have, you can feel confident youll get your book published after using their services.
We know that Amazon has over 80% of the book market share. But if you set up your book for wide distribution through an aggregator, you can tap into a huge international market. This could lead to other publishing opportunities such as having your book sold to foreign publishers.
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Review Options For Indie Authors
Professional review options for self-published authors varymany are paid services, while a few will check out and potentially review your book for free.
All of them have a few things in common: your book has to be just as high-quality as anything coming out of the Big Five in order to have a good chance of success and you have to allow time for the review to happenand to work its social-proof magic after its issued.
Professional reviews arent strictly necessary to sell books, but they can help you build your exposure and marketing platform. As youre building your marketing plan and budgeting for your marketing expenses, consider some of these options:
Pamela Paul On What Goes Into Those Pesky Year
Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, hopped on reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about the Book Review and the recently published list of their editors picks for the 10 best books of the year. In addition to recommending a number of great books and writers , dubbing Colson Whitehead one of the greatest novelists of our time, and suggesting that, of the Timess Top 10, a Trump supporter might most enjoy The North Water, Paul shed a little light on how things work at the Book Review . Below, find a few things you may or may not have known about how books are assigned, reviewed, and considered for the year-end lists of the paper of record.
Way more books come out every year than you think.
The Book Review at The Times reviews about 1% of the books that come out in any given year.
Planning for the Year-End Notable Books List starts in January.
Each week, we go through the previous issue and denote certain books as Editors Choicesthese are the 9 books we especially like from that issue. At the end of the year, we pull together all of our Editors Choices and narrow them down to 100 Notable Books of the Year50 fiction and 50 nonfiction. From those, we pick the 10 Best.
The Book Review editors are probably hanging out right now.
Book reviews are generally a top-down process.
There is lots of mail .
There is a definition for Best Books.
End of the year lists can have nothing to do with how books were reviewed.
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Select Popular Publication Routes
Select the popular publication routes, like through the aforementioned Amazon KDP or through IngramSpark, which is a division of Ingram for print-on-demand books.
However, remember that more than half of book sales, regardless of the format, take place online. If you choose to sell your print-on-demand and electronic books on your website, you might risk losing many opportunities, unless you’re a genius in book marketing.
Heres The Criteria We Used To Rate The Best Self
You are about to embark on an incredible journey into self-publishing. You are your own boss, you make all the creative decisions, and how fast you get your book out there into the world is really up to you and how much time you can invest in your book project.
Still feeling it? Good! Lets move ahead.
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A Side Note On Reviewers Who Want Money
This one is your call. As a former journalist, I think theres an inherent lack of objectivity when money is involved. That said, I also know that the bigger book review publications arent open to indie authors. Be aware, though, if youre going to give them money to review your book, you most likely will NOT be in their main publication. In fact, you may only be listed on their website that may or may not have anyone at all looking at it. You will, however, be able to use that review in your own marketing, which may be worth the cost you pay.
Use Book Reviews On Social Media
Reviews are great fodder for social media. Posting a review on your page, for example, gives you another way to remind your Facebook friends that you have a new book out there. Write a teaser, such as: Just got a great book review from XXX. They praised my vivid scene building and relatable characters! then include a link to the full review. Do the same on and other platforms.
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The Usa Today Bestseller List
This list used to be pulled straight from Nielsen Bookscan, but they recently changed and started making it a curated list, more akin to the NYT than the WSJ. Rather than separate out the categories of books, USA Today puts them all in one category.
Methodology:
From their website:
Each week, USA TODAY collects sales data from booksellers representing a variety of outlets: bookstore chains, independent bookstores, mass merchandisers, and online retailers. Using that data, we determine the weeks 150 top-selling titles. The first 50 are published in the print version of USA TODAY each Thursday. The top 150 are published online. The rankings reflect sales from the previous Monday through Sunday.
USA TODAYs Best-Selling Books list is a ranking of titles selling well each week at a broad range of retail outlets. It reflects combined sales of titles in print and electronic format, if available. For example, if Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice sells copies in hardcover, paperback and e-book during a particular week, sales from each format are combined to determine its rank. The description of a title and the publisher name refers to the version selling the most copies in a particular weekhardcover , paperback and e-book .
Tips & Tricks:
How Much Money Does A New York Times Best
Authors who make the NYT bestseller list have to sell at least 10,000 copies, so at a 10% royalty rate with a book priced at $20, theyll make at least $20,000much of that going to pay back their initial advance.
That said, many authors who make the list sell more than 10,000 books, selling even more once their book appears on that list as well. However, if the author was paid a higher advance, lets say $50,000, they would have to sell 25,000 books at a 10% royalty rate for a $20 book in order to pay back the advance.
Only then will they start to earn additional income from book sales that surpass their initial advance.
All to say, how much you make purely depends on the books list price, your royalty rate, and how much of your advance you have to pay back if youre traditionally publishing.
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The new York Times Reviews A Self
After featuring them on their best seller lists — mostly via the inclusion of ebooks a little over two years ago — The New York Times has finally reviewed a self-published book.
And guess what?
The appearance of Michiko Kakutani’s two-page review of the The Revolution Was Televised by blogger/TV critic Alan Sepinwall by did not cause the world the end or pigs to fly.
In fact, it’s not until the fifth paragraph that Kakutani even mentions that Mr. Sepinwall’s title was self-published, marking we hope, the end to the widely touted assumption that all self-published books are crap and don’t merit the attention that even the worst traditionally published books do.
Does this mean that The Times will start reviewing other indie titles? Doubtful. In her piece in Forbes announcing the news, Suw Charman-Anderson states that “Most reviewers don’t want to deal with self-published authors directly because they don’t really want to deal with any authors directly…” … and that “reviewers depend on publishers acting as winnowers, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, and at least attempting to make sure that they are sent books they are actually interested in.” All true.
What To Look For In Site Book Reviews
To make your reading efficient, you should find book review websites that give you clear and concise information.I especially look for reviews that highlight:
- Main concepts in the books
- Main drawbacks
- Criticism
- And finally: does the reviewer recommend the book?
Thats why for me its so crucial to trust the reviewer.I need to trust the reviewer almost, and sometimes even more so, than the author of the book.
Thats why Im not the biggest fan of Amazon reviews.
And thats why I dont like book reviews from big newspapers -like The New York Times-.They all tend to be too flowery, long and unstructured.You finish reading the book review and youre not even sure: did the reviewer like the book or not? Does he recommend it or not?
Im not looking for a literary piece.Im looking for information that makes my knowledge acquisition as efficient as possible.
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Why Every Bestseller List Is Always A Lie
Simply put: every bestseller list is a lie because no bestseller list measures the best selling books.
Let me repeat that, so you can grasp the gravity of what it means:
No bestseller list measures the actual best selling books.
Every single list is either measuring a limited number of sales in a few places, or far worse, its a curated list and a small group of people are what to put on their list. And theyre picking books based on what they think are important books, not based on what is actually selling.
This is not my opinion. They all admit this.
The most important bestseller list is The New York Times Best Seller List, and they are the worst culprit at this curated elitism. They readily admit that their list is only reflective of books that are selling at a certain number of bookstores and online retailers around the countrybut not an actual best seller list.
You know why they have to admit this publicly? They were sued about it.
For most of the 20th century, they pretended to use a scientific method to count book sales, and claimed their list was authoritative and accurate.
And then William Blatty wrote a novel called The Exorcist . It sold more than enough copies to be high on the list for a long time, but initially did not appear on it.
He lost the case. Why?
Because the New York Times defense was that the list did not purport to be an object compilation of information but instead was an editorial product.
What Are The Best Options For Self
If youve decided to self-publish, there are now hundreds of publishing companies, from mega-retailers such as Amazon that sell everything, to smaller private publishers focused on specific genres.
In terms of knowing which is the best option for self-published authors, youll need to consider what type of self-publishing company can best meet the needs of your specific book and the services you need done to get it published in the market you want.
It isnt a question anymore of Will I get published? But these days the big question is, Who do I publish with first?
This is a very good problem to have.
Our best advice: Do your research before publishing anything, and please, dont sign that dotted line until after youve read this post!
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New York Times Removes Book From Bestseller List Amid Accusations It Gamed System
The New York Times bestseller list is, at this point, an institution. Reaching number one is a coveted spot that not only allows you to sell more copies of your book, but also lets you put NYT Bestselling Author in front of your name on your next one. The prerequisite for the list, is, of course, selling lots of copies of your book. So how did a book that barely exists and nobody ever heard of manage to become a bestseller?Thats what happened this week on the Young Adult fiction chart, where the reigning champion of the last six months just got booted out by an upstart. Seemingly out-of-nowhere hits do happen a super-famous person will mention a little-known title and sales soar. But several in the publishing industry felt that this instance was something different, claiming there were not the usual signs that any readers were rushing out in droves to buy this title.So how did a book that very few people have heard of, by a new author, from a new publisher, and with no real publicity push behind it suddenly rocket to the top spot on a NYT bestseller list?Media news site Pajiba did a deep-dive investigation into one new books sudden and improbable appearance on the list.