It quickly becomes apparent in dealings that Kirkus, the book reviewer, the world's toughest book critic, from direct experience with the  Kirkus Indie service, is all about marketing.  You wait out your eight weeks, the professional opinion, delivered in two paragraphs, is sent to you, you agree to putting their review up on their website.  And then the emails come, asking if you might better take interest in their additional services, such as a campaign on social media sites, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

And so the Darwinian world of book publishing with its focus on selling the sellable, marketing the marketable, popular tastes, a preconceived notion of what the reading public wants and needs.  If a book does not meet up to the get-rich-get-thin-get-stylish-fast standards (to exaggerate slightly), the review will come with some read-between-the-lines sounding, 'this is not marketable, and here is why...'

So, not being marketable...  how does that work, how did it happen, what evidence is there?  This is what their review will suggest, but of course in terms of the professional reviewer.  Flat dialogue.  No one wants that now, do they.  Repetitive.  Lack of clear plot.  As if to say, the writer didn't make this, well, marketable.  And you can only come across as sounding bitter if you don't agree with their professional assessment.  Or maybe you wrote it intentionally that way, the way the mind's eye saw the reality it wanted to portray.

I have my own reaction to Kirkus Indie's review of A Hero for Our Time.  The reviewer takes one of the central passages and misconstrues, misreads it quite obviously, not the careful readership we learned in college.  And so I quickly saw through, or perhaps rather lost faith in its terms of critique.  No effort was made upon the reviewer's part to take into consideration a broader and longer understanding of literature, is my gut response.  Literature involves oral tradition, for example.  It must, or it should at least.  This oral tradition, to the reviewer's tastes, was the material of cliché.  Oral tradition is not marketable, apparently.  5000 years of literary history and tradition, replaceable, no longer relevant, no longer worthy of attention.  That's the new geologic era we live in.

How can the work of the lone individual, concerned with rendering life as it is in order to obtain some deeper understanding, go up against the Titan of marketed fashion, mass culture, popularity's interest?  How can one propose literary validity going up against the dictatorship of current style, current interests without clever circumvention, without beating them, as it were, on their own terms, as if to say, "I know what will be more popular..."?