Reviewers on Reviewing: Paying for Reviews

In 2025, ARB contributor Roseanna Pendlebury arranged a series of roundtables with SFF reviewers, originally intended for Nerds of a Feather. For some involved publishing reasons, this wound up being a better fit at ARB, and so, thanks to Roseanna & the roundtable participants, we are able to present these four discussions. Hopefully more to come in the future! These discussions have been lightly edited for clarity. * * * Roseanna Pendlebury: Today in our Reviewers on Reviewing project, we’ll be tackling payment for reviews: how it changes the way one reviews, and the extent to which the criticism ecosphere currently relies on unpaid reviewing. Obviously a lot of SFF reviewing currently relies on unpaid work, with a relatively limited pool of paid gigs. This conversation will look at how those paid opportunities make a difference, how they affect who gets to write, what they write about, how and where. Today’s panelists all have a wide range of experience in SFF crit, on both the…