May 24, 2001 Booksellers Bemoan Shrinking Book Coverage Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle got a surprise on April 29 when they reached for the Sunday paper's pull-out Book Review. It wasn't there. The book pages, with shorter reviews and added features, were instead to be found at the back of the Chronicle's weekend entertainment section. The stand-alone Chronicle Book Review was no more. The San Francisco Chronicle's altered book coverage, while startling, was not unique. Newspapers all over the country are responding to shrinking ad revenues (and other factors) by shrinking their book review space. In another northern California city, the San Jose Mercury News recently cut book space by a third. The Seattle Times has slashed its book columns by two-thirds. The Boston Globe's separate Sunday book review was recently folded into another section. Even the venerable New York Times Book Review recently shortened its "In Brief" summaries of new fiction and nonfiction. "I find it ironic," said Hut Landon, executive director of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, "that at a time when bookselling seems to be going through such a good period--sales are up, generally speaking; reading groups have become more and more popular; movies are being made of popular books--that in all of this, newspapers seem to be cutting back sections that you would think would be more popular, not less popular, right now." Landon noted that although the number of book pages added to the Chronicle's weekend "Datebook" pull-out seem roughly the same as those in the former Book Review, "There's a difference between a stand-alone section and 10 pages in a larger section. It doesn't have the same cachet, the same importance, the same clout." Neal Sofman, owner of A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, agrees. "Any time you cut back, it's not going to be good for us," he said. "I'm not happy about the trend. Of course it's not good. It's a problem for us, but I don't know what I can do about it." Though he thinks it's too early to judge the quality of the new Chronicle book coverage, Sofman said he intends to write a letter of general protest to the paper, but he added, "This is a big company. The media is controlled by a few very large corporations, and I don't know that they care what we say." Book reviews definitely help book sales, Sofman said; and he cited Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House) as a title that benefitted specifically from good Bay Area reviews. "But Michael's been an author that's been developing, and this was a great book. "With books, it's no one thing; it's incremental: a little this, a little that, and it hits critical mass with the buzz. But a good book review really makes a difference, no question. Good reviews in the local newspaper, absolutely." As for the business wisdom of the Chronicle's decision, Sofman said: "One of my reactions was: 'This is helping the New York Times's sales.' As the quality of the local newspaper goes down, more people buy the New York Times. But I'd rather see a quality local paper." Hut Landon also thinks it's too soon to judge whether the Chronicle's book coverage will prove significantly poorer (though he too has written a letter of protest to the paper, on behalf of NCIBA), but Landon said: "I'm more concerned with the perception that books as an art form are being devalued in general. This is arguably the strongest independent book market in the country, and certainly one of the top five book markets in general. Booksellers are doing well here. And yet the newspaper has decided that books deserve second billing; we're in the cheap seats, suddenly. And that's frustrating, more than anything." South of San Francisco, the change in book coverage at the San Jose Mercury News is more than just frustrating for booksellers. "It's very sad for us, right now," said Gwen Marcum, an owner of the Capitola Book Cafe. "It's been a blow." Her store (dependent on the Mercury News to publicize events the Chronicle sometimes deems "too far away" to list) often did well with titles the Mercury News's book editor Carol Muller singled out, said Marcum: "Carol Muller's always been a good friend of independent booksellers; we hated to see her go." (Muller was reassigned by the paper to another department.) "We did sell books that were reviewed in it," Marcum said of the Mercury News's book section. "Now, it's just hardly there." The Capitola Book Cafe had recently taken advantage of lowered rates to buy ads in the Mercury News Book Review. "For a while," Marcum said, "they were so high that only the chains could advertise." But Marcum doubts her store will advertise there in future: "We probably won't, because there's such a little bit of space." Marcum named Andrew X. Pham's Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape of Memory and Vietnam (Picador USA) as a book that benefitted significantly from coverage in the San Jose Mercury News. "He was from this area; we had an event for him. Carol ran an excerpt from the book in the paper, and that led to tons of sales." Another title Muller "really pushed" was Russ Rymer's American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory, said Marcum. "She had a great review of it, and we sold it pretty well." Marcum foresees such worthy books now being overlooked in the wake of shrinking book coverage. "It's usually the bestsellers that get the space," she said. "You cover the main bases; you don't have room for the quirky little ones." One such worthy work, Marcum mentioned, is Fixer Chao (FSG), a first novel by playwright and MacArthur Fellow Han Ong. "He's fabulous," Marcum said of the author, who did a recent signing at Capitola Book Cafe. "He said the book is getting attention in New York, but I don't think it's making too much of a stir out here." "Booksellers do a wonderful job of handselling books and of letting their customers know about new books coming out," said Hut Landon. "But book reviews obviously draw attention to books as well. And the fewer book reviews you have out there, the fewer number of books that get that recognition. That's got to hurt everybody, eventually." In Boston, Dana Brigham of Brookline Booksmith, was in full accord. "My customers come in every day and say, 'I saw (something about this book) in the Globe,' or, 'I saw it in the Times'--they're big readers, so they read about books." Interviewed before the Globe confirmed its plan to do away with a separate book section, Brigham said, "It's not that [customers] won't find that [new book] section; but it won't be as easy, and they may be smaller sections; and they may cut out less-known authors, first-time authors. It's alarming." Brigham cited Anita Diamant's The Red Tent (St. Martin's) as a book praised in the Globe that did well locally before becoming a national bestseller. Beyond the matter of how local coverage brings good books to buyers' attention, though, Brigham (like Hut Landon) is disturbed by the subtext of the story of the shrinking book reviews. Regarding the Globe's plan, she said, "I would be appalled. I think it trivializes everything we're about, and people who write for the book pages, and authors." And the timing is ironic, Brigham noted, given that the Boston Globe's chief book critic Gail Caldwell recently won a Pulitzer Prize. "I just think it sends a terrible message about the importance of books and reading," Brigham said. Rick Simonson, head buyer at Elliott Bay in Seattle, thinks media in general do a poor job of spreading the word about books. "Book reviews are odd," he said. "The reviews themselves are often so oddly written, whether they're little ones or the New York Times; it's such a hodge-podge of who writes what…. The reading public is ahead of any of the media. Media itself isn't a reliable messenger." Simonson believes feature stories sell more books than reviews do: "If you had a book or arts section that had reviews or critiques and then also had news and gossip and things like that, you'd have a more well-rounded way of doing things." The Seattle Times was serving book people's needs to some extent, Simonson conceded. "It's not just reviews; there are features. It is a place where people look." But the Times' coverage of books, movies and other things was cut drastically during a long strike and has not yet been restored. "There's good people there," Simonson said of the newspaper. "It's just a matter of if they have the space and time." One response to shrinking print coverage of books is ForeWordreviews.com, a new online service from ForeWord magazine, that will "professionally review books for a fee" ($295), starting June 1. But booksellers were doubtful that Internet services could do the job that newspapers should. "There's all sorts of online things," said Elliott Bay's Simonson, "but it just becomes little bits of stuff. It's not something a large reading public, I expect, will look at." Sofman, at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, emphatically agreed: "It's not in the same league. Your newspaper is still your medium of record. That's what people look at." The San Francisco Chronicle dropped its pull-out Book Review the same weekend the Los Angeles Times held its sixth annual Festival of Books. Steve Wasserman, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, spoke of the changes at the Chronicle and other papers in his remarks to the Festival audience attending the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He took the occasion to urge continued support for his own book supplement--now one of only a handful of stand-alone newspaper book sections in the country. -Tom Nolan Topics: News - Books, Resources,