The state of book publicity now

My Q&A with Carrie Olivia Adams

Last fall Carrie Olivia Adams sketched an overview of the current state of book publicity to share with colleagues at the University of Chicago Press and, a little later, members of the wider university-press community. I’ve thought about her document a lot since reading it a few months ago, and not just when there’s been splashy news like the closing of the books section at The Washington Post. Many authors and readers came along in an era when conventional reviews structured the world of books—but reviews don’t really play that role anymore, they haven’t for a while, and the newer ways that people learn and talk about books create some real opportunities. I think Carrie manages to distill all that in a way that’s useful for lots of people to hear.

I’m grateful to Carrie, who works as promotions and marketing communications director at Chicago, for answering my questions about the changing nature of book publicity. (For additional perspective on overlapping topics, have a look at my conversation with author Neema Avashia from 2024.)

In your overview of the state of book publicity from last fall, you noted that there are only nine or ten daily newspapers with dedicated book review coverage. What are (or were) they?

While we all know that newspapers more generally have been closing, shrinking, or consolidating, the reality for book review sections is even starker. It’s no longer just the smaller market papers that have given up covering books, but now even the largest dailies have ceased or cut back. When I put together the list back in September, the Associated Press had just announced that they were no longer publishing reviews. And we were dealt another big blow a few weeks ago with the shuttering of The Washington Post’s “Book World.” This brings the current list to just the following:

• The New York Times Book Review (and its daily review)

• The Boston Globe

• The Minneapolis Star Tribune

• USA Today

• The Wall Street Journal

• Financial Times

• The Guardian

• The Chicago Tribune

• With occasional coverage still to be found in the LA Times & NY Post

What about magazines?

Magazines have been facing similar pressures to newspapers, with print circulation dropping dramatically. And online, in the world ruled by click-rate analytics, book review coverage has never drawn impressive numbers. Thankfully, despite all this, there are still mainstream glossy magazines that are covering books and see it as part of their identity as a publication and something their readers expect. Outlets such as the New Yorker, New Republic, Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Nation are still giving much-needed space to reviews, particularly of nonfiction, and, of course, the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books remain dedicated to their book-focused missions. Nevertheless, you can see that everyone is struggling to earn the ad revenue that justifies the space, and in some cases, the overall space of the publication is still shrinking.

Is the nature of what these outlets choose to review changing?

It very much depends upon the outlet. Unfortunately, if you survey the pages of the New York Times Book Review, you’ll see very few serious nonfiction books reviewed anymore—and even fewer from university presses. It can feel very challenging to break through at the NYTBR with a book that isn’t a political or celebrity memoir. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal’s book review section has become an oasis for the kind of smart, general interest nonfiction that is the bread and butter of what we at university presses are publishing. Thoughtful history and biographies always have a home there, and I feel like the diversity of their interests has only been growing.

But a handful of outlets can only do so much. It’s important to keep in mind that while book review coverage has shrunk, publishers have continued to increase their output of books each year. By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is that there is intense competition for the small slice of the review landscape that remains.

So much depends on how the publication views their mission to their readers. There is a bit of a chicken and egg scenario behind all of this. You could say that nonfiction book sales in general have dropped over the last several years, in favor of romance, genre fiction, and manga (as any trip to a bookstore these days will attest), and that book review editors are catering to what book buyers are seeking out. But I’ve also heard from so many people, even within the book world, who say that they no longer have good, reliable sources for finding new books to read. We’re losing the role of the critic to drive people to the diversity of good, new books. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years, and my job has never been harder.

Tell me a little about the situation for book reviewers themselves. How does the Chicago Sun-Times kerfuffle from last year (which you call “the Summer Reading AI debacle”) fit in?

We’re losing the role of the critic because sadly, not only have book reviews lost their value, but so has the art of reviewing books. Depending on who you ask, there are fewer than ten full-time book review critics working today. Rates for book reviews for established trade media outlets have stayed the same or declined in the last 15+ years (in many cases the rates for freelance critics are less than minimum wage). Book reviewing can be labor intensive (reminder to authors that the length of a book really does matter to the media), and it takes a very special, refined skill and one that gets better with wider reading. It’s not something that can be done well on cheap labor, and along the line, the pipeline for training reviewers has diminished. Many book critics got their start writing for smaller digital magazines before working their way up to high-profile outlets, but many of those mid-tier outlets disappeared with the collapse of digital magazines a decade ago.

This is not unique to book reviewing or criticism more broadly, it’s true about journalism in general. We stopped valuing journalism and journalists, and due to the dismantling of newsrooms around the country, the journalists that remain are making do with fewer resources to meet the demands of content creation. And that leads to a situation like what happened this past summer, when a syndicated summer reading list was published in the Chicago Sun-Times among other outlets. A summer reading list is a welcome idea until it’s discovered that many of the books on the list weren’t actual books, but hallucinations from whatever AI program was used to produce the list. This was sad on so many levels.

You also note, in a twist that may surprise readers, that while traditional publicity still has value, it’s not what usually moves the needle on book sales. What do you mean by that?

Authors want to see their books reviewed, understandably. They’ve worked hard and want to see engagement with their work and want that level of recognition and feedback. But, I also want authors to know that a book can still succeed in the absence of traditional reviews, and while the acknowledgment that comes with a review is fantastic, its impact is not certain. One reason book review sections have diminished and book reviewers are not being fairly compensated is that reviews are historically among the least read sections of a publication; add to this that the atomization of media into niche outlets has meant that the reach for any one media hit has decreased. We are not all reading and relying on the same sources of information as a critical mass. Online discoverability—keywords and search—influences awareness and purchasing decisions as much as, if not more than, media coverage in today’s algorithmic world.

What strikes you as working nowadays, in the absence of traditional review attention?

In the absence of traditional book reviews, each publicity campaign has become increasingly bespoke and more catered to disciplinary or subject-area niches. We are heavily reliant on topic-specific media, including columnists, newsletters, podcasts, and influencers. The author’s network and profile are more important than ever, as is the author’s willingness to self-promote and be a close collaborator in the process. It’s impossible to overstate it: authors must be willing to work in partnership with their publicists.

This means that authors should be providing publicists with early and ongoing input about the contacts and media that are most relevant to the book, its argument, and the author’s profile. This means thinking specifically and creatively about relevant newsletters, podcasts, and commentators on every scale. It also means being comfortable as an author working one’s network—and recognizing that it will be work alongside your publicist’s work, and it is an essential part of a book’s success today. The more collaborative a spirit that authors can offer, the more opportunities that can be uncovered to bring attention to a book.

Any successes from your own work with Chicago that you’d be comfortable sharing?

I don’t think we’re unique in that we are increasingly reliant on books having a timely or topical news hook. Much of the media that surrounds us is noise. And we can either publish something as a diversion or an escape from that noise, or we can publish directly into that noise and try to speak to it. The latter can be very challenging and competitive, but when it works, it really works. Jens Ludwig’s Unforgiving Places had both a local and a national gun violence hook but was not being explicitly partisan, which allowed it to carve out a unique space in the conversation around those issues. And authors like Daryl Fairweather (Hate the Game) and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela (Fit Nation) are great examples of writers with terrific networks and profiles who brought a collaborative sensibility to publicity planning that paid off.

---

Carrie Olivia Adams lives in Chicago, where she is the promotions and marketing communications director for the University of Chicago Press and the executive editor for the nonprofit press Black Ocean. She is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, The Book of Marys and Glaciers. She writes the “Poetry & Biscuits” newsletter on Substack.