The Inner Workings of The New York Times Book Review Section
with Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Book Review Editor
Sam Tanenhaus was named editor of the New York Times book review section in March 2004. Previously he was the assistant editor for the New York Times Op-Ed pages, and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. Throughout his illustrious career he has written for nearly every publication we know. He’s the author of the 1997 Los Angeles Times Book Award winner and a 1998 Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography.
Sam Tanenhaus Opening Remarks:
Thanks to everyone for coming out tonight; it’s my pleasure to be here. I will talk briefly about my journey to the Times book review section and then take questions for the bulk of our time together. The Q&A format is the best way to get into what we do, and please know that there is no question you can’t ask.
I started in April, 2004 as the editor of the book review section. When I came in, a redesign of the section had already been in the works under my predecessor, Chip McGrath. It was introduced in October, 2004. But the redesign doesn’t change the inner workings of the review process. The book review staff is in place; they do all the work and they are really good at it. All of our systems are in place for how books are previewed and reviewed, and for getting in copy in time, etc. My job is simply to decide what editorial direction the section should take.
Here are basic premises we operate under: The book review section has been part of the Times since 1896. Historically it has, like the rest of Times, tried to offer a balanced view of its subject, which is books and authors. When I came aboard in the spring of 2004, I thought we could retain that principle but use a slightly different model than was used previously. That is, rather than having the most carefully measured tone in each distinct review, and not letting the reviewer betray his or her own beliefs and prejudices, instead we could achieve a similar result if we let the whole spectrum of opinions into the section. This was the first of two major changes in editorial direction that we implemented. This new approach would have someone from the political left review one week and then have someone from the political right review the following week, and the result would be to give the reader the same thing: a 360 degree view of the culture, and week by week readers would, in the aggregate, have a more accurate view of the culture
Let me give an example. The first big review utilizing this new model was Michael Kinsley’s review of Richard Brookhiser, followed by Brookhiser’s take on Kinsley. If you put all that together, you get a balanced, 50-50 view, and each time a review comes out, readers see more of a debate than the argument that would have happened before my tenure.
The second big-picture editorial change we made was to go “higher and lower” in magazine terms. I was at Vanity Fair for a few years, and I learned that the most effective way to tell a story is to mix the high with low, the serious with the comical. All the best prose is narrative, whether it’s criticism or biography, and the best stories have this mix. We’ve tried to do this at the Times. In our section you’ll see reviews of books on rock and roll music, advice books, and sex books—not because we are dummying down, but because we want to provide a better mirror of what is in the culture. We are reflecting one of the major cultural shifts of past 20 years, which is that barriers between low and high culture are dissolving.
A great example of this was illustrated by the recent obituaries of Susan Sontag, which praised her abilities to travel from the Olympus of high culture to the dangers of low cultures. And yet she was the last of the old-style intellectuals because she still made those distinctions. To the McSweeney’s generation—that new generation of writers associated with Dave Eggers—these differences are false and meaningless.
What this means for the Times is that some of the reviews read differently than they would have before, and the types of books we used to cover diligently might not be covered any longer. This should be good news for your publishing houses, and so I trust that you will leave tonight and report to the publishers that you have to advertise, because then we’ll have more pages to review your books. [Chuckles from the audience.]
But seriously, let me say a few words about the importance of advertising before I take questions. John Leonard, the former editor of the Times book review section from 1971-1975, is one of my models. He’s now visible as a critic, and he writes for New York Times and elsewhere. When he was the section editor, his weekly issues had twice as many pages as we have now. We get 32 pages now, whereas he had 56. In fact, he is the editor who introduced the “second front page” – he had so many pages that halfway through the section it started all over again with a new front page!
But is it true that he had all those pages because he had more advertising? No! Back then, the Times itself didn’t adhere so much to a business model, so he got that number of pages each week, and he always got them, no matter how much advertising the section had booked. It doesn’t work that way any more. As a section we have to pay our way now. But I must add that that Times, when compared to other book reviews like Steve Wasserman’s at the Los Angeles Times, does it pretty well. Wasserman has almost no ads, but we do. So we are able to do as much as we can though it’s not as much as we’d like to do.
I’ll take questions now. This is the era of glasnost so I can tell you how it really works. [Laughter from the audience]
Question & Answer Period:
Q: I’m from Berrett-Koehler Publishers, and we have a Times bestseller right now, #9 on the nonfiction list, titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Unfortunately it has not yet been reviewed by the Times. How long after publication date would you consider a book too old for the Sunday review?
A: New York publishers complain when we review two or three months after publication. They say it doesn’t help sell the book. I agree, except in one case—when the book is written by a new author. Having been a first-time author myself, that particular author who is building a career will always profit from a New York Times review, no matter how late the review. We will keep the window open if it’s a new author. Recall from my introductory remarks that we are trying to be more journalistic; it follows, therefore, that we should not be late. In theory, we will run a late review if makes sense. But we do try to be timely. It’s always better late than no review, but late makes it harder for a review to get in.
Let me explain our behind-the-scenes process for assigning books for review, and this is something that many New York publishers don’t know. We send a book out for review only when we think it is good. However, if the review comes in and it isn’t well written, then we won’t run it; unfortunately, the book pays the price. It’s unfair to publishers and authors, but here’s why we do it. One of most difficult things to do is to kill a book review and then reassign it to another reviewer. Why? Because journalists and reviewers are egotistical maniacs. [Laughter from audience.] If we don’t run their review, they assume that we don’t agree with the conclusion in their review. But that’s not the case. The only time we wouldn’t run a review is because we think it’s poorly written.
It’s important to understand that strongly negative and strongly positive reviews help a book; it’s the bland, poorly written review that hurts a book. If it’s not a salvageable piece of writing, then it won’t get into our paper. We are looking for better pieces of writing, and because we work on a weekly schedule there’s not time to rewrite or reassign—because then it would be at least eight weeks later. So the unfortunate truth is that if a book is assigned for review and the review comes back as a poorly written piece, then your book won’t be reviewed. You’ve probably had this experience: you send your book in for review, you’re told it’s been assigned for review, but then you don’t see the review. In most cases it would not run simply because the review was too poorly written, and not because your book wasn’t worthy of a review.
Q: As a publisher, what are the chances that I could see a review that doesn’t run because it’s poorly written?
A: No chance. Zero. Because that decision is an in-house matter at the Times. There was talk at one time of taking the reviews that don’t make it in print and instead posting them online. But that complicates things for Times because their posting system can’t archive pieces without them being printed first.
This problem you are raising increases pressure on the “previewers” to get higher quality reviewers. So let me say a few words about our previewers. We are the only book review section in America that pays people to read the galleys you send us, and these people are called previewers. We have six previewers at the Times. These are editors—amazingly, scarily well-read editors—to whom the two other managers and I present a stack of galleys each week. They have a week to read through the galleys to decide whether or not the book should be reviewed, and how long the review should be, and who the reviewer should be.
The galleys that get past our initial stage must come from established publishers; we do not consider self-published books any more. If the book won’t be available in the bookstore around the corner when the review comes out, then we don’t want to review it. This policy also adds a category of exclusion that makes it easier for us to run our business. Over 150,000 books are published each year, and that number keeps climbing, which means we have to find ways to exclude most of them. Those galleys that migrate to my office are distributed to the previewers.
Our previewers have an average term of service of 10-15 years. They read on average 10-20 galleys per week, 50 weeks per year. Imagine how well they know the books that are published in America! I trust their judgment completely. There are certain books of interest to me that I set aside for myself to review, as do the two other managers, but basically it’s the previewers who are specialists, and who are going through everything. I suppose some might characterize them as crazy, knowledgeable eccentrics; the point is that these are people who thoroughly know their stuff. The classics previewers know Greek and Latin. The fiction previewers have read everything in the field of literature, including Latin American fiction, European fiction, and all minor and major writers.
Sometimes the previewers will say, “We want to try out a cool young novelist to write a review”—but then sometimes the cool young writer doesn’t know how to write a review. So then we can’t use the review because it’s not a publishable review. They fall into the category of most book readers who are naïve and sophisticated at same time. Typical readers can’t tell you why The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is a great novel, but they know they love it. It’s the same principle with journalism: a bad piece of writing is a bad piece of writing. I can’t publish bad writing. This means the previewers are under pressure to deliver better reviewers. And I must say that they are succeeding. Our previewers are the most amazing, savvy intellectuals one could hope to meet.
Let me provide an example of how top-notch review writing benefits your book. Jonathan Franzen’s review of Alice Munro put her book on the bestseller list instantaneously. That is the power of a great writer writing a book review. The problem is that there are not a lot of Jonathan Franzens—or Alice Munros, for that matter—out there.
What do we do with books we kind of like, and reviews we kind of like, but that aren’t great? Our challenge is to work with them and try to make them great. We don’t always succeed. Every week I have to put together a readable, serviceable, grab-the-reader section, and so sometimes reviews are cut from the section at the last minute.
Q: I wrote science fiction novel, and I self-published it as a print on demand book. I had no agent or publisher. For reviews, I went to the Midwest Book Review, but I knew better than to go the New York Times. Can you recommend good reviewers who will consider a self-published author?
A: That’s a good question because we don’t review books published as print on demand. I don’t know, actually; I wish I had an answer. I suspect that other newspapers follow the same rules we do. I’ll be honest; as I said before, it’s the convenience of exclusion. It makes it easier for us because we receive so many galleys, thousands more than we can review—and by the way, I’m not saying this with pride. What I do suggest is for you to contact our children’s book editor, Eden Lipson, who knows everything about the publishing world. She may be able to help you with some suggestions. Her email is: lipson@nytimes.com.
Q: I’m Bridget Kinsella from Publishers Weekly. This isn’t a question, but I will add to your comments that the Times isn’t the only review mechanism operating under these constraints. Publishers Weekly suffers the same problem. We also exclude print on demand not because we don’t think you are good but because we have too many galleys coming in. However, we will consider your print on demand title if you find a different angle, for instance a news story instead of a book review.
A: Thanks for those remarks, and I’ll add to Bridget’s comments that traditional publishers should also keep in mind that a review is not necessarily the best place for you in the Times. Have your authors go for op-ed pieces, or go to the weekend review section. Often it’s better to go to editors in other sections because you reach different readers from book review readers.
Also make sure you go to Scott Veale, who is the first ever daily books editor that the Times has had. He does news stories, and what I call “books and ideas” stories. His email address is: Veale@nytimes.com
Q: I’m from Manic D Press, and because we are distributed by PGW we have excellent reach into the market, even though we are a small, independent press and not part of the big New York corporate publishing scene. Thanks to PGW, if you reviewed a book it would be in the store around the corner as you previously suggested. However, we publish paperback originals. How many paperback original reviews do you run?
A: I don’t know ratios, but we do a lot more trade paper originals now than we used to, especially if it’s fiction or poetry. We know that’s how younger writers get launched these days; it’s becoming rarer and rarer for a first time author to get a hardcover book deal. Remember, too, that we work from bound galleys. In a bound galley, the danger is that a paperback original doesn’t look any different from a galley. Make your bound galleys look different from the finished book.
An underlying question you ask is whether or not big New York publishers are favored by the Times for reviews. I myself used to think that very big publishers are favored over small publishers. I was a Random House author myself, and it seemed that Knopf, Houghton Mifflin, Scribner and the like were graced with all the reviews. So I decided to test this by asking the individual editors who were choosing a galley to review, “Who is the publisher?” And every time I asked this question they did not know; they had to look at spine in order to answer. The truth is, the editors don’t know. They don’t care. The bound galleys all look alike, whether they are from a big or small publisher. The previewers don’t care who the publisher is. But to go back to your direct question, there was a period a long time ago, before Chip McGrath, when trade paper originals weren’t reviewed at all. But now that would be absurd. The Booker Prize is sometimes awarded to paperback originals. Nowadays, poetry is almost always published as paper originals. That is not a reason not to review a book.
Q: I’ve noticed that review writers often get their own books reviewed in the Times. Is this intentional? Please describe the phenomenon of review writers getting their own books reviewed so frequently.
A: That’s a good question. Sometimes it happens, but it’s not usually premeditation. Sometimes it’s just weird coincidence or an unusual, unplanned series of events in the office. Let me give an example. We were excited about the novel Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. But our reviewer, Elissa Schappell, didn’t like it. Elissa is very smart and she writes well, and she writes for us regularly, but because she didn’t like the book Prep we couldn’t do much for it. The book was a victim of circumstance, of a lukewarm review.
But the question is, Is there a quid pro quo? Because after Elissa wrote the review of Prep we did indeed publish a review of Elissa’s novel. Are we building Elissa up first to write for us, and then we review Elissa’s book? We knew she had a novel out, but we hadn’t seen the review of her book. The review essay was very clever. It was Julie Just, the deputy number two at the paper, who said “I’ve been waiting for years to see this essay.” How male writers attract groupies and female writers don’t—that was the topic of the essay. We liked it so we ran it. Not much premeditation, but there was not really an orchestration, or quid pro quo.
Q: I’m Brenda Knight from Conari/Red Wheel/Weiser. I’m curious: at your weekly meeting with the previewers, what is said or done in that meeting that results in a decision not to review a book?
A: That’s a great question because you get at what bothered me about the whole process when I first came to the Times. I was puzzled: why were the editors looking for reasons NOT to write about a book? But that’s how it worked, and I made a change in the process. Now we ask this question: is there a way to write about this book? So for fiction, the question becomes: is there talent here? Is this one we can afford to write about? Any novel that gets written about is competing against a lot of other fiction. We look for an original voice, and all the other features that set one novel apart from the hundreds of other galleys on my desk.
With nonfiction, the problem is that often there are too many books on the same topics. How many books have you seen on the evils of the Bush administration, or on Iraq, or on terrorism? Unless you have a really original work, or something by an author we are obligated to review because of his or her stature in the culture, it won’t get reviewed. Sometimes we can package similar books together in a review. But so many books are published that, as democratic as we are, it becomes a meritocracy. “X” is a book we need to write about, while “Y” is not something we need to cover. And there are other dynamics at play. For instance, every time I give Andrew Sullivan 4,000 words for an essay, then that takes the place of several books that won’t get reviewed. Maybe those books are good enough to be reviewed, but aren’t so obviously spectacular that we just can’t pass them up, in which case it makes more sense from a journalistic point of view to run a Sullivan essay. Let’s face it: like most other things in the world, most books are not THAT GREAT. Most movies aren’t THAT GREAT; and so forth. The less space we have in the section, the higher the bar for individual books.
Q: Are there certain genres you aren’t interest in? For instance, if I have a regional book, should I bother sending it for consideration?
A: Always send us books because the previewers are ingenious at putting them together. There are certain genres we know need improvement; for example, we know that we need to improve our coverage of science fiction. We are working on that. We have not done as much black chick lit, for instance, though we do have a column coming out on that very soon. So we are finding different ways to write on different things. But as a rule, the genre books have a rougher time because if we spend too many words on genre fiction then it means the mainstream literary books will be overlooked, and mainstream literary fiction is what the Times readers are generally interest in.
Q: Do you review books on artists, on photography, and on graphic novels?
A: Yes, in our redesign, we do what Wasserman at the Los Angeles Times does. We take a cover and a caption. We look for strong images. Yes, we do art photography books.
Q: Do art and photography books get sent to someone in particular?
A: No.
Q: You touched on the idea of putting reviews on the internet. How will you leverage blogging and the internet? If there’s no longer a distinction between high and low culture, and if the internet reflects this by bloggers becoming as influential as the traditional press, then how are you looking ahead?
A: You are right; it is very important to look ahead. The Times has not been able to increase their circulation because so many people today look for information online instead of in the newspapers. In particular, people under 30 look online for their news. We have to figure out a way to use the web better. We are doing more. We link to more sites than we used to, and we’ve done a few dialogs with authors online. The first one was with Cornel West and “Skip” (Henry Louis) Gates (Jr.). I know both of these guys, and they went to our web services building to be interviewed on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The studio was filled with video cameras, and our readers could go online and witness the entire conversation online, but on our printed page we could only include 1500 words. We got 50,000 people go to our website to view the full video.
The New York Times is institutionally conservative. Its investment has gone into print, and especially into the national edition that you get out here and elsewhere outside of New York. That’s an unresolved tension. The book review section can’t break out of the corporation itself, and move ahead on our own. We did post online the Abu Ghraib essay by Andrew Sullivan. We thought we should put this online right away because Alberto Gonzales was being considered for Attorney General, and he had written the infamous White House memo approving the use of torture, or rather redefining the previously accepted understanding of torture. The book review is one of only two sections available in the Sunday edition of the Times where long essays run. Andrew’s essay was 4,000 words long. We thought we could deliver a full account of how the country started from Bush’s original statement of unlawful combatants and ended with the use of torture. We put this essay online right away. It’s something we should do more often, even if it undermines our print edition. This is always the tension between online content and print, and there is no good answer. In some ways the online edition appears to be better. We can put reviews of the last twelve books on the web, outstripping the printed edition.
Q: You have some unusual pairing of reviewers and authors, as when Kinky Friedman reviewed Jimmy Buffet’s new book. How do you decide to match a particular reviewer to a particular book?
A: Here’s what we do: we find an interesting match-up. We don’t say to ourselves, “X will like this book so we’ll ask him/her to review it.” Instead we look for an interesting match-up. An example was Elissa Schappell’s review of Curtis Sittenfeld’s book, Prep. In this case, her novel is A Separate Peace crossed with Catcher in the Rye. It’s a very journalistically precise account of what it is like to attend a ritzy East coast boarding school when you come from a different place, the midwest. It’s a fascinating semester by semester account; you can’t put it down. So the previewers and I had this conversation about Elissa; she’s a hip young writer, she has been to private schools, wouldn’t she make a good reviewer. In retrospect, maybe she got it too well. Maybe she saw the literary sources too clearly. She was not as entranced by the otherness of the experience of attending a prep school. That was a case where we went to smart young reviewer who we thought would get it, but the review came back with an unexpected coolness toward the book. And I might add the review was out of step with reviews published elsewhere.
Jimmy Buffett is a fun writer, and that’s how Kinky Friedman wrote about him. We aren’t pretending that he’s a different writer from who he is. So in this case, let’s go to a reviewer who “gets” Jimmy Buffet.
Nonfiction is tougher: do we go to a good journalist, or to the professor expert? Experts can deliver facts very well, but readers aren’t necessarily that interested in the dry, boring facts. Readers want to know whether or not this is a book they want to read. I tend to use journalists and magazine writers rather than the professor experts. Expert writers can’t always keep the prose interesting for our New York Times review readers. We need reviewers who can bring books to life and write about them in a compelling way. So I prefer go to skilled journalists who can learn enough about a topic and then write about it in an entertaining way.
When matching reviewers to books, we like to try out budding young writers who show promise, and when it’s the right kind of assignment we will go to major critics and writers, and give them more space than a standard review. About half the time we begin a review on the cover. It’s become an unspoken competition among big name reviewers, “Will my review be on front page?” That’s good from my point of view, because it pushes my reviewers to write better. We want to be confident in our reviewers, that their review will be interesting in and of itself, beyond the content of the book they are reviewing. It’s true that if there are two or three really strong pieces each week, then we are doing our job.
Q: I work for a fiction publisher. Please talk more about your fiction/nonfiction mix.
A: We hear questions and complaints about this all the time. It’s not true that I’m a frustrated fiction writer. [Audience laughs.] It may be 1 to 3 ratio, or it could be that if we review ten nonfiction books, then we do five fiction. The publishers release more nonfiction than fiction, and so that dictates what we do as well. But let me add that two Sundays from now, on the cover of the February 6 edition, we will have two fiction reviews side by side, which is the first time we’ve done that since I’ve been at the Times. These are two knock-out reviews. If I could put fiction on the cover every week, I would. Fiction is always the most important thing, especially if it is a first-time fiction writer. We try to do fiction as much as we can. But the fact is, there’s less fiction published, and if a novel or short story collection is not good, then I can’t forward the galley to a good reviewer. What we can do is this: if we see a fiction galley that is really good, and I mean REALLY good, we can put all our muscle behind it. Beyond that, there’s not much we can do.
Q: I’m from Regent Press, and I’m publishing an upcoming science fiction book. My question is this: the purpose of art is to transcend politics. Yet your earlier comments indicate you want to introduce the same polarity we see on TV and in the culture between art and politics, high culture and low culture, right and left. And in your book about Whittaker Chambers you talked about the chilling effect that politics had on culture and on the arts. Won’t this have a chilling effect on art, and aren’t you perpetuating the problem by the way you review or don’t review certain types of books? And by the way you say you want to include in your book review the very right-wing voices that wish to stifle dissent and art?
A: I can talk for a long time about Whittaker Chambers. Your question is: did Whittaker Chambers introduce a chilling effect? The brief answer is “yes,’ at least to extent that he was involved with Alger Hiss. But let me talk about the book review, since that’s why we are here tonight. To your first question, the question of the political polarity in our culture: yes, we do have to report on this polarity because that’s what we see in books that are being published. Not to say that there aren’t books that transcend that polarity; we will try to praise them as we can. In my earlier comments I did not mean to say that I will apply a mechanistic political discussion or a political point of view against all the books that come in—by no means. We are not looking to create politics where there are none. Our balanced political coverage is just a reaction to the books coming in, books that have been highly polemical and political, and for good or ill this reflects the current cultural climate. Our review section in turn must reflect this cultural reality. There are certain books that take us beyond these extreme polarities, and it’s our obligation to write about these books as well, and wherever we can.
To illustrate that our review section has not been given over to right vs. left politics: when we cover the short story collection by Alice Munro, and the novel by Marilynne Robinson, then we are saying to our readers that there is more to life than politics. The single longest essay I’ve published is Daniel Mendelsohn’s reappraisal of Truman Capote. In my opinion that essay is the single best and most important essay ever written on Capote, and there’s not any polarity or politics in the essay. It’s about craft and art and literature. For us to be relevant in our review section, we have to keep all those elements in play and in place for readers.
Q: You say that the galleys all look the same, and that the previewers don’t pay attention to publishers when they make their decisions. I’m wondering since we are on the West coast whether it’s more difficult for the previewers to pay attention to what we are doing. Collectively our publishing agenda is very different from New York corporate houses. How do we let the previewers know about us? Catalogs? Visits to your office? What should we do? We hope to give you a sense of West coast publishing, which is much more inventive, original, fresh, and certainly less corporate. You say you are excited about meeting with West coast book publishers, but let’s face it, the New York Times is centered around huge authors published by huge corporate publishers, neither of which are on the West coast. Our authors can’t compete with Jonathan Franzen for your attention because they aren’t that big yet.
A: Send galleys. It’s the best thing you can do. The more creatively you publish, the more responsive we will be. That’s not to say that we won’t make mistakes; we make them all the time. As far as office visits go, I’m very happy to see anyone who is in town. You can send catalogs and galleys directly to the previewers, but they will still come to my desk. Your methods are working, but the results are more a question of space and if a particular book is right. The New York publishers aren’t any happier than you, and in New York we have active hostility because they are after us all the time. We only have 28, 32, or 36 pages, and we try to fit the right books in, the ones that have general interest, and it’s just that most books don’t get covered. A lot of good writers are signed up by bigger houses with more money, and that’s just the way it is, like the sports world where the biggest, best athletes go to the clubs with the most money.
You can email me with information about a book, that’s fine. Come see me in my office, that’s fine. But the decision will be made as we read the galleys and see what works with me.
Q: How do we find out a book is going to be reviewed? I’ve called and bugged people, which I absolutely despise doing. But I can’t seem to find the correct protocol to find out a simple “yes or no,” to find out whether or not it is assigned, and then whether or not it will run. I don’t like to bug you, and I would be so much happier, as I’m sure you and your staff would be, if you could just tell us the protocol that would work.
A: How have you been trying to find out?
Q: When I call Dwight [Garner] he says, “It was assigned; I don’t know if it’s running.”
A: OK, I understand the problem. Dwight doesn’t put the section together, so he wouldn’t necessarily know. You can call me. We close the section on Wednesday, the day of our final proof. That’s our issue that has a cover date of two Sundays hence. There is an eleven day difference between the proof closing and the newsstand publication date. A previewer like Dwight Garner won’t know that there’s a review scheduled until he receives a copy of the proof. Because there can always be changes at the last minute, he doesn’t want to promise it’s running on certain date, and rightly so because he actually doesn’t know. Sometimes we have to pull something because ads are going in, or because there is less space, or any other number of reasons. I don’t have any trouble telling people it’s going to run as long as you understand it might not happen in the end.
Here’s a horrible example of something we had intended to run, but then was pulled at the very last second. There was a new biography of e e cummings that we got months ago. We weren’t doing anything with it. But then we thought this book presented an occasion for Billy Collins to write something interesting for us. He had never written for the review section, so he wrote a review that we liked, and we scheduled it as a featured piece on the cover. The biography was published by a Chicago publishing house, and by coincidence they came in to my office to present their list. I showed them the cover of the review section with their book, and they had never had a Times cover; the publicist was very excited, to say the least. However, the next day the finished copy of the biography came in, and on the front jacket was a blurb from Billy Collins. So I had to kill the review because of that. We couldn’t run it because of ethics. That was a mistake on the part of many people. Normally we make it clear to reviewers that they can’t write elsewhere about an author they are reviewing for us. We don’t like reviewers who have written previously about an author in recent years. That’s tricky in some cases; for instance, most reviewers have written about Joyce Carol Oates because she’s so prolific and she’s been around for so long. But the Billy Collins story is a grisly example of why we withhold the final information about whether or not the review is running. Reviews can be pulled at the very last moment.
Q: If you receive 50,000 galleys per year, realistically how many can you review per year? Have you considered doing more compilation reviews?
A: We publish 20-30 reviews a week, and yes, we do compilation reviews. That’s one way to cover more titles. We’re always looking for ways to give more books more visibility. For instance, when we do these little one-page “chronicles” essays, we have just started putting the books themselves in a shaded box so readers can see them more easily. Publishers tell us that any mention of a book is helpful.
The other outlet to keep in mind is the daily book review. I have no control over what they do. I see the schedule ten days in advance and the daily arts section also sees it. And they also know what we are reviewing. That’s why their daily review comes out before ours. If the daily reviews a book, and it’s not a book I feel absolutely obligated to review, then we might not review it in the Sunday section. Our point of view is that it’s better to avoid overlap. We try to eliminate double reviews in the Sunday section and the daily column. That is good news for publishers and authors, because it means more total books will be reviewed in the Times. Five books per week get reviewed by the daily review column.
Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. I’ve enjoyed it very much and I commend you for asking excellent questions and for publishing important books. In closing, let me provide my contact info. The best way is by phone, through my assistant Nancy Martinez-Ruiz, 212.556.1466, and her email is: martinez@nytimes.com. My email is: tanenhaus@nytimes.com.
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