Dear Ellen,
It was fun meeting up with you last week in Chicago at BookExpo (the annual gathering of publishers, booksellers, and authors). It’s hard to believe it’s been seven years since we first met at a BookExpo. That year it was in Chicago, too.
Since then most of the Big Stories in Publishing have morphed into Business As Usual. The battle between the chains and independent bookstores has dwindled to a stand-off: The former isn’t going away any time soon, and the latter are hanging on by their fingernails. No new mergers to report on (there aren’t many left to merge), and e-books apparently are NOT the next, best thing. Gone, too, are the big banners heralding Amazon.com (although at least one small publisher was accusing the 900-pound gorilla, used by all of us as a mammoth Books in Print, of blackmail).
So what IS the big news coming out of publishing these days? Steven Zeitchik of Publisher’s Weekly Newsline, insists that the big news is … the news industry itself. The media. Journos. “The Rights Center was a downer. The indie bookseller rolls seem to have shrunk. But you couldn’t mistake the journos swarming all over the place,” he wrote.
“Throw a cheese cube and you’d hit one. Maureen Dowd wrote about the show. The Times‘ David Carr got down at it. The NY Post tag-teamed Keith Kelly and Sarah Nelson. The Observer assigned a full-time correspondent to the show for the first time in several years. Untold bloggers swam the aisles. Newsday sent two, a critic and a reporter. Sam Tanenhaus (the new editor of The New York Times Book Review) walked the floor, meeting tirelessly with publishers. Harper’s was there. The New Republic, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books threw parties. Graydon Carter (of Vanity Fair) hosted a panel.”
It’s an interesting thesis. Too bad it’s flawed. Journalists — especially book critics — have ALWAYS attended BookExpo, and, in fact, this year there were FEWER book critics from smaller newspapers and magazines. The New Yorker ALWAYS gives parties at the annual book bash and usually has a booth (it didn’t this year) as does The New York Review of Books (it did, along with the literary mag Granta).
Yes, some newspapers (mostly out of New York) sent reporters (most likely because of former President Bill Clinton’s appearance), but The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, who appeared on a Saturday luncheon panel, also was there as an author (“My publishers tell me not to say this,” she advised the Babes, “but my book isn’t REALLY a book, but just a collection of my columns.”)
In fact, Clinton’s speech — taking more than one page from the Rodney “Can’t We All Get Along” King approach to book selling — was practically the only event covered by the mainstream media. Some also mentioned the Bibliocide panel you were on, at which book critic (Philadelphia Inquirer) Carlin Romano attempted to take on The New Republic‘s Dale Peck (who was there to flack “Hatchet Jobs,” a collection of his nastier reviews). But, in reality, it was a pale imitation of last year’s infamous fireworks between Al Franken (“Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right”) and Fox TV-host Bill O’Reilly (“Who’s Looking Out for You?”). Carlin is no Al Franken. Besides, you can’t have a fight when the other guy turns out to be a mild-mannered book nerd.
Do YOU think the media was the big news of the day?
Hi Margo,
The nugget in that PW Newsline item, it seems to me, was that the mega-medium, not the book critic, dominated the show. Clinton was front page, not book page, and that’s how BookExpo and the book industry wants it. I came away more convinced than when I went that book review sections — as they now exist — are dinosaurs.
This is a tough thing to tell you when you still edit such a section and I don’t, but don’t think my ox isn’t being gored. I make a tidy income from book reviewing, and the demise of the market that now exists for freelance reviewing doesn’t bode well for people like me. Book editors, on the other hand, could take this opportunity to re-evaluate their sections and their readers’ needs. Different markets demand different solutions.
Here are just a few of the observations I gleaned from the booksellers’ convention:
First, book sections are too rarefied. Often, they’re talking about the books that sell 10,000 copies at best; the books that sell in the six and seven figures are either what we dismiss as “commercial fiction” — the kind that people read anyway, so why give them a review? — or books that will be covered by broadcast and the front section (Bill Clinton’s memoir, for example), making the book reviews that follow also-rans.
Second, book sections are irrevelant. They’re often talking about the same books as The NYTBR, Entertainment Weekly, etc., while adding little. Squeezed from one side, then, by the mega-media, they’re squeezed on the other by literary blogs, which can carve out their own specific territory knowing they don’t have to try to be all things to all people.
Margo, I can’t give all the answers, but I think we’ve identified some of the questions. How do you serve an audience that’s too busy or distracted to seek you out? How do you get their eyes on the page when they can as easily turn to the Internet? (Something like 62 million Americans now rely on the Web.) If you want to find out about a book, it’s as easy as calling up Amazon, which carries capsule reviews from trade magazines like Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The local bookstores and the library, with its electronic databases, offer back-up.
As we learned talking to Library Journal‘s Barbara Hoffert, libraries no longer see themselves as book repositories, but “information centers” — and they’re merchandising themselves like entrepreneurs, determined to build per capita use and public support for their missions.
But that doesn’t mean there’s no room to roam. As Jerome Weeks of the Dallas Morning News pointed out at the panel you and I offered on “The Book Coverage Conundrum” — which was kindly televised by C-SPAN — regional possibilities are largely overlooked, when this slant could give character to the typical book section. And more than one observer told us that having a strong personality extends a section’s shelf life: The L.A. Times Book Review, overseen by the inimical Steve Wasserman, is often cited as a case in point.
Well, having huffed myself into a frenzy, let me mention my favorite moment at BookExpo — getting choked up when I talked to one of my heroes, Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. And the best business card I picked up: blogger Kevin Smokler’s, which reads “Writer, Speaker, Maker of Mischief.”
Dear Ellen,
Alas, I do think you are reading the tea leaves correctly. I do think book sections — in both mid-sized and larger newspapers — have to rethink their missions. Change or die, as you put it on our panel.
Frankly, I would have LOVED to see more of BookExpo covered by the mega-media than just that Clinton speech. For me, the “Book Coverage Conundrum” has always been how to move beyond the literati to a wider audience. There were tons of stories that could have been culled beside the usual suspects (although Tom Wolfe and Jon Stewart were hilarious). How about the Book Buzz section that talked about Tommy Franks’ new book, hinting that it might be more of an anti-Bush book than you would think, or newcomers like the Australian Pushcart nominee M.J. Hyland — whose “How the Light Gets In,” published by Canongate U.S., is a delightful female version of Holden Caulfield.
Even Dale Peck turned out to be a great interviewer and not at all the simplistic hatchet man he’s been described as … but more about that in a future Book Babes column.
