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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
In a note to reviewers, the AP said that as of September, the AP will no longer be in the regular book review business. The reasoning at this point is both familiar, disheartening, and intransigent: book reviews as a business proposition are extremely tough. This will greatly decrease the number of book reviews across the hundreds of papers the AP services. Celebrity book clubs, book influencers, Goodreads, and a just generally crappy market for traditional media have eroded the attention paid to regular reviews. I would say this is a real loss (and it is) but maybe the more depressing and honest read is that these reviews weren’t being read very much anyone, so maybe not that many will even notice.
And yet people are still going to write about books. I cannot say I recognize any of these emerging critics (that is sort of the point), but in looking through their bios, the array of publications they have written for is wide, even if the titles may not be familiar. There are so many smaller publications that remain dedicated to writing about books and so many people who want to write about them, that there will be a sort of eternal flame for criticism. But criticism as something that routinely appears in for-profit enterprises at scale? Only the titans (The NYT, New York Mag, The Atlantic, etc) are likely to continue.
Can you sense a theme today? The corner of the individual newsletter world I read is bigger than just Substack, but for the sake of this piece let’s just call it “Substack.” There are tons of interesting literary/publishing/book world newsletters, so many that finding and keeping up with them all is quite difficult. The upshot I think is that you can certainly get paid more writing your own newsletter than you can as a freelance book reviewer, but it takes dedication, endurance, skill, and maybe having gotten there already. But the central point is the same as from above: there are people who want to write and there are people who want to read this stuff. But that matchmaking is just not going to happen in the arts section (if there is even one anymore) of the Kansas City Star or the Dallas Morning News. I think some newsletter writers are probably more influential than any individual review in the NYT even, but that bar has been lowered as well. Could some writer emerge as the “take people care about” in the way that Woods or Kakutani were once upon a time? Possibly. More likely though is an ecosystem of niches, which might be more interesting and sustainable over time, though less able to punch through into wider awareness.
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