10 ms·

Is it the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?

131 points by Jerry2 4y ago

anita466 4y ago
coldtea 4y ago
It is the public media culture of scatching each other's back
zwieback 4y ago
Maybe not entirely a bad thing, if one plumber says that this other plumber is good I assume he knows what he's talking about. The flipside, of course, is that a mutual appreciation society excludes interesting outsiders.
- 21723 4y ago
  The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.) If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself. The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    How is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported?
    - 21723 4y ago
      330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire. Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books. ---- [1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
      - mbg721 4y ago
        What makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        National identity, culture and distribution. I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  But plumbing is largely a zero sum game. Book sales are not: this makes an enormous difference.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Plumbing is not entirely a zero sum game, and referrals are a big part of exploiting division of labor. If two plumbers are good at different aspects of plumbing, giving referrals to each other when they're called to jobs for which the other one is better suited has positive dividends - better plumbing gets done and customers are happier. A plumber passing on work this way is passing up the immediate benefit of a contract in hand, but presumably trades that for a better contract in the future that he might otherwise not have gotten, not for nothing at all.
    - wardedVibe 4y ago
      relative advantage is a wonderful thing
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        Perhaps, but it's not relevant to the situation I described, which relied on each plumber having an absolute advantage over the other one. For relative advantage to come into play, there would have to be some kind of limit to the total amount of work one plumber could do.
    - SeanLuke 4y ago
      Sure, yes, coalitions form in even unlikely places. But even so, come on. Plumbing is largely a zero sum game, or at least far more so than book sales.
returningfory2 4y ago
Having a "clubby" culture is one explanation, but another factor could be that the NYRB just gets very high profile contributors. For example Zadie Smith has written essays for the NYRB, while also being the subject of reviews. Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them? I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.
- starwind 4y ago
  > Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them? Uh, I don't see the difference
  - frereubu 4y ago
    I think some might read the original question as saying that the books reviewed wouldn't be reviewed unless they were contributors. Zadie Smith's books would get reviewed whether she'd contributed or not, but she still counts towards the "clubby" total.
    - starwind 4y ago
      Oh OK that makes sense. I thought "part of the club" as in "club of high profile authors"
- briga 4y ago
  It's a positive feedback loop: an author becomes high profile by getting positive reviews in the NYRB -> they become more likely to contribute to the NYRB -> they become more likely to get more positive reviews, and so on. Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris. How many authors get passed over just because they happen to live somewhere else? There are so many books released every year that it would be impossible for any one publication to review them all. So instead of a curation of the best authors, publications like this inevitably just become a curation of authors who are in the club.
AndyMcConachie 4y ago
It's only as incestuous as academia :)
FatalLogic 4y ago
Sounds like peer review? It's difficult to find people who can provide an informed analysis of an activity unless you choose from amongst people who can do that activity themselves
- hkt 4y ago
  Exactly this. I found out the embarrassing way (by asking a journalism tutor) how to end up being a writer like Perry Anderson because I enjoyed one of his longer pieces in the LRB, reviewing the work of an illustrious writer on the history of the EU (Luk van de Midelaar). He told me if I wanted to be like that, I'd need to contribute to the New Left Review for six decades and also be a Marxist historian. The point being, becoming a peer of that kind is impossible to do through academia, so some people consider it "clubby". It is, perhaps, that these people have been both commercially successful in their niche and influential that confers that peerhood, not shared social ties (although I'm certain those form too).
- car_analogy 4y ago
  In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic. If NYBR reviewers mostly review books by other NYBR reviewers, while ignoring the tremendous amount of other quality authors and literature, that is likewise problematic. Unless one speciously defines the type of book that NYBR would review as its own genre (analogous to a researchers field), shrinking the candidate literature down what NYBR reviews.
  - aahortwwy 4y ago
    > In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic. The comparison to peer review is perfect, because exactly this happens across many areas of research. Any area where the pool of potential reviewers is small enough that everyone (sort of) knows everyone else, the process tends to get corrupted by concerns over personal networks, careers, grant funding, etc. etc. Much as prestigious book review cliques get corrupted by networks, careers, access to publishers, etc. etc.
21723 4y ago
This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don't actually read most of the books they're paid to talk about) and the major reviews. It gets a lot worse. Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers and which ones are there just to make the lead titles shine by comparison. Reader word-of-mouth doesn't really get a voice in the traditional book world, because it's slow, because reading takes time... and it's not publishers who started this fire, but the chain bookstores who abused the consignment model (Great Depression hangover) and invented the 8-week rotation. Publishers actually do care about the future of literature and being decent to the authors they're publishing... but these days if the chain bookstores don't like your numbers, you're dead after two months on the shelf (and will be difficult for publishers to place in the future)... and the economics of the whole system follow from that. If you're not going to be a lead title--and that depends on who your agent is, not the quality of your book, and your odds of even being read (let alone represented) by that kind of agent are less than 1% no matter how good your book is--then you're going to find traditional publishing experience extremely disappointing. The current system is based on selling huge numbers of copies (or not) in the first couple months, not on producing evergreen titles or building audiences. That said, reader word-of-mouth does get a voice in the long term, and self-publishing is a better option if you can afford it. (It costs about $20 per kiloword to do it right, though; you have to hire at least one editor, preferably two, as well as a cover designer.) You won't get reviewed by famous people, because you don't benefit from the network of "Do X or the next call is from my boss to your boss" phone calls that run NYC publishing, but you'll have more creative control and probably make more money in the long term.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  >Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers Oh, if only we knew how to do that!
  - 21723 4y ago
    I should say "are supposed to be* bestsellers. I have heard horror stories where someone gets a lead title package and the book still flops. Whether that's because of a bad book or just terrible luck, I don't know enough about it to say. But the chain bookstores are definitely a big part of the problem whereby publishers are expected to bet big on a few books ("lead titles") and let the others wither. The publishers didn't ask to be in this world.
bobthechef 4y ago
gxqoz 4y ago
"Wow, who is this Ralph Manheim guy I've never heard of and why is NYRB obsessed with him?" Oh, apparently he's a translator.
- layer8 4y ago
  Translators rarely get the credit they deserve, so it’s kinda nice to see this. :)
michaelt 4y ago
Private Eye periodically reports on "log rolling" in book reviews - where an author approached by a journalist will recommend books with the same publisher, or the same publicist, or the same agent. So I wouldn't be surprised if one found a similar pattern across the entire publishing industry.
- ilamont 4y ago
  The American magazine Spy used to do this as well back in the 80s, with a monthly column called "Log rolling in our time" calling out authors writing blurbs for each other.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Having been through this as an editor, there is an issue where, for instance, how do you get blurbs for a book? You ask people the author knows, people you know, people your colleagues know, if you can thumb-wrestle an address out of them, etc. There's a chain. On the other end, any moderately-successful author is getting a lot of such requests, so they're going to filter in reverse.
  - freddyym 4y ago
    A large portion of blurb quotes come from people who haven't read the book... [0] 0 https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning-was-the-blurb https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning-wa...
  - 21723 4y ago
    Semi-troll, semi-serious question. What keeps people from getting blurbs from people with common names that also belong to famous authors--such as Stephen King? I can't imagine it's illegal to get a blurb from Stephen A. King, schoolteacher in Idaho, and use it sans middle initial. So why aren't more people doing it? It may be Saul Goodman-esque, but if blurbs actually drive sales, it makes sense.
    - not2b 4y ago
      Except that when you're found out (generic "you", not the author of the comment), you are disgraced: everyone soon knows that you're a fraud. And social media will expose this kind of fraud very quickly. Doesn't matter if it's legal: the Internet then identifies you as the idiot who tried to pass off a schoolteacher in Idaho as the famous Stephen King. That will tank a career.
notacoward 4y ago
Don't similar "revolving doors" exist in just about every industry, including tech?
swatcoder 4y ago
This is a beautifully long-winded way of confirming that "Literature" is simply a genre that people confuse for quality. The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it. If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing. It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Pulications like NYRB and the New Yorker review books in many genres. Arguably, what defines 'literature' is quality (which I'll leave undefined), regardless of the genre. From that perspective, saying there is no difference between literature and non-literature is like saying there is no difference between NBA basketball players and those who couldn't make the NBA, or maybe more accurately, that there is no difference between typical developers at Google and those in the IT department of a mid-sized law firm (to pick an organization outside the tech field). My experience is that there is, generally speaking, a clear qualitative difference between literature and non-literature. It's an old trope to deny 'fine' arts have merit, but often such denials lack an assertion or evidence - they just deny someone else's. What do you think the state of such things is? All is equal? Everything is subjective? That would be pretty extreme.
  - swatcoder 4y ago
    I wrote more in response to an adjacent reply, but your analogy is missing the point. The work featured in those publications does indeed showcase the best “NBA players” and is better than quite a lot of other work at large. But it simply doesn’t aim to speak at all about the “players” of the NFL, NHL, FIFA, Starcraft, etc. And that’s exactly what the analysis in this article reveals. Writers in the literary genre critique and share literary works in journals for readers who enjoy that style. Meanwhile, other journals do exactly the same thing for their own styles-of-focus, and lots of writers and readers stride across all of them.
cafard 4y ago
The National Lampoon once did a "New York Review of Us" issue. (https://magazineparody.com/2018/01/28/national-lampoon-parodies-1970-2006/ https://magazineparody.com/2018/01/28/national-lampoon-parod... says that this was in January 1976.)
jgalt212 4y ago
How come directors don't write movie reviews, but book authors commonly write book reviews?
- wolverine876 4y ago
  Interesting question: Maybe the barrier to entry for directors is much higher than authors. The budget required for a film greatly limits the output; any critic can try writing a book. But I wonder how many film critics try making short film? With modern digital video and YouTube, it's possible.
  - cardiffspaceman 4y ago
    Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Goddard, and Roger Ebert made movies and wrote film criticism.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Great examples, thanks. Still, the barrier to entry is much higher.
browningstreet 4y ago
The manner of NYRB book reviews -- essays often covering 'n' related books on a given topic, are also more specific to NYRB's formula. Form and function... The length of their reviews & essays isn't common among other, similar lit rags.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  The other distinguishing feature of those "reviews" is that they often take the form of "Author A.B wants to write an essay about X. Here are 3 or 4 books somehow related to X that A.B will comment on during the course of their essay."
bhouston 4y ago
This is the same as paper reviewers for academic journals. The reviewer are usually authors whose work has been accepted into the journal. And then you build up better contacts and also you know how the review process works intimately and this are more likely to get papers accepted. (I was published in and then a reviewer for an academic journal.)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > This is the same as paper reviewers for academic journals. I mean, "this paper does not cite enough of my colleagues" is a common satirical representation of academic journal reviewer feedback.
zoolily 4y ago
While most comments focus on fiction, I find the real value of the NYRB for me are the reviews of nonfiction books. These reviews go into much more depth than reviews in other places and often compare and contrast multiple books on the same topic. The nonfiction reviews are great for both finding books to read and learning enough about a topic so that you can decide that you don't need to read a book on that topic.
curious_cat_163 4y ago
Why is this an important question?
jo6gwb 4y ago
Neal Stephenson has a great perspective on this is his book Some Remarks.
z1nc 4y ago
Good writers probably do have the best insight on what the best books are, but that's a clear conflict of interest. It also gives less visibility to new or "indie" writers. Some sites, such as Drive Thru RPG, do not allow you to leave reviews if you are a publisher, presumably to avoid this conflict. Folks can certainly log on with their personal account, but at least it is some level of accountability.
earthboundkid 4y ago
I once went to dinner with some NYRB reviewers and was thoroughly impressed that yes, it’s the New York Review of Each Other’s Books. I haven’t given it any respect since. LARB is much better in my opinion.
rendall 4y ago
I looked carefully, but did not find in the article what is expected. Is the contention that authors who do not contribute do not get reviewed? Or that otherwise successful authors are excluded?
cameldrv 4y ago
NYRB in the nineties when I was reading it was absolutely amazing. I can say that my life and my tastes would be different without it. In the 2000s it got much thinner. The articles were shorter, and under GWB it veered much more into politics. The editors felt that they had to spend their cultural capital on politics under the circumstances, but they spent a lot. Many years later I got to see the premiere of Scorsese's documentary with Bob Silvers in attendance and it's a cherished memory.
spoonjim 4y ago
I’m sure Physical Review Letters is an even more connected graph.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
https://slate.com/culture/2001/08/one-cheer-for-cheering.html https://slate.com/culture/2001/08/one-cheer-for-cheering.htm... - first line "Spy magazine had a column titled “Logrolling in Our Time,” devoted to exposing authors who traded good reviews back and forth. " which I remember, it was pretty funny sometimes.
lordgrenville 4y ago
Nice touch having the graphs use the NYRB font. Anyone know what it is?
MrMan 4y ago
anyone remember the column "long-rolling in our time" a column in Spy magazine which named and shamed this self-same behavior?
anita466 4y ago

131 points by Jerry2 4y ago

anita466 4y ago

coldtea 4y ago

It is the public media culture of scatching each other's back

zwieback 4y ago

Maybe not entirely a bad thing, if one plumber says that this other plumber is good I assume he knows what he's talking about. The flipside, of course, is that a mutual appreciation society excludes interesting outsiders.

21723 4y ago
The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.) If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself. The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
- mbg721 4y ago
  How is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported?
  - 21723 4y ago
    330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market). Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low. Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire. Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books. ---- [1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
    - mbg721 4y ago
      What makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        National identity, culture and distribution. I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
SeanLuke 4y ago
But plumbing is largely a zero sum game. Book sales are not: this makes an enormous difference.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  Plumbing is not entirely a zero sum game, and referrals are a big part of exploiting division of labor. If two plumbers are good at different aspects of plumbing, giving referrals to each other when they're called to jobs for which the other one is better suited has positive dividends - better plumbing gets done and customers are happier. A plumber passing on work this way is passing up the immediate benefit of a contract in hand, but presumably trades that for a better contract in the future that he might otherwise not have gotten, not for nothing at all.
  - wardedVibe 4y ago
    relative advantage is a wonderful thing
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Perhaps, but it's not relevant to the situation I described, which relied on each plumber having an absolute advantage over the other one. For relative advantage to come into play, there would have to be some kind of limit to the total amount of work one plumber could do.
  - SeanLuke 4y ago
    Sure, yes, coalitions form in even unlikely places. But even so, come on. Plumbing is largely a zero sum game, or at least far more so than book sales.

returningfory2 4y ago

Having a "clubby" culture is one explanation, but another factor could be that the NYRB just gets very high profile contributors. For example Zadie Smith has written essays for the NYRB, while also being the subject of reviews. Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them? I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.

starwind 4y ago
> Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them? Uh, I don't see the difference
- frereubu 4y ago
  I think some might read the original question as saying that the books reviewed wouldn't be reviewed unless they were contributors. Zadie Smith's books would get reviewed whether she'd contributed or not, but she still counts towards the "clubby" total.
  - starwind 4y ago
    Oh OK that makes sense. I thought "part of the club" as in "club of high profile authors"
briga 4y ago
It's a positive feedback loop: an author becomes high profile by getting positive reviews in the NYRB -> they become more likely to contribute to the NYRB -> they become more likely to get more positive reviews, and so on. Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris. How many authors get passed over just because they happen to live somewhere else? There are so many books released every year that it would be impossible for any one publication to review them all. So instead of a curation of the best authors, publications like this inevitably just become a curation of authors who are in the club.

AndyMcConachie 4y ago

It's only as incestuous as academia :)

FatalLogic 4y ago

Sounds like peer review? It's difficult to find people who can provide an informed analysis of an activity unless you choose from amongst people who can do that activity themselves

hkt 4y ago
Exactly this. I found out the embarrassing way (by asking a journalism tutor) how to end up being a writer like Perry Anderson because I enjoyed one of his longer pieces in the LRB, reviewing the work of an illustrious writer on the history of the EU (Luk van de Midelaar). He told me if I wanted to be like that, I'd need to contribute to the New Left Review for six decades and also be a Marxist historian. The point being, becoming a peer of that kind is impossible to do through academia, so some people consider it "clubby". It is, perhaps, that these people have been both commercially successful in their niche and influential that confers that peerhood, not shared social ties (although I'm certain those form too).
car_analogy 4y ago
In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic. If NYBR reviewers mostly review books by other NYBR reviewers, while ignoring the tremendous amount of other quality authors and literature, that is likewise problematic. Unless one speciously defines the type of book that NYBR would review as its own genre (analogous to a researchers field), shrinking the candidate literature down what NYBR reviews.
- aahortwwy 4y ago
  > In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic. The comparison to peer review is perfect, because exactly this happens across many areas of research. Any area where the pool of potential reviewers is small enough that everyone (sort of) knows everyone else, the process tends to get corrupted by concerns over personal networks, careers, grant funding, etc. etc. Much as prestigious book review cliques get corrupted by networks, careers, access to publishers, etc. etc.

21723 4y ago

This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don't actually read most of the books they're paid to talk about) and the major reviews. It gets a lot worse. Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers and which ones are there just to make the lead titles shine by comparison. Reader word-of-mouth doesn't really get a voice in the traditional book world, because it's slow, because reading takes time... and it's not publishers who started this fire, but the chain bookstores who abused the consignment model (Great Depression hangover) and invented the 8-week rotation. Publishers actually do care about the future of literature and being decent to the authors they're publishing... but these days if the chain bookstores don't like your numbers, you're dead after two months on the shelf (and will be difficult for publishers to place in the future)... and the economics of the whole system follow from that. If you're not going to be a lead title--and that depends on who your agent is, not the quality of your book, and your odds of even being read (let alone represented) by that kind of agent are less than 1% no matter how good your book is--then you're going to find traditional publishing experience extremely disappointing. The current system is based on selling huge numbers of copies (or not) in the first couple months, not on producing evergreen titles or building audiences. That said, reader word-of-mouth does get a voice in the long term, and self-publishing is a better option if you can afford it. (It costs about $20 per kiloword to do it right, though; you have to hire at least one editor, preferably two, as well as a cover designer.) You won't get reviewed by famous people, because you don't benefit from the network of "Do X or the next call is from my boss to your boss" phone calls that run NYC publishing, but you'll have more creative control and probably make more money in the long term.

Finnucane 4y ago
>Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers Oh, if only we knew how to do that!
- 21723 4y ago
  I should say "are supposed to be* bestsellers. I have heard horror stories where someone gets a lead title package and the book still flops. Whether that's because of a bad book or just terrible luck, I don't know enough about it to say. But the chain bookstores are definitely a big part of the problem whereby publishers are expected to bet big on a few books ("lead titles") and let the others wither. The publishers didn't ask to be in this world.

bobthechef 4y ago

gxqoz 4y ago

"Wow, who is this Ralph Manheim guy I've never heard of and why is NYRB obsessed with him?" Oh, apparently he's a translator.

layer8 4y ago
Translators rarely get the credit they deserve, so it’s kinda nice to see this. :)

michaelt 4y ago

Private Eye periodically reports on "log rolling" in book reviews - where an author approached by a journalist will recommend books with the same publisher, or the same publicist, or the same agent. So I wouldn't be surprised if one found a similar pattern across the entire publishing industry.

ilamont 4y ago
The American magazine Spy used to do this as well back in the 80s, with a monthly column called "Log rolling in our time" calling out authors writing blurbs for each other.
Finnucane 4y ago
Having been through this as an editor, there is an issue where, for instance, how do you get blurbs for a book? You ask people the author knows, people you know, people your colleagues know, if you can thumb-wrestle an address out of them, etc. There's a chain. On the other end, any moderately-successful author is getting a lot of such requests, so they're going to filter in reverse.
- freddyym 4y ago
  A large portion of blurb quotes come from people who haven't read the book... [0] 0 https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning-was-the-blurb https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning-wa...
- 21723 4y ago
  Semi-troll, semi-serious question. What keeps people from getting blurbs from people with common names that also belong to famous authors--such as Stephen King? I can't imagine it's illegal to get a blurb from Stephen A. King, schoolteacher in Idaho, and use it sans middle initial. So why aren't more people doing it? It may be Saul Goodman-esque, but if blurbs actually drive sales, it makes sense.
  - not2b 4y ago
    Except that when you're found out (generic "you", not the author of the comment), you are disgraced: everyone soon knows that you're a fraud. And social media will expose this kind of fraud very quickly. Doesn't matter if it's legal: the Internet then identifies you as the idiot who tried to pass off a schoolteacher in Idaho as the famous Stephen King. That will tank a career.

notacoward 4y ago

Don't similar "revolving doors" exist in just about every industry, including tech?

swatcoder 4y ago

This is a beautifully long-winded way of confirming that "Literature" is simply a genre that people confuse for quality. The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it. If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing. It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.

wolverine876 4y ago
Pulications like NYRB and the New Yorker review books in many genres. Arguably, what defines 'literature' is quality (which I'll leave undefined), regardless of the genre. From that perspective, saying there is no difference between literature and non-literature is like saying there is no difference between NBA basketball players and those who couldn't make the NBA, or maybe more accurately, that there is no difference between typical developers at Google and those in the IT department of a mid-sized law firm (to pick an organization outside the tech field). My experience is that there is, generally speaking, a clear qualitative difference between literature and non-literature. It's an old trope to deny 'fine' arts have merit, but often such denials lack an assertion or evidence - they just deny someone else's. What do you think the state of such things is? All is equal? Everything is subjective? That would be pretty extreme.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  I wrote more in response to an adjacent reply, but your analogy is missing the point. The work featured in those publications does indeed showcase the best “NBA players” and is better than quite a lot of other work at large. But it simply doesn’t aim to speak at all about the “players” of the NFL, NHL, FIFA, Starcraft, etc. And that’s exactly what the analysis in this article reveals. Writers in the literary genre critique and share literary works in journals for readers who enjoy that style. Meanwhile, other journals do exactly the same thing for their own styles-of-focus, and lots of writers and readers stride across all of them.

cafard 4y ago

The National Lampoon once did a "New York Review of Us" issue. (https://magazineparody.com/2018/01/28/national-lampoon-parodies-1970-2006/ https://magazineparody.com/2018/01/28/national-lampoon-parod... says that this was in January 1976.)

jgalt212 4y ago

How come directors don't write movie reviews, but book authors commonly write book reviews?

wolverine876 4y ago
Interesting question: Maybe the barrier to entry for directors is much higher than authors. The budget required for a film greatly limits the output; any critic can try writing a book. But I wonder how many film critics try making short film? With modern digital video and YouTube, it's possible.
- cardiffspaceman 4y ago
  Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Goddard, and Roger Ebert made movies and wrote film criticism.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Great examples, thanks. Still, the barrier to entry is much higher.

browningstreet 4y ago

The manner of NYRB book reviews -- essays often covering 'n' related books on a given topic, are also more specific to NYRB's formula. Form and function... The length of their reviews & essays isn't common among other, similar lit rags.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
The other distinguishing feature of those "reviews" is that they often take the form of "Author A.B wants to write an essay about X. Here are 3 or 4 books somehow related to X that A.B will comment on during the course of their essay."

bhouston 4y ago

This is the same as paper reviewers for academic journals. The reviewer are usually authors whose work has been accepted into the journal. And then you build up better contacts and also you know how the review process works intimately and this are more likely to get papers accepted. (I was published in and then a reviewer for an academic journal.)

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> This is the same as paper reviewers for academic journals. I mean, "this paper does not cite enough of my colleagues" is a common satirical representation of academic journal reviewer feedback.

zoolily 4y ago

While most comments focus on fiction, I find the real value of the NYRB for me are the reviews of nonfiction books. These reviews go into much more depth than reviews in other places and often compare and contrast multiple books on the same topic. The nonfiction reviews are great for both finding books to read and learning enough about a topic so that you can decide that you don't need to read a book on that topic.

curious_cat_163 4y ago

Why is this an important question?

jo6gwb 4y ago

Neal Stephenson has a great perspective on this is his book Some Remarks.

z1nc 4y ago

Good writers probably do have the best insight on what the best books are, but that's a clear conflict of interest. It also gives less visibility to new or "indie" writers. Some sites, such as Drive Thru RPG, do not allow you to leave reviews if you are a publisher, presumably to avoid this conflict. Folks can certainly log on with their personal account, but at least it is some level of accountability.

earthboundkid 4y ago

I once went to dinner with some NYRB reviewers and was thoroughly impressed that yes, it’s the New York Review of Each Other’s Books. I haven’t given it any respect since. LARB is much better in my opinion.

rendall 4y ago

I looked carefully, but did not find in the article what is expected. Is the contention that authors who do not contribute do not get reviewed? Or that otherwise successful authors are excluded?

cameldrv 4y ago

NYRB in the nineties when I was reading it was absolutely amazing. I can say that my life and my tastes would be different without it. In the 2000s it got much thinner. The articles were shorter, and under GWB it veered much more into politics. The editors felt that they had to spend their cultural capital on politics under the circumstances, but they spent a lot. Many years later I got to see the premiere of Scorsese's documentary with Bob Silvers in attendance and it's a cherished memory.

spoonjim 4y ago

I’m sure Physical Review Letters is an even more connected graph.

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

https://slate.com/culture/2001/08/one-cheer-for-cheering.html https://slate.com/culture/2001/08/one-cheer-for-cheering.htm... - first line "Spy magazine had a column titled “Logrolling in Our Time,” devoted to exposing authors who traded good reviews back and forth. " which I remember, it was pretty funny sometimes.

lordgrenville 4y ago

Nice touch having the graphs use the NYRB font. Anyone know what it is?

MrMan 4y ago

anyone remember the column "long-rolling in our time" a column in Spy magazine which named and shamed this self-same behavior?

anita466 4y ago