Kirkus Review is a trade publication for use by booksellers and librarians deciding which books to stock, and by mainstream publications deciding which books to review. Kirkus uses an army of anonymous freelance reviewers to review over 7000 trade-published books per year, and its subscribers pay to get those reviews because they are useful.
The trouble is, bookstores are closing, libraries are downsizing and mainstream publications are relying more on wire content and producing less original book coverage. So the subscription base for Kirkus and the other trade publications, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, is shrinking.
In 2010, Kirkus almost shut down. It was owned at that time by the Neilsen company, and it was losing money and subscribers. It was bought at the last minute by the owner of the Indiana Pacers. Since then, its subscription cost has been slashed considerably, and its started looking for revenue elsewhere, including from advertising, from licensing reviews out to online booksellers for republication on product listings, and, most controversially, the paid reviews of self-published books.
What Kirkus offers self-published authors is this: For a fairly substantial fee, they'll send the self-published book to an independent freelance reviewer, who will send back a 400 word capsule review. This review will not be published in Kirkus, but the author can use it and label it as a Kirkus review in his promotional materials and on his Amazon listing. I think Kirkus may publish these reviews on some segregated part of its website.
Since the whole point of the thing is an independent editorial review, the review isn't guaranteed to be positive, but if it's a bad review, the author can keep it from appearing anywhere (though Kirkus keeps the money). Kirkus brands itself as "the world's toughest book critics."
I haven't heard anyone in publishing suggest that this side business compromises the reliability or usefulness of Kirkus's reviews of trade books. And self-published authors won't get a respectable, professional review any other way. Booksellers and librarians don't stock those books, so they won't pay for a biweekly review of them. Readers don't care, either, about the vast majority of these books. And if self-publishers feel that there's a lack of respect implied by the fact that they have to pay lots of money for stuff published authors get for free, I don't disagree with them.
Freelance reviewers write for the trades for very little money; they do it in part to get free advance books, and in part to make industry connections. They don't want to read self-published books, and they don't want to write reviews that won't be printed. I think Kirkus pays them more for reviewing self-pub books than they do for reviewing trade books.
Publishers Weekly, which is the largest of the trades and in many ways an industry bible, also sells coverage to self-published authors. It has an "independent" supplement every quarter, and self-publsihed authors can pay $175 for a "listing" which is not a review. Then the editors pick out some books from among the listed titles and review them.
