Why some genres suffer more from slashed book pages
A decline in Australian newspapers’ literary pages and an increase in review-sharing between Fairfax’s mastheads the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times have significantly reduced the number and diversity of book reviews in the Australian print media. The impact on new authors, literary fiction and scholarly nonfiction is particularly worrying, report Sybil Nolan and Matthew Ricketson in a recent article in the Sydney Review of Books.
Publishers and literary journalists alike are clear that reviews are more important to some types of books and authors than others. For a new or little-known author, a newspaper review not only introduces them to a potentially large audience but helps create an enduring public profile, since the review becomes part of the digital archive available online. Additionally, published reviews of first-time authors are more likely to be positive, particularly where fiction is concerned. Literary editors are interested in unearthing new talent for their readership: there is little point dedicating newspaper space to negative reviews of books by newbie authors no one has heard of.
For trade nonfiction—particularly books about issues of the moment or by or about celebrities—radio and television publicity is often more crucial than reviews in achieving sales momentum. But fiction is a different matter, particularly literary fiction, which depends on the oxygen of the books pages more than any other form except poetry. While publishers increasingly use Twitter and other social media to build strong communities of readers interested in more literary forms, they acknowledge how important the books pages are to their endeavours.
Take Sleepers Publishing, a Melbourne imprint run by Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner. Sleepers exemplifies the Melbourne model of tiny independents publishing literary fiction to dedicated audiences who are comfortable with discovering new books via salons and social media. There is even a Sleepers short-story app for the iPhone. Yet traditional forms of literary validation remain important. One of the biggest things to happen to Sleepers was its author Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming winning the Age Book of the Year Award in 2009. Swinn acknowledges the authority of newspaper reviews. ‘Broadsheet reviews for us are the most important,’ she said, pointing out that review lines from papers such as the Age, the Canberra Times and the Guardian feature prominently in the publicity on the Sleepers website.
Traditional newspapers’ combination of credibility and reach still matters, despite the growing number of dedicated literary bloggers and tweeters, and sites like Goodreads. As [director of nonfiction publishing at Pan Macmillan] Tom Gilliatt said: ‘It doesn’t tend to be literary fiction that goes viral on social media. Quiet domestic drama is not going to create the viral impetus in the way a work of zombie erotica will. But generally speaking, when a literary title like Anna Funder’s All That I Am has already reached a critical mass of readers, it’s then that social media can help sell more copies of it.’
It is not only literary fiction by new authors that has much to lose when books pages are reduced and fewer reviews are published. Specialist and scholarly nonfiction are also affected. The Canberra Times, with its resident audience of policymakers, academics and technicians, has made such titles a mainstay of its literary pages. Its traditional concern with national policy reached into corners of Australian life and public administration often ignored by the Sydney and Melbourne press. The Canberra Times has long been a go-to paper for publishers struggling to achieve coverage of titles about serious issues or lesser-known but still significant lives. For readers with old-fashioned newspaper habits, its books pages have been all the more memorable for the joy of the unexpected find. But the changes at Fairfax mean that the Canberra Times’ future place in Australian letters is no longer clear.
Copy sharing works out just fine for book publishers when positive coverage is replicated across papers, but it is an all-or-nothing scenario. And its impacts extend well beyond the literary pages, according to [Hardie Grant Books marketing director Roxy] Ryan, who noted that standardisation of the food and lifestyle sections by both News Ltd and Fairfax had had implications for Hardie Grant’s extensive food and wine list, particularly at a time when food magazines were also falling over. (Recent casualties included Australian Good Food, which closed, and Masterchef Magazine, now published occasionally.) While online and social media had proved ‘a bit of a saviour’, influential websites that could make or break a book were ‘few and far between’ (Mamamia is one such). To Ryan, newspapers are still an important part of Hardie Grant’s marketing model, one that she is not prepared to give up on, particularly in the current difficult climate.
This is an edited extract from Sybil Nolan and Matthew Ricketson’s article ‘Parallel Fates: Structural Challenges in Newspaper Publishing and their Consequences for the Book Industry’, published by the Sydney Review of Books on 22 February 2013. See the full article online here.
Category: Features
