Billionaires and Book Reviews
Post Bookforum thoughts
The announcement that Bookforum is closing launched a tsunami of tsoris on the increasingly spare and angry platform (or, according to Musk, “traditional publisher1”) twitter. The reason seems to be a new owner who, having bought Artforum a few weeks ago, decided to close its little sister publication that, presumably, makes less money (or, probably, loses money) than the art magazine. That mirrors the reason for the short life of Astra magazine: the Chinese conglomerate that funded it decided to stop funding it after a few short months. Who knows if that other darling new literary publication, The Drift, now funded by a rich person/art gallery, might suffer the same fate.
“No more billionaire owners of book review publications!” was the mood on twitter after the Bookforum announcement, a mood echoed by those decrying the new owner of twitter itself. I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but I am cognizant of how quickly such stands can become hypocritical. Authors who publish books with HarperCollins, owned by a right wing billionaire (Rupert Murdoch), and whose workers are still on strike, should, to be consistent, rip up their contracts and return their advances. But being 100% consistent—attaining some sort of non-capitalist purity—is not something I think feasible or reasonable. I don’t judge those who publish books with houses owned by billionaires, and I don’t judge publications owned by billionaires. I don’t judge people who keep tweeting (I am, after all). We all are finding a way to muddle through with our morals and politics intact.
So “no more billionaires!” is something I would like to sign on to in theory, but am less willing to do so in practice. Because what’s the option?
Lauren Groff suggested one in a tweet that went moderately viral.
The problem is that is “owned by a collective of editors/workers” is not a business model. Belt Publishing is worker-owned (which means, for us, everyone who has worked for Belt for at least a year is given equity in the business, as well as a vote in major decisions), but that has nothing to do with how we make money. We make money by selling books. The same logic applies to people deciding to “start a non-profit” for cultural publication. A non-profit is a tax status, not a business model. Sure, a non-profit might get grants that a business isn’t eligible for, but otherwise it does not solve the problem that the rich people saw in Bookforum and Astra: revenue.
So, if there were a new book review publication started by a collective of editors/workers, the obvious first question should be, “how will it make money to pay those editor/workers and the writers it commissions”?
If subscriptions and ads were an obvious answer, these publications would probably still exist: rich people don’t often whimsically shut down profitable businesses (though of course they might!). Subscriptions and are still the main revenue model for magazines, and magazines, if you haven’t noticed, have been doing terribly for decades now. Advertising buys are getting smaller; digital advertising has always been a pittance, and magazine subscriptions are seemingly increasingly ‘old-fashioned,” or bought as a form of charity: “gotta help these poor folks out, they are out there trying to keep literature alive.” The third angle in the “make a publication work now” triangle is events, something that no one has made any money on for almost three years now, and is at such a remove from the purpose of literary magazines (the written word and all) it has always been a stretch to rely on events to pay the staff.
So where does that leave our group of eager, realistic editors who want to start a worker-owned review outlet to replace Bookforum? You don’t need a lot of money, relatively. If only there were someone who could just float the thing and it wouldn’t be a burden to them….like, I don’t know, a rich person? Sure, they might jump ship and the magazine might fold upon their whim, but then again, who says these things should just go on and on and on? Magazines, with perhaps a precious few exceptions, have a lifecycle, and magazines that continue beyond their natural ones are not something to valorize. Another recent magazine that closed—the phenomenal berfois, did so by consciously deciding it was time.
I admire Russell Bennetts as much for how he decided to end his publication as I do for the work he did with that publication. This is how you do it! Anyone who starts or leads a precariously funded magazine should have a plan in place for when and how to close. No one should be shocked or outraged, not here in 2022, if the money runs out.
So what would I do if I wanted to increase smart coverage of American books in 2023? I would start by analyzing the truly surprising new business model story of this decade: the willingness of individuals to pay individual writers who write newsletters on Substack. The surprise is not the success of Substack per se, but that so many people are willing to pay to read newsletters. A subscription to a Substack is the same as a subscription to a magazine in kind—you pay to have access to and support a publication—but the money goes to an individual, not an organization. In the days of blogging, getting people to pay bloggers was an uphill battle almost all writers lost, but today, it seems, getting people to subscribe to a Substack actually works for many writers. Meanwhile, getting people to subscribe to a print publication becomes ever more difficult. Why? Why are we more likely to click this blue button below than the one on the homepage of New York Review of Books?
Whatever the answer—I have a few ideas but they seem facile; comments welcome!—I would tell this fictional group of eager new-book-review-publications to start there. How could they harness the current willingness of people to subscribe to Substacks for their publication? Is the personal appeal? That they come to our inboxes? That we’ve learned from the past 20 years what happens when we don’t support these efforts? The ‘frictionless’ ease of paying for things ApplePay or whatever? (I often—often!—start subscribing to something, then get foiled by payment, and end up never subscribing to magazines.) (I would also mention that I do not think this willingness will last—paid subscribers to Substack will, I bet, become harder to garner at some point. All things have their cycle).
Perhaps they might want to make Bookforum 2 a non-profit. This is the route most literary magazines and independent presses have taken, after all. However, as you cannot own a non-profit, you can’t have a worker-owned non-profit.
And if I can add one more piece of advice: give up on print! It’s only nostalgia, or some sort of arrogant claim to the legacy of Great Magazines of the Past that leads people to launch print publications today. It makes zero financial sense. Paper is expensive. The web is not. Why hobble a new publication with printer bills when just figuring out a sustainable revenue model is hard enough? The point is words, not the surface upon which they appear. Pay editors and writers, not printers.
Feeling defeated? Want to tweet your despair at this nation’s inability to support book review magazines? Hahahahahahaha. There are still so many out there. Check out the list at the wonderful Council for Magazines and Literary Presses and donate to a few. Did you bemoan the loss of Bookforum while realizing your subscription had lapsed, as I did? Put that money towards The New Inquiry or LARB or Public Books or RainTaxi. Or—and this would be an interesting experiment—if you decide to take me up onone of these ideas, which one will you choose?—support some of the great current Substacks devoted to books (which we should really call “publications,” right? Why refer to them by the name of their platform?) Some ideas:
The payment process is super-easy!
It’s a puzzle, figuring out the next iteration of smart book reviews, or, more broadly, creating business models for independent cultural publications. And puzzles can be fun to solve.
Notes from a Small Press is the newsletter by Anne Trubek, the founder and owner of Belt Publishing. Subscribe to receive every post. Oh and don’t forget to grab a copy of So You Want to Publish a Book?, the book based on this newsletter that other people say good things about.
Thank you for writing this. You so consistently have super-smart things to say about the book business, and this post is no exception. I think it's important for us in the book business to really examine all the sacred cows we hold onto and see them for the sacred cows that they are. Print is nice, but. . . it's expensive, and carbon-costly, and has other problems. And that's just on of the points you make here that I think is worth thinking about.
Exactly! Thanks so much for this, Anne, and for the Book Post recommendation! I also think that one thing people underestimate about becoming a nonprofit is how it changes your workload. When you are a nonprofit fundraising and grant-writing become a significant part of your day. Graywolf, Milkweed, they have development staff. Your audience becomes, in a meaningful way, your funders as well as your readers. And fundraising is hard: it’s a lot of work and not everyone is good at it. As with the billionaires, it becomes people with disposable income "doing good" steering the ship rather than readers paying for what they want to read. When I wrote up the Bookforum closure for Book Post what I found interesting was that it actually grew out of a thriving business model (gallery ads for art magazines), even though that too was linked to wealth... What you nail here is that with newsletters the financial link between the reader and the writer is very direct, no layer of patronage, no other influence or interest asserting itself.