Chekhov’s Mistess

Book Bloggers Publishers and Reviewers: A Final Word On BookExpo 2005

As you can see from my earlier posts, my BookExpo experience was a dizzying first exposure to the marketing side of the book business. Perhaps if I attend next year’s show, I’ll have some more substantive commentary. While the New York Times (Stalking the Literary Sleeper Beneath the Hype and Buzz, Dinitia Smith, 6-June-2005) will give everyone their dose of big stars and hot new titles, for me the show was about the people I met. In fact, with only one exception, I don’t believe I spoke to anyone at the show that I had ever laid eyes on before BookExpo (being the normally sequestered litblogger that I am).

It’s clear from my posts that I met the Tireless Ed Champion of the litblog Return of The Reluctant. The photo is of Ed and Joel, a British writer we met on Friday. We had lunch at a small New York Deli in the classic vein of “Do you want that sandwich in your hands, a plate or a bag?”

Ed is an exuberant and genuinely friendly guy who earned his “Tireless” moniker by interviewing 27,000 of the 30,000 people in attendance at BookExpo (he may have covered a few more on the plane home). Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books and MobyLives.com said that Return of the Reluctant is a bad name, because there’s nothing reluctant about Ed. It’s true Ed.

Other bloggers I met were Laila Lalami of Moorish Girl fame; Media Bistro’s Galley Cat Nathalie Chicha; Sarah Weinman of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind; Mary Reagan who knows how to use her camera better than I; the novelist M.J. Rose, whose blog Buzz, Balls and Hype, I wrote a short piece for not long ago; Robert Gray who is a writer and bookseller and active participant in the Reading The World project; Ron Hogan, Mr. Beatrice himself; James Marcus of the House of Mirth; MR. TEV, Mark Sarvas; Megan at Bookdwarf and Michael Orthofer of the Literary Saloon. I thought bringing my on-line world into reality would be surreal at best, but as it turns out, after reading their writing on nearly a daily basis for a while, it was more like seeing old friends rather than new.

I found myself gravitating around the booths of the Consortium of Independent Presses. The photo above is of Kelly, Valerie and Dennis of Melville House who seemed to have a steady flow of people in and around their booth. Among them was David Kipen, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who has a new book forthcoming (The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History) about the importance of screenwriters over directors as a dominant force in film. David was also a panelist on Saturday in a program about embargoed book reviews.

The photo above is of James Marcus, writing for the L.A. Times (his litblog is House of Mirth), Kipen and Mark “Elegant Variation” Sarvas. Mark blogged the panel and if you’ve ever wanted to see what that looks like, see the photo below and his report at his site.

The panel, moderated by Art Winslow, a former editor of The Nation, included John Freeman, a freelance critic, Kipen, and the Chicago Tribune’s book editor, Liz Taylor. The group mused over publishers’ habit of legally embargoing book reviews to generate a “perfect storm” of press coverage in a short period of time, or to better manage an author’s reception.

I found it interesting that there were only critics and no publishers on the panel, particularly since each of the speakers announced that they never sign any legal embargo documents and unanimously agreed up front that embargoes were primarily for the benefit of the publishers and probably harmful to readers, thus answering the question posed within the first few minutes.

When asked under what circumstances they would break an embargo, Kipen said he would under instances where national security would otherwise be at risk (as I wonder to myself the probability of that happening) and Taylor answered that she would do so when a legal action might keep the author’s book out of stores (Taylor). This implies of course that each of the reviewers abides by the embargoes even if they don’t sign the forms.

Freeman, who as I said is a freelancer, showed a very pragmatic approach to book reviewing when he said that he felt his job as part of the publishing industry was to promote good books to readers. Reviewing, he indicated, was a part of a virtuous circle of writing, publishing, reviewing and reading. But, he said, the idea of embargoes made the process too “synchronized.” Winslow seemed to take issue with Freeman’s implication that reviewers were that close to publishers – he said it was not the job of a reviewer to promote books. Probably not wanting to get off the topic at hand, he left it at that, but the subject never really went away.

A June 2003 Slate article by the publicist Jen Bluestein (Stop That Book) was brought up. The article (which I read afterwards) describes the various instances when the tactic might be used. Some of the panelists took issue with Bluestein’s characterization of the relationship between publishers and reviewers:

An embargo can also help a publisher guard a vulnerable author from negative pre-publication press. Embargoing Stephen Glass’ novel—a fictional chronicle of the journalist’s dismissal by the New Republic for fabricating stories—gave Simon & Schuster, his publisher, the opportunity to stave off an inevitable wave of personal attacks by old colleagues and disapproving columnists, and, in the meantime, negotiate some sympathetic interviews and articles (emphasis mine).

“Negotiate some sympathetic interviews and articles” understandably being the offensive phrase. I could infer from much of what Kipen said throughout the discussion that there exists a real tension between publishers and critics that often flowed into practical matters of getting review copies on time and not knowing when he was supposed to have a review out – he facetiously suggested that all books be embargoed so he could keep track of which books and when the reviews should be published. Kipen is the smart, articulate and unabashed guy you want to have on panels like this to keep them interesting. Really.

Inconclusive as a short discussion on a big topic can be, this panel found an easy scapegoat when television was brought up toward the end. On the heels of Oprah’s announcement (televised live on the convention floor) of a Summer of Faulkner, the panel and several audience members lamented the influence of big money networks on timing of author and book publicity. Slightly aside from the idea of television driving embargoes, Kipen brought up an interesting point that there must have been thousands of people involved in the production of Oprah’s book club and secrecy was maintained throughout – an embargo, even if only implicit.

After the panel, I sat down for a while at the Unbridled Books booth, where I met Lamar Herrin, author of the forthcoming House of the Deaf. We had an interesting conversation about the Basque situation, the theme underlying his novel, and I was left looking forward to reading it.

I would describe my reaction as downright geeky (falling all over myself with excitement – kudos to Sarvas for not abandoning me at that point) when I found the Northwestern University Press booth. One of my favorite books, Meša Selimović‘s Death and the Dervish, is part of their “Writings from an Unbound Europe” series, which is a series of literature in translation from the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe. They are sufficiently obscure that I’ve never run across another title in the series. I think that situation might improve and you can bet that you’ll read about them here soon.

That ties in nicely with the conversation I had just had with Chad Post at Dalkey Archive Press. Chad started the Reading the World program last May to promote literature in translation (I still have some pieces to write on books highlighted in the program) and I was hoping to get my opinions in on next year’s project. BookExpo is a busy place and we didn’t get to chat long, but I think next year’s program will be even larger and have the potential to really start making an impact.

Shortly after embarrassingly confusing Columbia with Cambridge, I found a couple of literary criticism titles at Columbia University Press‘s booth. Among them was William Logan’s The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin, which from the description looks to be an upsetting reading of some canonical works from “the most hated man in American poetry.”

Despite the buzz about blogs, many of the people I met didn’t know what a litblog was and only had a vague familiarity with blogs in general. One exception was Molly at Coffee House Press. CHP is a non-profit publishing house out of Minneapolis with some great authors in their catalog. I walked away happy to have met the people behind a great organization and a copy of Gilbert Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies.

At the Theater Communications Group (TCG) booth, I got a copy of the re-released Swimming to Cambodia by Spalding Gray. You might recall that Mr. Gray committed suicide by drowning himself in New York Harbor not long ago (originally published in 1985, the book’s cover had to be changed because it was a picture of Gray’s head bobbing in water; obviously inappropriate now). TCG’s booth drew me because of some of the company’s titles including plays that I had seen like the Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz’s Two Sisters and a Piano and Suzan-Lori Parks Topdog/Underdog.

I’ve mentioned the Pinsky signing I went to and his new book and there were more titles that I came home with or look forward to seeing, but we’ll have to wait until I can read them. I’m looking forward to reading Laila’s collection of short stories “Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,” which will be published by Algonquin Books in October.

Besides the Litblog Co-op party, which I was only able to attend long enough to meet Kara from Archipelago Books and tell her how enthusiastic I was about their books, I went to the Independent Consortium party at Splashlight Studios thankfully close to Javits Center where the convention was held.

This is where I met Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, who the Tireless Ed Champion described as “the most energetic man in small publishing.” Indeed he was, but if it weren’t for the siren song of my toddler calling me home, I probably would have kept on chatting with Richard much longer (even thought they had already run out of beer and I was on to wine) and gone on to some of the other parties. Still, the Independent Consortium party was a fitting end to my BookExpo experience and talking to Richard made me believe in this thing called a litblog.

Read widely, think well, and write often

comments

I met you at the LBC party!

    – bookdwarf (06/08  at  02:55 PM)

This is a great round-up story of your BookExpo experience. Really great to see the highlights on what the independent presses are doing, and also, all the bloggers who were present and reporting on the scene. I wonder if there are any authors who wrote about their experience? I’ve seen several good book blogger write-ups, but curious about authors who had books showcased at BookExpo, and how they used the show to promote their book.

    – Jeffrey Yamaguchi (06/09  at  05:45 PM)

Jeffrey,

You probably would be interested in Laila Lalami’s site http://WWW.moorishgirl.com/

She is both a blogger and an author who had a presence at BEA.

Thanks!

Bud

    – Bud Parr (06/09  at  11:50 PM)

Thanks for the rundown--it’s also nice to put some faces and blogs together.  Hope to wander around some day at an Expo, it must have been exciting.

    – susan (06/10  at  10:10 AM)

I liked reading your report. It was atmospheric.

As a former book review editor and reporter covering the book publishing industry, I just want to toss one more consideration your way. This business of publishers’ negotiating some sympathetic interviews and articles: it’s not, as everybody knows, a matter of wining and dining somebody into a quid pro quo sort of arrangement. I don’t know what Jen Bluestein meant exactly--it sounds like it would have been helpful to have clarified her comments when airing them--but it usually makes sense for a publisher to approach a reviewer whose tastes are well-aligned with the publishers’ fare. In the case of Stephen Glass, well. Sympathy there probably just meant trying to keep as many journalists as possible from outright vitriol.

The offensive phrase that may never get the kind of air-time it deserves is “self-censorship.” This is relevant not to the negotiation between publicist and reviewer but between editor (or editorial institution) and reviewer. Book reviewing should be as free as reading is idiosyncratic. But I suspect self-censorship gets in the way more often than not.

    – Elizabeth Manus (12/08  at  10:27 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: June 07, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Reading Railroad: Events

• Comments:5
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