I have seen publishers and authors bow and scrape and grovel and cajole and beg for reviews. To me, this is a humiliating process. And results are not guaranteed. I ve not heard of bribes used to obtain reviews, but it would not surprise me if this were the case. In numerous instances, reviews appear long after the books have been remaindered.
Textbooks constitute a special category.
Hoping for adoptions, publishers send out hundreds if not thousands of examination copies so much so that scavengers come knocking on the professorial doors, buy these copies for a song, and then launder them back into the selling mode. On the other side of the coin, speaking as a reviewer, I am flooded with books to review. I pick and I choose, selecting the books that appeal to me most. If I were a full-time reviewer, I could do one book a week. Young people in science don t like to do reviews, even in their fields of specialty.