Maybe you were by a pool this summer, or on a beach, or on a train headed to either of the above. As though in a particularly on-the-nose Black Mirror episode, you looked left, looked right, and there were the season’s ubiquitous books: Strangers, Famesick, or Yesteryear. The hardcovers multiplied, like Tribbles, across your timeline. Your book club was reading them, and your friend’s book club was too. The library hold list was longer than the waitlist for a kidney transplant.
It’s become a truism that we no longer live in a monoculture. Save for events like the Super Bowl and the VMAs, there are few cultural events that unite us anymore. The kinds of movies that once seemed predestined to be blockbusters fail to attract an audience. “Must-see TV” seems as conceptually distant as cave painting. Lots of people have apparently never heard the No. 1 song in the country (Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas”) and the ones who have probably aren’t listening to Music, Fashion, Film. But the literary landscape, at least lately, feels like a throwback to a time when consensus coalesced around just a few cultural products.
I enjoyed all of the aforementioned titles (I even interviewed debut novelist Caro Claire Burke about Yesteryear), so this isn’t to say that any of the above are undeserving of their massive success. But as the take machine ground all three titles into its jaws, I found myself thinking: Where were the weird, fringe authors, the obscure titles BookTok and Bookstagram and book Substack (BookStack?) were supposed to introduce us to?
The internet promised us endless variety, but precious few titles seem to penetrate the collective consciousness these days. According to Publishers Weekly, over 600,000 books were released by traditional publishers last year, to say nothing of the countless small-press and independent publishers. Why did fewer and fewer feel anointed?
“I don’t know how a book becomes The Book, but I do know that when it does, everybody’s ready to get on the train.”
To find out, I consulted a self-convened panel of writers and readers. First, I turned to Maris Kreizman, the essayist, critic, and author of I Want to Burn This Place Down. We found ourselves commiserating over the fact that book coverage is not what it used to be. Every time I find a great used book, I told her, it’s a gut punch to open to the first few pages and see the reviews from publications that either no longer exist or no longer publish a book review supplement. That has a trickle-down effect, Kreizman says. “With book criticism completely falling apart, there are fewer ways, even for TikTokers, to find out about new books.”
Book review sections also used to provide a sense of curation. “I don’t know how a book becomes The Book, but I do know that when it does, everybody’s ready to talk about it. Everybody’s ready to get on the train,” Kreizman says. “So it’s really not about discovery anymore. It’s about, ‘What’s the book that people are talking about and should we then cover it?’”
“You could be published by the Big Five and still be a total underdog.”
Lincoln Michel, who is the author of titles including Metallic Realms and a book critic himself, notes that “it’s easier to get clicks online for an article that is about a topic related to a book, something like tradwives or affairs, than for a traditional review.”
Kreizman also points to the fact that the book publishing industry, like so many others, has been squeezed by corporate consolidation. As a result, “You have the same sales teams trying to sell these huge lists of books from across the company and they need help prioritizing,” she says. “It’s now a time when you could be published by the Big Five and still be a total underdog. It doesn’t get you anything anymore, really.”
