This week the Book Babes welcome British journalist Natasha Randall as our Guest Babe. She writes a column for the London-based Publishing News, commenting on book trends and the publishing industry in America. Randall also has written for The New York Times, the L.A. Times Book Review, Strad magazine, Case da Abitare, and other publications. Based in New York, she is currently at work translating a classic Russian 20th century novel. Here is her column, which appeared in Publishing News earlier this summer.
By Natasha Randall
I have often been tickled by the adorable enthusiasm that British editors and American editors have for each other. After a week of meetings on the other side of the Atlantic, each will inevitably comment: “How refreshing! The [insert here ‘British’ or ‘Americans’] really LOVE books.” Each side is convinced that the other side is so much more spirited and ardent towards their projects — and rather wearied by attitudes in their own communities.
This is one of the lovelier examples of a sort of publishing nostalgia and mild disgruntlement that riddles the industry. And it feeds on the jigsaw of rifts that fit together to form the publishing trade — editorial vs. sales, commercial vs. literary, specialising vs. diversifying, conglomerates vs. independents, small bookstores vs. Wal-Mart, quality publishing vs. quantity publishing, etc. As the industry has grown and made efforts to modernize and organize, it has created endless layers of categories and boundaries — and in the face of this, the human element, understandably, often reacts with reluctance and nostalgia.
Books themselves are defying categorization too, and blurring into a stew of backlist bestsellers (thanks to Oprah), front-list flops, and mid-list miasma. Genres and sub-genres won’t stay put either, endlessly spawning newfangled hybrids like religious fitness books, right-wing cookbooks and business-model-cum-romantic-self-help books. It’s impossible for industry statistics to keep up with the blurring of categories. “Units” and “titles” are the vocabularies of different dimensions.
Stuart Applebaum recently complained to … the Book Babes about the “class war” that plagues American publishing. He was referring to that old horse that can’t be flogged enough: the battle between the commercial and the literary factions. Applebaum quite rightly pointed to the news media as the culprits in all this — the most recent spat began with Stephen King’s receipt of a long-standing literary honor last year. Shock, horror. At the same time, Chip McGrath, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, resigned and the mudslinging really began.
A book review section in flux is grounds for a good old bun-fight. It suddenly turned out that nobody liked the NYTBR and everybody had their two-pence to contribute. But when the executive editor of The New York Times suggested in an interview that they would include more reviews of commercial fiction and give the lion’s share of the section to reviewing non-fiction, there was an uproar. What would New Yorkers do if, at a dinner party, they couldn’t talk about the reviews of the literary fiction they hadn’t actually read?! There is some sort of mangled consensus that literary books deserve reviews because there is never enough time to read enough good books and because didacticism is alive and well in journalism. The idea is that literary books are to reviews what commercial books are to advertisements.
As it turns out, the NYTBR‘s intentions are very sound. They intend to publish shorter reviews of more books across a wider spectrum. Literary fiction won’t be marginalized, but other types of book will be given more ink. The new editor-in-chief, Sam Tanenhaus, pointed out that the book review is a news service, a digest of the latest news about books — not publicity for publishers, nor a rarified forum for highbrow esoterica. That said, publishers ought to be thrilled that more books will be covered and that the NYTBR‘s central motivation is to attract more readers to their section. Listen here: it’s a symbiosis, not a struggle.
Also, we ought to remind ourselves why book review sections are so crucial — it’s the same reason that book clubs are so necessary: readers (and potential readers) are overwhelmed by the great white noise of 175,000 books being printed, bound, and packaged a year. Take an historical view of the status quo: since the middle of the 19th century, there has been a parabolic explosion in the amount of information a person is expected to absorb. There are countless examples of the choices consumers make in order to tackle this barrage — people trust Wal-Mart for their book selection; people buy non-fiction that neatly packages the history of the world through the lens of one object (the history of sweets, tulips, salt, etc.); and people cling to Internet search engines, not reference books, as though they were auxiliary memory banks.
A property guru once explained the complications of real-estate and life to me: “Honeybunch, listen to me. Don’t fight it. IT’S ALL ALGORITHMS.”
Let’s see — [175,000 books] integrated with [television, films, and other entertainment] but differentiated by [time and effort needed to read/watch] plus [longer work hours] with a variable of [stress and anxiety] and an unknown quantity of [anti-intellectualism] = a reader under siege.
Natalie Randall can be reached at Nsrandall@earthlink.net.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misidentified the number of books published.
