Elliott also spends time in the interview complaining about the lack of NY Times Book Review coverage, claiming they only review the big name books with heavy publicity campaigns.

I have never done a study, but how many BIG sellers does the NYTBR really review? I'd guess a pretty low percentage of what they review is sold in high volumes. I don't think getting a review in there does all that much for one in terms of sales -does anybody have any better data than my "I don't think"?

Thanks,

Dan

I sure don't...well, wait, actually, I do, in a strictly conversational sense, from my tenure at Amazon. You get a review in there, and you can expect at least some sort of spike. Of course, I didn't look particularly hard at the fiction sales, since I was handling nonfiction, but the sales on reviewed nonfiction were not insignificant. Though any number of TV shows produced bigger spikes, true. I assume that's as true today as it was back in 1999, and if James Marcus is still reading my web site, maybe he could say something about whether the fiction sold more briskly after NYTBR came out.

If I had to guess, I'd say they probably do a better job of reviewing bestselling nonfiction than bestselling fiction...but I'd also point out that Elliott's not entirely right; consider how much coverage Soft Skull Press has been getting from NYTBR for its novels lately.

Hi,

A friend pointed out your discussion to me so I thought I'd chime in, since I was the one interviewed. First, I agree that it's not absolute. The New York Times has been good about Soft Skull Press and does do a number of smaller books. So what I was saying is not absolute. Also, they reviewed my newest book, so who am I to complain?

But the point I was making was not that they review best sellers or that they have an impact on sales. Rather, that they review books based on the size of the advance the book recieved. So that's slightly different. The number of books reviewed twice, in the Sunday and weekday sections, confirms this. The big book (whether it actually takes off or not) from a large publisher is almost always reviewed twice, while books on the bottom of the list are rarely reviewed at all. MacAdam/Cage has been particularly ignored over the years, though recently that seems to be changing.

I don't really think the NYT affects book sales that much unless they're overwhelmingly positive, but it's incredibly important to the authors for a lot of reasons, not just sales. And though I would tone it down from what I said in my interview I will stand by my original assertion that the NYT could, and has the resources to, do a considerably better job in searching out lesser known books that deserve some attention. In particular second and third books by authors that are almost always better than first books by authors.

Stephen Elliott

"I will stand by my original assertion that the NYT could, and has the resources to, do a considerably better job in searching out lesser known books that deserve some attention."

I wholeheartedly agree with that assertion. One doesn't even need ANY resources besides a little effort to do this much - there are literary blogs such as this one, as well as sites that review and interview authors of much lesser known books, and they're not spending huge amounts of money or man-hours to do so.

MadAdam/Cage is deserving of much more than they receive in terms of review recognition. I recently had the opportunity to review five of their fiction efforts and interview three of the authors, as well as David Pointdexter, the publisher, and the material was excellent and Pointdexter has a great plan for continuing to publish this excellent work.

I missed the aspect you stated regarding how many of those high-publicity books get reviewed twice, both in the NYT Daily, and the NYTBR - seemingly a waste of those resources you speak of.

I'll agree with that assertion as well. Though I think there's some small argument to be made for both reviewing wings to pay attention to a given book; I don't know the numbers, but I'm sure there's a part of the NYTBR readership that doesn't read the daily Times. And in some cases, I think the dual perspectives can be useful to those of us who read both types of review regularly.

But whether it's advance size or some other form of buzz that determines which books get attention from both parties, and despite all the headway that's been made, we all wish there were space where other, smaller books could get noticed.