Is it the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?
danielstone.substack.com
danielstone.substack.com
I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.
Uh, I don't see the difference
I do think something like this is already happening, but along genre lines. Twenty years ago, self-publishing was a last resort option for people who were mostly writing perma-slush. Ten years ago, it was an admissible strategy for certain genres but still considered an undesirable way to go for most authors. Five years ago, it had become a respectable alternative (in part, due to consolidation-induced dysfunction in trade publishing). Now, we're starting to see self-publishing take over literary fiction [1] as well.
This isn't necessary good news--to self-publishing properly is expensive, beyond what most people can afford; and traditional houses are now able to farm out their risk unto authors--so much as it is a mix of good and bad, but the scene is changing and I think the New York literati are already under 20% of peak relevance (midcentury). They confer a bit of prestige, but they don't actually get you read, and they certainly don't get you read deeply, which is what you want if you want your books to still be read 20 years from now.
----
[1] I'll skip over the long, long debate over "What is literary fiction?" That would add 3 kilowords to this post, just to define terms.
I'll bite:
Self-publishing began as an option for publishing books that nobody reads, evolved over time into a viable option for publishing books that some people would read, and finally reached the high status of being an option for publishing books that nobody reads.
There is something to be said for writing a book that people claim to have read, though.
Is this true?
Smith, discussed in the parent, sure, born and lives in London. In general, I have a suspicion this concentration is more true of British authors than American ones, although the most recent one I can think of that came to fame is...
Sally Rooney? Ireland.
Naming a few other famous novelists I've heard of in the last several years, and doing some quick Googling... trying to stick to "literary" ones:
Franzen? Santa Cruz
Knausgård? Sweden + London. Looks like it was only London after he got famous, though.
Ferrante? Heh, well, famously nobody knows for sure, but seems like people believe Italy.
Stephen King? Maine until very recently. Go further into genre content and we get out of the point of the "literature" discussion here, though.
I'm looking at novelists vs columnists both because of the example given of Smith and because novelists are less geographically constrained than someone whose day job is to write for a publication that historically has been based in those cities, to try to avoid "once you're in the club you get the job that makes you move to the city" factors.
See this article for a discussion of the dynamics
https://www.academia.edu/2763450/The_New_Coterie_Writing_Com...
She nicely explains how so many bright, hardworking folks can end up optimizing on goals that made sense to, e.g., a 20 year old college dropout, but that might not produce much social value overall. Considering when she wrote it, the essay is downright prophetic.
The general point about the magazine being a venue for "elitist, East coast, alternative, intellectual, left-winged" [1] authors to write to and about each other is well taken. But I don't think they just got lucky in featuring ZS, I think they make an active effort to get good authors writing on important topics.
In some circumstances, nepotism and meritocracy might be observationally equivalent [2].
[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/
[1] https://twitter.com/30_rock_quotes/status/7699430022?lang=en
[2] I think it was Gary King who said this, on the subject of how top ranked political science departments dominate the job market, but I can't find the exact quote.
In fact, how else are you going to find qualified reviewers but to find people who were reviewed well? Does it make sense to get people whose works are bad to review other people's?
These are completely different matters. Any idiot can have an opinion on just about any non-academic literature. Whether any idiot can be taken seriously is up to debate. Whereas for math papers, there are very few people outside the pool of authors who can understand enough of it to even have an opinion.
If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself.
The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low.
Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire.
Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books.
----
[1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
So I wouldn't be surprised if one found a similar pattern across the entire publishing industry.
0 https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning-wa...
What keeps people from getting blurbs from people with common names that also belong to famous authors--such as Stephen King? I can't imagine it's illegal to get a blurb from Stephen A. King, schoolteacher in Idaho, and use it sans middle initial. So why aren't more people doing it? It may be Saul Goodman-esque, but if blurbs actually drive sales, it makes sense.
And social media will expose this kind of fraud very quickly.
Doesn't matter if it's legal: the Internet then identifies you as the idiot who tried to pass off a schoolteacher in Idaho as the famous Stephen King. That will tank a career.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-24-ca-4461-s...
You really don't want to try this kind of fakery, it could be costly if you have assets to go after.
Just because the scope of the lie is relatively small and unlikely to cause significant damages, doesn't do enough to counter the extreme brazenness and tastelessness of this.
Reader word-of-mouth doesn't really get a voice in the traditional book world, because it's slow, because reading takes time... and it's not publishers who started this fire, but the chain bookstores who abused the consignment model (Great Depression hangover) and invented the 8-week rotation. Publishers actually do care about the future of literature and being decent to the authors they're publishing... but these days if the chain bookstores don't like your numbers, you're dead after two months on the shelf (and will be difficult for publishers to place in the future)... and the economics of the whole system follow from that.
If you're not going to be a lead title--and that depends on who your agent is, not the quality of your book, and your odds of even being read (let alone represented) by that kind of agent are less than 1% no matter how good your book is--then you're going to find traditional publishing experience extremely disappointing. The current system is based on selling huge numbers of copies (or not) in the first couple months, not on producing evergreen titles or building audiences.
That said, reader word-of-mouth does get a voice in the long term, and self-publishing is a better option if you can afford it. (It costs about $20 per kiloword to do it right, though; you have to hire at least one editor, preferably two, as well as a cover designer.) You won't get reviewed by famous people, because you don't benefit from the network of "Do X or the next call is from my boss to your boss" phone calls that run NYC publishing, but you'll have more creative control and probably make more money in the long term.
Oh, if only we knew how to do that!
But the chain bookstores are definitely a big part of the problem whereby publishers are expected to bet big on a few books ("lead titles") and let the others wither. The publishers didn't ask to be in this world.
The point being, becoming a peer of that kind is impossible to do through academia, so some people consider it "clubby". It is, perhaps, that these people have been both commercially successful in their niche and influential that confers that peerhood, not shared social ties (although I'm certain those form too).
If NYBR reviewers mostly review books by other NYBR reviewers, while ignoring the tremendous amount of other quality authors and literature, that is likewise problematic.
Unless one speciously defines the type of book that NYBR would review as its own genre (analogous to a researchers field), shrinking the candidate literature down what NYBR reviews.
The comparison to peer review is perfect, because exactly this happens across many areas of research.
Any area where the pool of potential reviewers is small enough that everyone (sort of) knows everyone else, the process tends to get corrupted by concerns over personal networks, careers, grant funding, etc. etc.
Much as prestigious book review cliques get corrupted by networks, careers, access to publishers, etc. etc.
The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it.
If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing.
It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.
My experience is that there is, generally speaking, a clear qualitative difference between literature and non-literature.
It's an old trope to deny 'fine' arts have merit, but often such denials lack an assertion or evidence - they just deny someone else's. What do you think the state of such things is? All is equal? Everything is subjective? That would be pretty extreme.
The work featured in those publications does indeed showcase the best “NBA players” and is better than quite a lot of other work at large.
But it simply doesn’t aim to speak at all about the “players” of the NFL, NHL, FIFA, Starcraft, etc.
And that’s exactly what the analysis in this article reveals.
Writers in the literary genre critique and share literary works in journals for readers who enjoy that style.
Meanwhile, other journals do exactly the same thing for their own styles-of-focus, and lots of writers and readers stride across all of them.
It's disagreeing with the point.
It's just that the top 1% of literary output is a huge volume of work and most of it is pretty good. The fashion is which of the top books make it in front of you, but you're not seeing the invisible 90% of books that would never get there, or the 9% that need a lot of luck and an editor with a hatchet.
Inside the community of contemporary authors, editors, and MFA programs, there’e no real controversy to the idea that the writing suitable for NYRB, The New Yorker, etc is just a genre with specific, evolving expectations.
There are countless amazing works that those same authors and editors hold in extremely high regard, but that would not suit those publications on account of being too “something else”.
Really, it’s mostly the lay public that still carries a special sense of deference and esteem for this genre, thinking of that work as the inheritor of the Western Canon, itself being something that they were taught to see as the epitome of “Good Writing” rather than “Powerful Examples of a Certain Style”
Many years later I got to see the premiere of Scorsese's documentary with Bob Silvers in attendance and it's a cherished memory.
The length of their reviews & essays isn't common among other, similar lit rags.
Some sites, such as Drive Thru RPG, do not allow you to leave reviews if you are a publisher, presumably to avoid this conflict. Folks can certainly log on with their personal account, but at least it is some level of accountability.
(I was published in and then a reviewer for an academic journal.)
I mean, "this paper does not cite enough of my colleagues" is a common satirical representation of academic journal reviewer feedback.
LARB is much better in my opinion.
But I wonder how many film critics try making short film? With modern digital video and YouTube, it's possible.