Hello book lovers, book critics, and book writers!
This week’s guest is John McMurtrie, the esteemed former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review section. Join us as we explore the transition of book reviews from traditional media like TV and radio to online outlets like Amazon and Goodreads. His is an interesting take about how things were and how things are, along with insight about what a book reviewer is looking for when considering what books to review. Join us as John shares valuable insights on breaking into book reviewing and what he considers to be the key elements of a great book.
John Updike’s rules for reviewing:
Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame them for not achieving what they did not attempt.
Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.…
If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s theirs and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser:
Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Review the book, not the reputation.
Partial transcript from the show
Grant: Hello book lovers, book critics, and book writers, I’m Grant Faulkner, and I’m here with my book-loving co-host, Brooke Warner. Hey, Brooke.
Brooke: Hey, Grant. I’m excited about today’s topic!
Grant: Me, too, and about today’s guest, John McMurtrie, the esteemed former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review section, which I read for many, many years while John was at the helm, and it was my main source for news on new books, especially books from the Bay Area or California, in addition to the New York Times Sunday book review. John’s going to tell some tales from his years of reviewing and tell us just how books are chosen to be reviewed, but he’s also got some unfortunate tales about the cuts book coverage has faced at nearly every newspaper and periodical in the country. For now, though, I want to go back to the halcyon days of book reviews, when I’d open the Sunday Times each week, and the books that were reviewed felt like they were changing the world. They were all momentous to me in stature, and I studied the Times and the Chronicle’s coverage, and other than wandering in bookstores and discovering books, the book reviews I read were my main way to discover books. I still read the Sunday Times book review, but the Chronicle no longer has a book review editor, so its book coverage is somewhat skimpy, and if truth be told, I discover book in random ways on the internet now more than through any reviews in publications. I was thinking that we both have an interesting generational lens on book reviews because a good portion of our lives were lived pre-internet, so we’ve experienced both the before and the after, the traditional review and the crowd-sourced review, so I’m curious what role book reviews have played in your life, as reader, editor, and publisher.
Brooke: A huge role, and my heart fluttered a bit when you said the halcyon days, because the book review section was such a big part of my life at Seal Press. I started there in 2004, so it was post-internet, but it was pre-social media. Just. Or coincident with… because Facebook started in 2004, too. I was working at Seal when Twitter launched, and so it took some time before social media became so important to publishing. That means that I got to come of age in publishing during this time when reviews were king, when we were gunning for traditional media, like TV and radio. The San Francisco Chronicle’s book review section was the end all, be all for us, and when a Seal book was reviewed there it felt like the equivalent to Good Morning America. It was a huge deal.
Grant: It’s interesting because we’re now living in a world where TikTok or BookTube reviews are the main ways for many people to discover books, and then there are Goodreads and Amazon reviews, and even though I don’t know any of the reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon, it’s amazing what a predominance of 5-star reviews will do for a book’s clout if I don’t know much about it. That said, I think a big part of me is influenced by the status a book gets when it’s noted by a prestigious publication like the Times. I recently read a piece by the British sociologist John Thompson, who studies the influence of the media on society, and Thompson identifies five resources or capital that are essential for publishing success in his book titled Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. He writes that besides cash, the most important resource is what he calls symbolic capital, which he defines as “the accumulated prestige and status associated with the publishing house.” So, to deconstruct this a bit, new authors, and perhaps especially self-published authors, start with little to no symbolic capital, because they simply aren’t known, so they have to work to create that capital. One key way to do so is through book reviews, which are important even for books with the capital from the esteemed publishing houses that publish them. Book reviews are important for social proof as well as getting marketing opportunities like BookBub placement or mining quotes for ad copy. So this is a big question for a new author, an indie author, and many other authors, actually, is how do you go about building up symbolic capital, especially through reviews. What do you advise writers to do, Brooke? Hire a publicist? Pay Kirkus for a review? Work hard on book bloggers? All of the above?
Brooke: Yes to all of the above. For us, reviews continue to be very important to the campaign of a given book. But we encourage authors now to focus on what we call the Big five trade reviews, which are Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, and Foreword. There are other outlets, too, of course—Shelf Awareness, Midwest Book Review, Lamda, BlueInk to name a few where our authors get reviewed. These kinds of traditional review outlets still do hold a lot more clout than a blog site might, just because they’re specifically for reviews, and where and why that matters most is for the library market. Now of course if you’re self-published then the library market is super hard to penetrate. But for us it’s a big deal and part of the reason we care about reviews so much is for the penetration into markets that have nothing to with Amazon or Barnes & Noble or indie bookstores.
Grant: I think symbolic capital can be created in ways other than traditional book reviews. One way to plant the initial seeds of symbolic capital is to recruit readers who essentially become your advance reader team. These are people who you can send your new books to before launch and ask them to review on publication. To recruit these readers you can send out an email to friends and family to see if they’ll be on your review team, or, if you have a larger list, ask for book review volunteers via your newsletter or social media. Also, these days it’s not all about getting your book reviewed in a newspaper because there are so many book blogs. So it’s worth researching who are the main bloggers covering your genre and building a relationship with them. It should be noted, though, that it’s good to reach out 4-6 months before your book comes out to get the reviews in place. The symbolic capital might not be as great via a book blog, but it’s still capital, capital you can spend and invest and build it into something bigger. But we’re talking about this from the book sales angle, Brooke. The book review section of a newspaper has the purpose of being a cultural arbiter, of covering ideas and tastes and news-breaking books, so the task of a book editor and their team is to essentially curate our reading buffet. Are we losing something by losing these traditional places of tastemaking and idea spreading? Do our new, more democratic ways of reading about books lead us to better places on a general culture level?
Brooke: The jury is still out on this for me. I just don’t know yet. On the one hand I feel a lot of sadness and nostalgia around newspaper reviews and how many of them are gone or just slashed way back. I do still read the books section of the New York Times. And other traditional media sites review books, like The Guardian and NPR, places like that. I think what’s happened and is happening is that people don’t trust their news sources as much as they used to, so in a lot of ways it’s the loss of clout in addition to the splintering of media that has caused this major shift. People trust individual voices, people they trust. I think this is why Substack is taking off in the way it is—because Twitter self-combusted and all these people decided to take their offerings to a platform that is very un-Twitter like with its expectation of article-writing. I’m reading so many people on Substack now, much more so than I’m reading other magazines I subscribe to, like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Cultural arbiters have historically had to be given a platform, and now they don’t. They can create their own platform. So there’s something very democratic about that, that I like. Take me, for instance, the reason I finally started my Substack was because I had an article I wrote about KKR’s purchase of Simon & Schuster. I tried to get it placed and I couldn’t, so I published it myself. Of course that appeals to me because I’m a green-lighter, Grant. It’s kind of my thing to encourage people not to wait for the powers that be to tell them that their stuff is good enough. So as much as I feel the loss of these outlets, I also feel that they’re not democratic. What gets chosen is highly subjective. Many voices get left out, especially historically, based on lots of problematic “-isms.” And I think with the splintering of media maybe we’re better at curating our tastes because there’s more offerings . . . Like I said, though, jury still out because I’m still wrangling with all this in my head.
Grant: In some ways, as I’m listening to you talk, we’re kind of living in this interesting Golden Age where we get both. The Atlantic put out this big list of 136 “Great American Novels.” It’s not like it used to be to make a list; they didn’t make it to be a cannon, they made it to be a thought provoking list, a list to argue with, and have a conversation with. In some ways I think that’s the role that publications play: planting the seeds of conversations. On the other hand, we have all these great tools and, like you, I’ve had things that I couldn’t publish traditionally so that’s where Substack becomes very handy because I can write it and publish it right away and have a conversation with readers. Really interesting times we’re in and John has some great perspectives so looking forward to talking with him.
National newspapers that still have book review sections:
To discover 30+ regional papers that are also holding the line, visit BookTalk.org!
This Week’s Book Trend:
The House passed a bill recently that would force TikTok’s Chinese owner, Bytedance, to sell the platform or be banned in the US. This is an important development for the book world because of the immense influence of #BookTalk. I agree with Kathleen Schmidt's stance on the issue as a whole. She says,“The truth is that no one knows when a social media platform will be sold (look what happened to Twitter) or shut down. Does book publishing have a plan B? I doubt it, and that’s a problem.” A lot of people obviously have a lot of strong feelings about TikTok. What's your take?
ABOUT JOHN MCMURTRIE
John McMurtrie has worked as an editor and writer for more than three decades, and from 2008 to 2019 was the books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. He is now an independent book editor and a senior editor at the San Francisco-based literary journal Zyzzyva. John also edits for McSweeney’s Publishing and the literary travel magazine Stranger’s Guide. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Literary Hub.