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May 08, 2007
Review inches, wampeters, and blogjams
The present verbal friction between traditional print-media reviewers and the lit-bloggers seems to me a distraction from the real problem we all face together.
The tension, I believe, has its root in the National Book Critics Circle’s petition to save the Book Review Editor position at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That important petition now carries over 5,200 signatories, a number that is happily growing daily. But with the appearance of the New York Times article for which Motoko Rich interviewed a few lit-bloggers, the good campaign for the Atlanta pages became, I gather, something of a brouhaha.
For a publisher who handles as many review-driven works as we do, the steady loss of review inches is painful at best. The value of the traditional review media, it seems to me, lies not in the reviewers’ position as arbiters of taste, but in their shared capacity to bring readers’ attention to the good books that might otherwise pass quietly by. Newspaper reviewers have long been in a unique position publicly to underscore books that lack celebrity hooks or Brand-Author clout. And that, I think, is the most important task they can undertake.
(Yeah, I know: What else would a small-press publisher think?)
Others, it seems, can now take up that cause as well.
In the past when we have asked review editors why a book of ours wasn’t covered, the few answers we’ve received have leaned (perhaps graciously) upon the assertion that too many books by big-name authors were published that month. This has been proffered as though we would understand that there just wasn’t room to review a book that subscribers did not already know about.
Sadly, this was true. But I know full well that it is not the way the review editors think. I know that this assertion reflects the kind of pressure they have long suffered under. That is, I know that it is the media publishers, not the review editors, who fail to see books in a historically cultural context. With a few notable exceptions, readers become reviewers because they love books. Newspaper publishers do not publish reviews for the same reason.
I don’t think we should be arguing over who has the remaining authority to describe and recommend our embattled literature when there are so few offline opportunities to do so and when the reach of any individual online reviewer is not yet large, not when literary careers are precipitously cut off every season by sales-scan numbers.
The issue, it seems to me, is for those who have the widest input to the culture to determine whether books should still be part of the culture, whether there is value to multiple written voices — both authorial and reviewing.
Fred Ramey
Posted 5/8/07
Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog
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Comments
Conversely those who have the thinnest input to the culture must expand. Together book blogs can concentrate or assimilate readerships like they immediately or currently don’t.
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Posted by Brian Hadd 05/08 07:36 PM