Lost in the Noise

Posted 20 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing, Publishing |

Daniel Green provides a fairly accurate, if somewhat cynical, assessment of book reviews in today’s media-saturated society, viz.:

The process of book publishing and book reviewing has become indistinguishable from that which rules the release and reviews of movies: build up interest over that opening weekend, whose box office receipts tell us what we need to know about the quality of the “product” in question.

This has been the norm in Hollywood for some time: movies aren’t judged by their staying power, but by how well they “open” — that is, how well they do in the first three days of their release. Very few films that open at number one on a given weekend stay there for long; they are quickly displaced by the following weekend’s big release. Last week’s box office champ, the Jodie Foster revenge film The Brave One, which displaced the previous week’s champ, 3:10 to Yuma, is likely to be bumped this week by tomorrow’s release of the Brad Pitt western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. In today’s Hollywood, no one stays on top for long, and most films are quickly forgotten once the opening weekend push dies down.

Sadly, there are signs that the same phenomenon is occurring in the realm of books, where publishers target reviews in major publications on the weekend of a given book’s release, then largely forget about those titles and move on to the next “big” thing. This results in even the heaviest of hitters getting only a very short kick at the can to make an impression on readers.

This is not true one hundred percent of the time, of course. Although Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows experienced a serious drop-off in the attention paid to it in the media after its July 21st release, I still see people reading or carting around hardback copies of the book practically daily in my travels. This is anecdotal, naturally, and there’s nothing to say that these people didn’t purchase the book in July and are only now getting around to reading it, but it still appears to have legs over a longer term than just a few weeks in the summer.

Likewise, Alan Wiseman’s speculative non-fiction book, The World Without Us, continues to chug along apace, selling steadily two months after its initial release.

However, with book reviews in major media outlets hemorrhaging pages and publishers clamouring for coverage of their biggest stars, it’s little wonder that most titles flash and burn instantly.

There are dangers inherent in this approach to promoting books. With publishers fighting to have their books reviewed on publication, and with newspapers and magazines competing for readership, everyone wants to be first out of the gate, which often results in reviews being written too quickly, with not enough time for thoughtful consideration on the part of the reviewer. Reviews in every major publication frequently fall over themselves to declare a major new work “significant” or “an important addition to our literature,” without being in a position to know whether these statements are true or not. The only real indicator of significance is time, which is the one thing that is being routinely taken out of the equation when it comes to book reviewing.

Too often what gets lost in the shuffle are those books that need time to build an audience; books that require word-of-mouth promotion or hand-selling on the part of booksellers. If a book like Matthew Firth’s spectacular 2006 collection Suburban Pornography garners the few reviews that it can expect to receive in the first couple of weeks of its release — when the reviews are likely to be lost in the noise of other, higher-profile new releases — and is then summarily ignored, it is never going to sell up to its potential.

It’s important for readers, reviewers, and publishers alike not to get suckered in to the attention-deficit approach to marketing books that focuses on large early returns to the exclusion of all else. There are some titles that need care and nurturing over the long term if they are to flourish. It would be a shame to sacrifice these on the altar of Hollywood-style front-end promotion.

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