If there was anything missing from this morning’s this morning’s excellent NYT piece on the book review crisis, it was that all is not lost. Over at the Washington Post Book World, for example, they’re doing innovative things like “Kids’ Stuff,” a monthly supplement that covers books for young people in ways designed to attract the attention of those very readers. And as Book World editor Marie Arana observed on the NBCC Critical Mass blog, a newspaper with a firm commitment to book coverage can accomplish quite a bit. “Readers want book information more than they want information on new movies, pop music concerts, live theater,or even newly released DVDs,” after all. And for all those review editors who complain that nobody in publishing ever supports them with ads?
“A little more than a year ago, when the Post‘s head of advertising, Katharine Weymouth, looked into our situation and assigned a dedicated salesperson to Book World, our ad revenue began to blossom. Unlike the New York Times Book Review, which has a whole sales team, we had never had such a person before. Someone whose job it was to be imaginative and proactive about selling ads into our pages. Ad sales at Book World had always been a receivership, not a creative and aggressive enterprise. What does that mean? That with some effort and ingenuity, book review pages can pay their way.”
That’s “effort and ingenuity,” you’ll notice, not “a sense of cultural entitlement.” That’s what WaPo critic Michael Dirda brings to the table later in that Critical Mass post. “Every blogger wants to write a book,” he sniffs, forgetting perhaps that many of them already have—and not just genre writers, either, but serious literary types who get invited to speak at events like PEN World Voices. “If you were an author,” Dirda goes on, “would you want your book reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books—or on a website written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biografiend?” Never mind that no such hobgoblins appear to exist, if Google’s anything to go by, or that calling a site “biografiend” would indicate a level of familiarity with Joyce that might just mark somebody as a reasonably insightful reader. In the binary environment of DirdaWorld, book reviewers like Joe Queenan dedicate themselves to artfully thoughtful discourse on new releases, while bloggers like Matthew Cheney engage in “shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting.”
Anyway, apart from the more nuanced view Maud Newton offers, the argument just falls back to the Villalon/Sarvas dichotomy: It’s not how big your book review is, but how intimately your readers embrace it.