Book Reviews: Finding the Needle in the Haystack
Walk into any good bookstore, and the realities of being an author hit you right in the face – you’re confronted by a vast volume of recently published books. About 175,000 new titles were released this past year. For writers, that’s a daunting number; we can only hope that critics and readers will discover our one book from among the many thousands vying for attention.
But look at it from the point of view of book critics. It can be a Herculean effort to sift through the avalanche of books and bound galleys they receive daily from publishers and publicists, to select the handful worthy of review. Consider the picture above, of Frank Wilson, the influential books editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s practically buried by the piles of books that arrive daily in the mail. He told me that he had just unpacked 150-200 books – in one day.
However, Frank loves his work, it’s the job he dreamed of when he was in college. His passion is evident when he speaks about reading, in his eloquent, resonant voice, emphatically gesturing with his hands, warming quickly to the subject. “I’ve never read more in my life than I’ve had to read since getting this job, obviously. One of the things that I would not have anticipated as a consequence of that is the fact that I find it very difficult to endure passive entertainment. If I go to a film, the film has to grab me pretty quickly or I begin to think about something I ought to be reading and wish that I were home reading instead of watching this movie.” He likens reading a book to a musical score, because it plays out in your head. “It’s an interactive, participatory experience. You’re a co-creator.”
The problem is that no matter how many books Frank receives at his office, his newspaper can review only about 400 titles a year. So how does he select which ones The Inquirer will review?
Books by the big-name authors, such as John Updike or Philip Roth, will be reviewed because they can’t be ignored. But if a book is being reviewed everywhere else, Frank would rather not follow the crowd. Instead, he enjoys finding the quirky, offbeat book “Finding a book like Jane Gardam’s ‘Old Filth,’ that Michael Orthofer reviewed for me. That was really neat. Finding John Scalzi’s ‘The Ghost Brigade’ was really neat.” An avid and very successful blogger, Frank pays attention to what the buzz is among his fellow bloggers, in search of the little known gem of a book.
Certain small publishers will often get a second glance from Frank, especially when the house has “a single, controlling intelligence, a genuine intelligence, a discerning intelligence.” Then, their catalogs are “like an art collection.” For example, he mentioned George Gibson of Walker and Company, and Kent Carol of Europa Editions, both of whom he feels are personally reading and choosing the books they will publish, “which is why they tend to be of high quality.”
But given the odds, most of his unpacking of the daily pallet-full of books involves a filtering out, rejecting the books he knows he doesn’t want covered. The Inquirer doesn’t have a paperback column, so the vast majority of them go, with the exception of the rare paperback original that might catch his interest. Self-published books are almost always ignored. “There may be a masterpiece in there, but probably not, and we’re probably not going to find it.” Nor will he review self-help books, such as ones that tell you how to improve your business or alter your outlook on life. Publishers tend to have a “herd mentality” when putting out political books, so Frank often ignores them, even if they are by a “name” author, unless they have something really new and interesting to say.
Mystery and crime fiction are also hard sells, and he’s particularlyy not interested in any DaVinci look-alikes. First of all, he has no respect for “The DaVinci Code.” But more importantly, the competition in the mystery field is brutal. “Which would you rather read,” he asked. “This rather pedestrian medieval mystery or Andrew Klavan’s ‘Damnation Street,’ which is one of the creepiest crime novels I’ve read in a long time? My eyes wouldn’t move fast enough to read the last few pages on that one. If you want to get into writing a crime novel, you better realize that there are some pretty heavy hitters in that field. And good just won’t cut it. ”
Of course, every author wants to be reviewed, to have her book noticed. Otherwise, why write it? But with so much competition is there anything that an author can do to get a major book editor’s attention? For instance, I asked Frank, is there value in hiring a freelance publicist (someone who works for the writer rather than for the publisher)?
He acknowledged that there are publicists whose recommendations he trusts, but he wouldn’t mention names. As he explained, “If a publicist will tell you, as a publicist once did, ‘I actually don’t know why they spent the money to print this book,’ I trust a person like that.” And when that person turns around and tells him that a book is really good, he’ll tend to believe her (or maybe, it was a him). But hiring a freelance publicist is tricky. Some don’t even read the books they are pitching, and it’s obvious in their press releases. So, if you’re going to spend some of your hard-earned advance, you’ll want to be sure that the publicist you hire really knows your book, and believes in it wholeheartedly. And it must be someone reviewers trust.
However, instead of hiring a publicist who may or may not be able to garner attention for your book, Frank recommends that writers blog. I have my doubts about the value of blogging; it’s certainly not for everyone. But I’ll go further into that subject in another journal entry I’m planning to write within the next couple of weeks, called “Blogging: Is It a Good Career Choice?”
Frank is quite aware of the dreams that each book he discards represents. “The fantasy that everyone has is that ‘I’m going to write a book, it’s going to be a best seller, and I’m going to retire.’ No,” he said, “You’re going to write a book, and you’re lucky if it’s published, and if it is, it is probably going to be remaindered.” He told me about his interview with John Jakes years ago, when Jakes wrote ‘The Bastard,’ which was a best seller and became part of the miniseries that made Nick Nolte’s career. Jakes told Frank that everyone thought “The Bastard” was his first novel, when it was his 26th. ”If you’re going to be a writer,” Frank advises, “You better realize that it’s a marathon, not a sprint”