As Jeff Bercovici revealed late yesterday afternoon, the staff of HarperStudio invited some people with their eye on the publishing industry (myself included) to tell us a bit about where the newly formed imprint is headed and to pick our brains about some of the key issues the publishing industry is forced to deal with right now. One topic that came up during the conversation, that I wound up thinking about for much of the day, is what I’ve referred to in the past as “the so-called crisis in book reviewing,” as newspapers continue to whittle away at the amount of space devoted to the book world. I’d already been thinking about the subject because of the interview with Winfrida Mbewe, a publicity manager at W.W. Norton, in this week’s Publishers Weekly, where she says:
“We’re fooling ourselves if we don’t pay attention to the Internet… But I still see the importance of newspaper reviews, magazine features, and radio and television interviews. People are still learning about books and authors through traditional sources.”
And that’s true enough—see, for example, one book buyer’s recent explanation of how a Guardian article eventually led to a purchase—but I’m looking at that article right now, and it’s not a review, it’s not even a feature story… it’s a guest article by the book’s author about the premise behind his book. In other words, one of Britain’s leading newspapers is essentially taking the same approach to book coverage as apopular author blog (albeit presumably to a larger audience). Now, we can go back and forth about who “invented” this format, but I think the key lesson to take from this example is that what authors and publishers want from the media isn’t necessarily incisive literary criticism—anything that gets the name of the book in the paper will do just fine.
Mbewe’s comment reminded me of publishers’ handholding of anxious reviewers late last year, those reassurances from Publishers Weekly and the Association of American Publishers that, oh, yes, we absolutely still believe book reviewers are performing a valuable service. But I found myself thinking aloud yesterday morning—for all the erosion of the book review landscape, has America’s literary culture taken a hit? Well, okay, that’s an excessively broad question; let’s put it another way: Have American book sales taken a hit? So far, data from the first five months of 2008 suggests booksellers are actually experiencing slight improvement, although publishers find their sales flat, down less than one percent. So reviews may be drying up, but we still seem to find our way to buying books as well as we ever did.
Of course, that’s a highly reductive oversimplification—for one thing, it doesn’t even begin to get into the issue of what books we’re buying; Bercovici’s account of the HarperStudio breakfast cites Robert Miller‘s reflection that the big books of today post much bigger numbers than the big books of his early years in the business. So it’s worth conceding the possibility that the slow death of mainstream book reviewing may have a deleterious effect on books that some might label “midlist” or “literary fiction.” Or it may turn out that new techniques for planting books into people’s consciousness will take care of that problem—and, as more mainstream media outlets begin to experiment with formats and presentation models that independent bloggers have used not just to attract audiences but to build readership communities, there is good cause to hope that the MSM will continue to pay attention to books—in ways that actually compel people to pay attention to what the MSM has to say about books. And I don’t mean to just notice the book features on their way to the movie listings, but to actually give a damn about what somebody has to say about a book, to take genuine interest in a writer and his or her message. Long story short, we need to stop thinking about this situation with a deterioration mindset and bring ourselves to embrace a transformation mindset.
And that goes double for book publishing.