User Submitted Blog Post: Take Our Reviewers, Please

Spend any amount of time looking at statistics about reading and books, and it's easy to get confused. Americans aren't reading as much as they used to---to a degree that's somewhere between disheartening and catastrophic, depending on who you ask. But more books than ever are being published. The Literary Saloon points out that, according to one recent study, more than 50,000 novels were published in the United States last year, more than double the amount published five years prior.

Who's reading all of this new bounty, if anybody? There's no clear answer to that question. What the Literary Saloon is more concerned about is why these books aren't actually getting reviewed:

So for example The New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus: in 2004 it already seemed dubious (to us) that he excused the lack of fiction coverage at the NYTBR by claiming: "There's a lot more nonfiction published these days than there used to be" -- but certainly he now should face the fact (and the facts, in terms of raw numbers) that if that was true then the tide has turned -- in a big, big way.
But after the 25 May issue (ratio of fiction titles to non-fiction titles that get their own full-length review 1:5 !) they offer their 1 June 'Summer Reading' issue -- and provide only three (3) reviews of fiction titles and nineteen (19 !) reviews each devoted to an individual non-fiction title, as well as four reviews each devoted to several works of non-fiction. What world are they living in ?

I don't study the NYTBR with that much vigor, and I don't know enough about Tanenhaus to speculate much about his thinking. But I might guess that, like most editors at newspapers these days, he's trying to balance out the goal of comprehensiveness against shrinking space. And that space isn't just lost in the book section---it's lost in the news sections as well, which might make covering nonfiction books on global affairs somewhat more appealing. After all, the book review may be the only space where you can engage with international politics with any depth.

To lose fiction coverage in the midst of that is disheartening, to be sure; I know for my part that I wish that every week's book review section in the Times or the Washington Post did better than rounding up the biggest books from the larger publishing houses. But fixing the problem won't involve proportioning space based on statistics about how many books get published. Major book review sections may feel obligated to bring the news, and with shrinking staffs it's harder to dedicate energy to weed out the good stuff from the stacks of books coming from small presses or via POD. But the best rebuke to that failing isn't to sit and wait for those places to come around to your way of thinking. You have to make the noise yourself.

Some of that work is already being done---not least by the likes of the Literary Saloon. And if those numbers are right, there's room for plenty more. If there's a market for the books, there is, somewhere, a market for smart reviewers to tell readers about them.