Americans Want To Read More Books. Or Do They?
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1-800-CHEM-DRIVE or visit chemdrive.com to connect with your local Chem-Dry and learn about special offers in your area. That's 1-800-CHEM-DRIVE or visit chemdrive.com today. This is the Book Drive Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. It's a busy week. I don't know if it was. I'm covering today in books this week and there was a lot. It was a target rich environment. We've got a lot to talk about here, Rebecca. April, I guess, is a busy month.

It feels like there's news all over the place. Yeah, it feels like a good, steady news cycle. Like there hasn't been one huge story that has dominated publishing this week or in the last couple of weeks, but just a steady drip. Things are happening. The wheels are turning. Books are coming out. People are fighting book bans. We're talking about stuff. Right. Let's see. Programming notes. You dropped something here. I was going to drop this into, it's not a link, but it's a fact that came from Publishers Lunch yesterday.

It's going to be an amuse-bouche for the Patreon episode we're going to record right after this that's going to go out tomorrow or early next week for Patreon subscribers. Check that out, the Book Riot Patreon. Link in the show notes at bookriot.com slash listen. Also, you can always email us at podcast at bookriot.com. Okay. You're articulating that so specifically. For no reason. But we're going to do a hot list check-in in which I...

I continue to evolve this product. Oh, okay. But I think this, for the first time ever, it may be durable from one. Okay. I'm looking forward to this. I'm just looking at... I've done it before where it's like 50 or 9 and there's different tiers. I just stopped putting things in. We're like, nope, that's not it. That's not even a contender. And I think I've got 18 to throw at you. Okay. And that's on the Patreon, so check that out there. That'll be fun. On first edition recently. Yeah.

My conversation with Katie Kitamura, if you enjoyed our conversation about that, even if you didn't, go listen to her talk about her book and me talk to her about pastries and deaths and how it's weird to have a different human one day. To suddenly wake up and your son is 14 and 5'10 and his voice is deeper than yours and how that's a strange thing to happen.

to all of us. You know, and we're not the only ones who had our minds blown by that book. I saw online yesterday that Jennifer Egan was in conversation with Keita Murrah going, no, for real, how did you write this book? Well, if Egan is coming to that, you have done something. Truly. That's really amazing. Whether or not Audition is on that list, you have to check out the Patreon to find out. But actually, we'll do our first sponsor break, and then I'll get into this first story-lit thing that we have here. Okay.

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You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. Oh!

I told you so.

So you put in here that Fearless by Lauren Roberts, which is a YA romanticist in the Powerless series. It's the third book in this trilogy. Sold on day one, Rebecca. Tell the people how many books. Day one. 266,000 units globally on day one. That's in all formats. This was the highest ever first day sales number for a Simon & Schuster YA book.

Third book in the series. The other two books have sold a combined 5.5 million units globally. And if you had told – I don't know what to do with this. Have I heard this name? Maybe. Maybe.

And I know this is happening, absolutely not. No, I had not heard this. And this is one of those, like, we struggle with this when we do the It Books episodes every month of like, what do we do with this romantic-y thing that is huge but seems to exist in a different space than literary culture? And even in mainstream casual reader literary culture, it's its own... There, of course, are some overlaps. These are not mutually exclusive reading groups, but...

The headline in the publisher's lunch email was like, Lauren Roberts book sells 266,000 on first day. And I was like, who is Lauren Roberts?

Yeah, I was trying to think of some way of understanding this. And some of it may be trying to, with my fingernails, hold on to some kind of relevancy. I recognize that might be the case. Might it be liberating to just not? Well, but here's the thing. How do we, as a podcast that cares about books and reading, and we're covering this from a news angle, but we're not going to cover it from this is not our genre, this is not our interest. And I think we look at this

with some kind of consternation of how to understand it. I was trying to think of some other area of culture where there's something similar, where it's a huge and popular, but it seems to exist in its own ecosystem. But some things bubble up, like romanticism, we have to say, we can't just put it over in a snow globe and it's over there. That's a thing.

And at this point, like the Onyx Storms of the world, the Sarah J. Maas of the world, they have now bubbled up to at least be names where people maybe have heard of them, they read them in their casual life. The one I was thinking about is video games. Okay. Where there are really popular video games that...

that you and I have never heard of. And they sell millions of copies. I've heard of none of them. Well, no, but you know Mario. Sure, okay, yes. You know Zelda, but I'm saying like there are some, maybe you even heard the name Grand Theft Auto or Fortnite. Yes, okay, okay. You're helping me out with some millennial references. Where they do actually bubble into mainstream culture. The thing that I'm trying to figure out here is

Are these part of... Is there a mainstream book culture? And what is this thing's relationship to it? Maybe this is mainstream book culture. I don't know. I think this is a central question right now. One of the admittedly imperfect ways to start to gauge these kinds of things is like...

if characters on popular sitcoms are reading these books or joking about them, like, would it be familiar enough to enough people for that to land? Like, Fifty Shades of Grey crossed that threshold. Twilight crossed that threshold. I don't know that I've, I haven't seen Romantasy, like, hit

Can you make a fourth-wing joke and have a prayer that someone is going to get it, sort of in a general-purpose setting? Right. And those have not been discussed in the same kinds of, like, Today Show, Good Morning America, mainstream media sorts of spaces that, you know, Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey were. And The Hunger Games, because The Hunger Games introduced the big dystopian wave, you know, of the early 2000s. Right.

I also don't know what to make of this. Like surely some mainstream readers, you know, like civilian book people are out picking these up for something to get as big as Onyx Storm and the Sarah J. Maas books. A lot of people who read very, very casually are picking them up, but it's like carved into...

strange zone. And yeah, I also don't know how to talk about it when something can be this popular that more than a quarter of a million of them sell on the first day and the industry has not been talking about this name. It's kind of fine with me if I don't know the

names of all of the popular genre series that are just going to show up on like the Goodreads list at the end of the year because a lot of those genre fandoms do exist in their own like separate spaces or spaces that I don't spend a lot of time in but it's

If it's popular enough that you're selling a quarter of a million units on day one, why is book media not covering this in a different way? Why haven't I heard about her in publishers? I think because it's getting covered on individual social media account and platforms. I think that's the reason. But even this seems like the kind of thing that...

publishers weekly would be like, hey, the first two have accumulated 5 million copies sold. We're going to wait and see what happens when the third one comes out next week. I didn't know that this was even a thing I should be waiting to know how it would perform. Well, and we talk about this when we do the winter drafts or the it books or whatever, because we do, you know, we pull from various sources. And one of those is the Goodreads Most Anticipated. And we get face blindness to the covers where this looks like a lot of other books that are coming out this month.

And for the rest of the year, and they're the tops of these most anticipated lists on Goodreads, which is indicative of something. Like I'm trying not to brush this off. I don't want to brush this off. It's not something to brush off. But in terms of like how to understand it at all is really, really hard. Is it, and I don't try to besmirch anything. It's different books for different people. But is it more equivalent to Dogman than The Da Vinci Code?

In terms of it's like Dog Man and Wimpy Kid sell more than these. Yeah. And they exist for, you know, for those kinds of readers that are reading that book and

Maybe you can make a reference because you're a parent, but Da Vinci Code sells, again, a lot more, and it becomes a part of the whatever. Right, and everybody knows about it, right. And 20 years later, we're talking about it. 15 years later, we can still refer to Fifty Shades of Grey and folks who were old enough to be reading adult books at the time remember. Yep.

what that was. And it remains unclear to be if we're going to still be talking about this Romantic-y pop or any of these individual titles beyond the Yaros and Sarah J Maas into the future. If future Jeff and Rebecca looking back on the 2020s will be like, oh yes, and Lauren Roberts, she was also among them. Well, yeah, I think that's interesting. It's amazing. I think the thing you're hearing us, listener, be

Blown away by the volume and attention and also the kind of segmentation at the same time. Because I did not...

should I put this on the hot list? Well, if I'm just looking at numbers, absolutely. But there's a part of me that's absolutely not like that's where I am. And yeah, I think so. And maybe TV is the analogy that I'm going to reach for, but this feels to me like it might be similar to how like procedurals are the thing. NCIS, Des Moines. Right. And right. And there are 25 spinoffs and there's, then you have the CSIs and then all of the streamers have their versions of all of the procedurals and

And those are getting a lot of viewers, and they're also not noteworthy in the conversation about the television culture. Way more people watch those than will watch The Pit. But for those who care about TV sort of in an existential way, The Pit is the business, or The White Lotus, or some of these other places. Do they have a 50th of the viewers of whatever? What's the...

The woman from Big Bang Theory that's now a judge on a CBS sitcom or whatever. It's like, I don't even know what that is. Or Kathy Bates in the Matlock reboot or whatever. Oh, right. Yeah. Like those get so many more viewers. It's a different kind of audience. It's also important for the TV ecosystem that those things exist. Does Fearless by Lauren Roberts selling a bunch of these books selfishly subsidize books that I care about?

Probably. That's what we always say about these. Mm-hmm. That's what we always say about these. If you care about Fearless by Lauren Roberts or know something about a podcast at bookriot.com, I'd love to hear if this is something you knew about. Is this something you care about? Are you as shocked as we are? How'd you learn about it? Yeah. Did you learn about it right now? Because here's the truth. I'm going to forget the name of this book and author tomorrow. I will not remember this tomorrow. And...

That is interesting. That's a fascinating thing. Well, I guess in terms of fascinating things, this was an Ipsos poll that actually shows something that the headline doesn't. This is what I said about it in Today in Books, which is weird. It's a fascinating poll. The headline is, the poll shows most Americans want to read more and just don't. As far as I can tell, Rebecca, there is no single question that out and out asks the question, would you like to read more? It's all inferred from

other things. But having said that, where did your eye lead you? What do you find some of the more interesting takeaways or results in this? They lead this piece with a chart that is highlighted as reading is aspirational.

And that resonates with what we talk about in terms of like vocational awe and the sort of halo of like respectability and nobility and, you know, that reading is a, that reading confers something on people who are readers in terms of cultural cachet or respect that they, you know, like 98% of people want their children to develop a love of reading.

that reading is a way for me to learn about the world. People rank that highly. That reading is relaxing, they say. They like to keep collections of books in their homes. You know, very few people are willing to say that reading is a boring activity. Sadly, as you pointed out in today in books, 41% of them still say that listening to audiobooks is not a form of reading. We've got, I was stunned. And it's exactly the same for the overall and readers. Readers being someone who said they listened to an audiobook or read a book in the past year.

year. And right. That's an interesting thing about this is that the data are broken out between the overall respondents and people who are considered readers or consider themselves to be readers. And a reader in this survey is just someone who has read a book in the last year. So, and some of these are pretty big discrepancies or interesting discrepancies where like the difference between having read one book and having read zero books does seem to

be connected. But Mallory Newell, who's the vice president of public polling at Ipsos says like, we want to be a reading nation. Like people say that they aspire to read. But where is that? I mean, but what I'm, I think I'm just sort of doing a penumbra thing. Like, would you, do you wish you read more? Why isn't that a question? Just ask it directly because the closest they get is reading is low on my priority list.

Right? Well, and then they get to like, I don't have enough time because of other things. So like, I agree with you that it would have been nice if there was a question that was straight up like, do you read as much as you wish you had, as much as you wish you did? But she doesn't even reference, I mean, she's like, we want to be a reading nation and then doesn't cite any of the specific results. Like, I'm so confused. I mean, I think,

I think things like, I want my children to develop a love of reading indicate we want reading to be a thing that we do. I want to become a better reader. 63% of overall respondents and 71% of readers said yes to that. I think they're ascribing aspirational to this collection of questions, but you are correct that no one actually asks. I just don't want to... Do you read more? Don't spin the data. There's no reason to spin the data here. I mean, one of the interesting...

you know, I like to look at the spreads, like you mentioned, like where do we get a big difference between the overall and people who are categorized as readers in this? And again, for people listening to this show, reading one book in the last year, I don't know that we ourselves would say, hey, you're a reader if you do that, but that's what this is going on here. But even that difference is,

reading or listening to a book is relaxing for me. That seems to be the single biggest difference between someone who's read a book in the last year and the overall. That's a spread of 16 points from 92% of people who did one book said it was. So if you find it relaxing, you are more likely to have read a book last year. And I guess that makes sense, but the biggest spread, like there are people who read books and don't find it relaxing, ergo they read less often.

I hadn't thought of the relaxing nature as being so... Because that's what I... I don't read to relax. So I'm like, that's not what I do. Yeah, yeah. And I think we're weirdos there. Like, we are extreme outliers in any kind of survey like this. One of the other pieces that they pull out is, you know, that...

As they're saying here, they're interpreting this as that we want to be a reading nation, but only 51% of people report that they've read a book in the past month in this poll. And in comparison, 80% of people watched streaming services, used social media, or watched a short form video. And that's usually where a piece like this diverges into, so books have so much to compete with. And it seems like folks...

are reporting that, that like, I just don't have enough time. There are other things in my life. But we know from our conversation with Laura McGrath last month about the most interesting stats in the world of reading. And this piece notes as well that respondents who classify themselves as readers are also more likely than non-readers to consume other forms of media. So it's not competition.

with other forms of media that make the difference between being a reader or not being a reader. Playing video games doesn't make you less likely to be a reader. I still dispute the logic of that. Can I get on my high horse for a second? Because the logical chain could be

that people who read books still consume other media doesn't necessarily follow that the extensiveness of other media doesn't cannibalize people from reading books. All that proves is people who read a bunch of books do not consume less other media. It does not suggest that if you consume other media, because those are going to be two completely different kinds of cool words. That's true. I mean, I think what we're probably circling around here is a confounding factor that nobody's talking about, which is access to leisure time.

And that if you have access to leisure time, you can read and...

watch a bunch of movies. If you don't have access to leisure time, you're not going to be doing either of those things. And then you're among the respondents in this poll who are saying that I just don't have time because of other life activities. And when they say other life activities, they don't mean because I'm watching something on Netflix. They mean because I work two jobs or I have to take my kids to soccer practice, or it's honestly just not that important to me. Well, I don't think they explain what because of other life activity means that I,

are these other things here a subset to this? Does even the respondent understand? Yeah. Because how can it be to say they just throw it into one big category? Right. I'm just saying I think that socioeconomic class probably influences this. I mean, I just don't know. I mean, I think I'll hold in possibility that it doesn't cannibalize. But there are way more people watching streaming services that are reading books. Mm-hmm.

And that's just true. So I also think this is one of those things. Leisure reading has gone down over the last two decades. So I think we could, we don't need to overthink this. Well, and there's social incentive to say that you would like to be a reader. Sure. Well, and you may not even know that you're dissembling, right? Like you may want to be a reader and maybe you don't like the hegemony of reading has gotten to you to some, to some expense. Like,

I think, too, like the genre stuff is interesting. Thriller, crime, mystery being the most popular. Historical nonfiction being 24%. That's one where I have my, where are the dudes that Laura found? That's when I was like, aha. Yes, that's the dad books. Memoir biography, autobiography, thriller, crime, mystery, historical nonfiction. Those are the three top genre here. Historical fiction, those tend to be more dude books.

Friendly is the wrong word. They're marketed and bought by men. More affinity men on the whole. And then interesting romance, even as we're talking about the Lauren Roberts thing, I think there's another thing that we know in our Lauren Roberts fearless why romantic scene. Romance is bottom middle. Yeah. Young adult is bottom middle. So...

There you go. That's our consternation, too. When Thriller Crime Mystery is the only one that crossed more than a quarter, they got more than a quarter of respondents to say it. That 37% is the highest. The next one at Historical Nonfiction is 24% and everything ticks down immediately.

from there and that's a pretty big difference between 37 and 24 and then on the way down almost three times as many people cite reading thrillers crimes and mystery as reading romance and the young adult hits at eight percent which i think there's also social incentive stuff happening here maybe that like many more people are reading these young adult novels and reading romance

then like more than 8% of readers are doing young adult novels. I have a theory about that. Tell me. Most people responding to this don't know what young adult means. Oh, that's probably true. They're not. I mean, we say YA in like a headline on a BR Instagram post, like people are like, what are, what's YA? Yeah. So, I mean, I think they, they're like, I don't, whatever that is, I don't read that because I don't know what it is, but if they picked up sunrise at the reaping or the hunger games or, or,

I don't know what we're doing with Onyx Storm these days because they're 20. Have fun with that categorization. There's a note here at the bottom, actually, that in terms of some of the patterns, it's women and people over 50 driving the thriller genre to the top of the list. And that the men's interests were coalescing around nonfiction and historical fiction. And then, of course, this makes sense just...

on its face, respondents over the age of 65 are the ones who are actually carving time out of their day to read. What do they have to carve out of? You're over 65. Well, they're making it a part of their day because they're, you know, less likely to be going to work. I think they don't have to carve it. It's like they have to soft scoop. That's soft serve ice cream. This is not bedrock that we need to get into. Send your editorial notes to Megan Sullivan at NPR. Well, that's fine. This is almost, this is very interesting, but almost very interesting.

I do like this idea of, and maybe this is a note for them next time, just ask them, do you wish you read more? What is the principal reason you're not? Yeah. Or like actually do something like how much time do you spend reading and how much time would you like to spend reading and look at the separation there? Yeah. I mean, the theory of the case and most of these things when it comes to reading in the modern age, this is my hypothesis, is that a lot of people would like to read more, but they'd like to do other things more.

Their consciousness wants to read more, but...

But they don't actually want to. They actually want to spend their time differently. Well, yeah, I think that if you're reading just... If you're thinking of reading as just for pleasure, there are other things that you can do that are more likely to give you a greater amount of pleasure. Right. Or be relaxing or entertaining than reading is. There is some work involved in that. And people are... I just really think we are incentivized to say that you care about reading. And it does happen when I meet people casually who like...

My husband's clients at a cocktail party. Like, this is a cocktail party. Yes, absolutely. Oh my gosh. I wish I had time to read. I wish I read more. And I can see that they're like a little bit concerned that if they tell me that they aren't into books, I'm going to like be standing there judging them for saying it. And I'm always like, I don't care what you do with your time. Yeah. I mean, the thing, I guess they only really ask about two reasons to read. One, it's relaxing. Or one, it's a way to learn about the world. Mm-hmm.

I think there's another core piece that I think they didn't tap into is that it keeps me – something like it keeps me sharp. It keeps me just like good for me. Like this is – reading is good for you. Yeah. I'm doing my mental sit-ups. That would look closer to that 99 to 90. Do you believe that reading is good for you? I bet that would be an extremely high thing. I think that would have been very high. Yeah. And then you would see a disjunction between that and –

How, you know, where it is on my priorities or where it relates to other activities they could do with their discretionary time, then you could really see. But I think the Q rating of that would be extraordinarily high. Oh, yeah. Reading is much more popular in theory than in practice. Yeah.

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Publishers Weekly, this is a real insider baseball kind of a story, except that I think it's a micro data point that's indicative of a macro thing that I think it's interesting to talk about. Publishers Weekly is now charging $25 to submit your book for review consideration. So yes, that means you're not guaranteed a review. That means you just get put on the pile that they will consider reviewing.

to be reviewed. I saw a couple of people decrying this. Me too. Which I understand. I saw some how dare, yeah. But Rebecca, did you read my Today in Books piece on Monday about this? I did, yeah. Where was I right? Do you want to make my case for me? What do you think of that? I totally agree with you on this. I understand why Publishers Weekly is doing this, and I bet that they are kicking themselves for not having done it sooner. They receive...

I would assume tens of thousands of books in the mail every year from publishers and authors that are hoping to have those books reviewed. Just sorting through those or, and just sorting through catalogs. Like, I don't know what the process is by which Publishers Weekly determines which books they're going to review. And the fact that they review as many as they do is incredible. Like it's a feat. Yeah.

So the process to like sort through everything and see what's available and assign reviews to people is cumbersome. And book reviews in general do not pay nearly as well as they should for the amount of time that it takes to read a book and then write something cogent about it.

And Publishers Weekly says very clearly, this is not pay for play. We are trying to subsidize our review process, which is code for we are trying to be able to pay ourselves to do this work. Keep the business churning. Right. Keep the business going. This is very work intensive. Maybe they want to give book reviewers a raise. I don't know.

This seems very, very reasonable to me. And as you point out, it's either $25 per book that is submitted or entities that have site licenses to Publishers Weekly, which start at $950 a year, can just put their books through. And it's a safe assumption that all of the major publishers have those site licenses. I'd be shocked if they didn't. Right. So it's not a new expense for big publishers. And smaller publishers, I think this is a reasonable...

investment to ask like this is a reasonable lottery ticket $25 to have your book considered if you do get a publisher's weekly review like and if it's a starred review and that is some good attention on your book I'm pretty confident you're going to move a couple of units and make your $25 back

I feel good about this. Like also just to give listeners some perspective, like if I had charged five or 10 bucks to be able to send me a book in my blogging days or my early book riot days before I like went on my grand, just send me e-gallies campaign. Like I could have paid my mortgage every month with the number of books that were coming into my house. And I am one person. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things. I don't actually know, maybe Publishers Weekly has gamed out how much additional revenue they would get. Maybe they're going to get some. The other piece of my case for why they should do this is to keep the submissions down. If you do not believe in your book enough to pay $25 to get it to be considered for Publishers Weekly, which I think, tell me if you're wrong for people who are in the business.

probably the most important trade-facing review outlet. I don't think there's anywhere that's... I mean, there's Library Journal and... There's some other places that are important, but if you're going to pick one to have it in, I think you're picking publishers. Especially if you're thinking about where bookstore buyers might be looking to find out which... to determine books that they're going to order into their stores. $25 is not just...

your chance of getting your book reviewed so that you can like put it on your fridge, like a gold star. It's a chance for visibility in front of the kinds of people who make decisions about which books are on bookstore shelves. Like I think that's very reasonable and publishers weekly also has a different program for self-published books. If you get the print editions of publishers weekly, there's like a 10 page section called book life that is paid reviews of books,

self-published books. So you don't get a guarantee that your review will be positive, but if you want to be guaranteed that Publishers Weekly will review your self-published book, there is already a way to do that. So that also means that where those self-published folks who are least likely to float up from this slush pile of things that just go to Publishers Weekly, you can pay to guarantee it. Or now you can pay this $25 consideration fee and maybe boost yourself up

in line or at least be swimming in the same pool of titles for mainstream review consideration that are not in that separate book life section. But I do think it's probably both a, we have to subsidize our time to do this. And also if it curbs submissions even a little bit, that helps Publishers Weekly do their job. Yep. And they're requiring physical copies. I don't know if that's something that existed before this. I'd love to know that if you work at Publishers Weekly or no, or you're part of this

because that's another good way because a a secondary reason to curb submissions is not just already there's a lot of books but we've been hearing from literary magazines especially in the genres that the llm ai generated slot machine is now

infesting submission boxes. So if you have to have a couple of physical copies, you can't just sort of ask chat GPT to write a historical YA romanticity crime thriller poetry young adult children's book starring whatever and then shoot it over an email as a PDF. Like you have to have a physical thing. That's a gatekeeping thing. That's a...

We want you to be serious. I mean, I think it's we want you to be serious. This is a token charge for that. Yeah. And the people that I've seen decrying it are coming from the like, it's hard enough out there for authors. How dare they do this to us? Now, most authors that are considered for Publishers Weekly are coming from the big five because the big five publish most of the books. So like, you're fine. Your publisher is not having to spend any more money. They all have these site licenses. Do not worry about it. And if they don't, self-publish.

Right. If your publisher is going to pony up 25 bucks for that, I would get a new publisher. Yeah, I think that's fair. And the other piece is that Publishers Weekly exists to be a mouthpiece into the publishing industry to provide information for people who work in publishing and people who work at bookstores and are trying to determine which books they should put onto their shelves. Their primary purpose is not to help others.

authors. And I understand that it's hard out there for authors, but to expect businesses, especially media companies in this day and age. We may have more sympathy for bookish media than other people, but the only thing harder than being an author is writing a bookish media company. I mean, I just think it's important to hear that perspective. We know it's hard out there to be a writer. And also, you are not owed a

a review or review consideration anywhere. You are not owed someone's time. Like a review of a book means six to 10 hours reading it, depending on how long it is just in general. And hopefully a couple of hours of work of synthesizing. At least thinking about it or considering it or what else might goes into it. These are not long reviews, but they're,

Right. They're professionally done. They're consistent. I think they're quite fair. You don't hear a lot of, like, Publishers Weekly is a bunch of dicks. Like, that's not a conversation I hear. You know, don't at me. Well, I don't know if there's something that's interesting. I mean, very rarely does something get skewered in a Publishers Weekly review. Like, little, like, the...

This is a Patreon episode I've had in my mind for a while. It's to sort of collect like the six or seven, well, there's more than this moves, positive and negatives that Publishers Weekly does in that last sentence. But that's another, the house style is very interesting to me. So this is, you know, I think this is a good window into the book world. Like this 25 bucks is indicative of a lot that goes on. I have another note for Publishers Weekly. And I'm on your side. Charge more for your site license.

If Random House is going to get all their books, they can submit a million, infinity books, charge them five grand. They've got the, or sliding scale based on revenue. Get more money. Like the publishing industry should be thrilled Publishers Weekly exists. Charge more for this. Yes. Or like your 950 site license gets you 10 a year or something. Or with a minimum advertising, like money supporting Publishers Weekly from the publishing industry is an aggregate good.

And Riverhead and all these people should be thanking their lucky stars this exists because this is one step above. I think this is only one step above from looking at the matrix of Edelweiss yourself.

Like, this is the next thing you do after this. Yeah, and, like, one of my hobby horses, as you know from our text thread, is paying attention to who ponies up the billions of dollars for the cover of Publishers Weekly. Right. Which, like, no knock on Publishers Weekly, but I do not think that spending, like, 15 grand to put your book on the cover of Publishers Weekly is going to have a positive ROI. Yeah.

So if, and it often is small publishers and sometimes even independent publishers. And I've seen a couple self-published, like if you are thinking that that is a good investment and you're also railing about $25 to have PW seriously consider your work or the review section, you need to flip your priorities and save yourself like 14 grand. Yeah. I mean, I do think that

You know, the value of institutions in any walk of life, I think, becomes underrated. I may be talking about this for political reasons. Who can say? Stay tuned for my frontless foyer entry. But some of these tentpole places, you know, in the world of journalism at large, you know, the New York Times, in the world of books and reading, like, honestly, Publishers Weekly is a tentpole institution. Yeah. And...

I think this makes a ton of sense. It does make a ton of sense. And it's one of those things that like, like when I'm talking privately with Book Riot contributors and saying like, I just read this, I thought it was overblown. Has anybody else read it? It's not uncommon for someone to say like,

Yeah, I had the same experience and I was, my expectations were higher because it got a PW star. It matters. Like you can hear, you can hear in our voices and our expectation, like this is one of the places we go to. Like we also look at Edelweiss directly, but we also miss stuff. And Edelweiss is just marketing copy. Like, you know, an evaluative, like, okay, pay attention to this.

In the form of a star or the pros, I think I'd love to know again, maybe we should get some publishers on there, but the star, the star award procedure, because there's positive reviews. Like if you took 10 reviews that were positive and asked me which one got a star, I don't know that I could pick it out. But that's a that's a different game for a different day. OK, wow. I felt a lot about that. Where do we want to go next? Oh, McGrath.

I think we've gone along on a couple of these. Oh, yes. Yes. Speaking of Laura McGrath, who, if you're just tuning in, is an English professor, a data scientist. She came and hung out with us a couple episodes back to talk about stats. She has done some number crunching on her sub stack, which is called Text Crunch.

about the demographic data in the publishing industry. And her central question is, we talk about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing industry, but how white is it and relative to...

So I don't know that we want to go like super into all of the numbers here. I think it's worth looking at Laura's sub stack. This is a free post and you can subscribe and support her work. But she confirms like, yes, publishing is whiter than the general population, but she's grounding. She's pushing us to ground like rather than just saying this is a white industry, like

What are we talking about? White compared to the general population? White compared to college graduates? White compared to what? And she actually pulls the data to help us have that conversation. Yeah, and I think even her sort of humanistic intro of like, she got pushed by a peer reviewer for her title, which we're anticipating with great excitement here on this show, to...

Have some sort of lodestar for, wait, how white is it? In her resistance, I think I have a little of this, and I think a lot of other people might too, which is that feels like dismissing or undercutting the real felt urgency of diversification's urgency.

Important and underrepresentation is real. But this is something you and I have dealt with, frankly, on the HR side of the business a little bit of like, what is a reasonable goal? What is a legal goal for diversifying a workforce? And how can you work within our extant legal procedures? Because you cannot discriminate based on race. You cannot do that.

You cannot discriminate based on gender. Right. So how can you advocate in your hiring processes for underrepresented? You can only really advocate for them or build for them in your hiring process until they are quote unquote represented. Yes. Right.

And so what does represented mean? So you and I have thought about this directly in our own process. So like, I am more sympathetic to, you need to have a goal so you know what the hell you're doing and when you've reached it and if progress has been made.

But I think that's fair. I think that's fair. I think that's fair, too. And so we can use the U.S. population example here. So publishing is about 72.5% white. And the U.S. population, according to the census that Laura uses, is 58.4% white. So publishing, 72.

significantly whiter than the U.S. population. She then also looks at publishing, like the breakdown of publishing's trends versus college graduates' trends, the whiteness and gender representation of publishing and other professions. That's particularly interesting. Like if publishing is unbearably white, is it actually unbearably white relative to other industries? Or are we just talking about like...

It's a problem in itself that publishing is wider than the U.S. population, but how widespread is this problem? How is publishing doing relative to other industries? So that's really interesting to see. She's got numbers from medicine, from the legal professions, from the education sciences and stuff from the U.S. Census Bureau. If you like data...

You are going to enjoy this and you will get a lot of value out of clicking on Laura's sub stack. Yeah. I mean, and I think just as an example, so one thing she finds is that publishing is 14% whiter than the US population and 20% more female than the US population. I don't think anyone that I want to talk to is like, you know what? We need to get more dudes into publishing because it's overrepresented. But I do think it'd be like, you know what? If you think that

If you feel like one of your issues or something you care about is we need more women publishing, maybe check that assumption.

Right? If you think that, why? I mean, or maybe it should be in different levels of the company. Like, we could be a little more nuanced about some of this stuff. Right, and I think Laura gets into some of that, and she's using data from the Lee and Lowe survey, which is more robust than the data. They survey a wider group of people than the Publishers Weekly salary survey does each year, but that Publishers Weekly survey does break down gender representation at the different levels of companies, and that's where you can start to see that publishing is very female, but...

It becomes very male at the top. Yes. So it's like, I don't, I think of this way. I don't think it's sort of a binary of do, is there work to be done? Yes or no. It's more of, can we target where the work needs to be done? Yeah, this is helpful in,

seeing those places, like rather than just a, like a blunt instrument approach to diversifying the workforce, where are the places that we need work and getting more women into publishing is not it promoting more women into the higher echelons of publishing. Yes. And certainly getting more and then, you know, different kinds of racial background, even within that, um,

breakdown, there's going to be variances by group and identities and other things that I think are worth. So that's a welcome here. We better go to Thrift Books at this point. Frontless Foyer, brought to you by Thrift Books. Did you know there are millions of books you can buy on Thrift Books? And probably 95% of them were submitted to Publishers Weekly for review. Probably so. I wonder if I've ever bought a book or read a book that wasn't submitted to Publishers

I guess I've read a couple of self-pubbed things for like friends. Oh, okay. But beyond that, I would be generally very surprised if I've read something that wasn't at least submitted to Publishers Weekly for review. I think that's fair. I just bought some stuff from Thrift Books to actually is related to my front list for you. I will get to in a minute. But they have a reading rewards program, free shipping on orders of over 15 bucks to people in the US and...

You can join their rewards program in which, you know, a certain, you spend money on books, you get a free one every now and again. Who doesn't like that? Also, we're getting into mom's, dad's, and grad season. Shoot us an email, podcast at bookriot.com. If you'd like to be submitted, you'd like to submit your question or request, we will get that over there. You know, this is a good place you can buy movies, DVDs, games, and other kinds of gifts. So you can all put into one bundle, get your shipping.

Put it under the... I think for dads, you put it under a rotating rack tie of ties they don't use.

And for moms, you put it under the documents that pile up that mom tends to be responsible for, permission slips and other things. This is very essentialist, but also there's some truth to that, I'd say at some point there. I don't know. A tree. What kind of like, you know, there's like the Festivus pole. What kind of items would be totems of these other kinds of objects? A Thai tree, something made of like golf tees. Oh, that's good. Yeah, I like that. Anyway, let's see. Why don't you go first with your front?

All right. Well, my front list foyer is brought to you by your daughter, Rowan. Yeah. At our live show at Powell's about the most recommendable books of the century, Rowan recommended The Care and Keeping of a Pet Black Hole by Michelle Cuevas. And she talked about it a little bit more when we were hanging out at home. Yes.

I was sold immediately. It's a middle grade novel. It's about, it opens with the main character on the bus coming home from NASA. She's been trying to get into NASA. This is the late 70s because she wants to meet Carl Sagan and give him a recording of her dad laughing. I know, I know. I'm sorry, Jeff. Dad has recently passed away. Now I'm going to cry. And

she believes that this recording should go on the Voyager's golden record that Sagan is going to send into outer space so that when the aliens find it and they want to know what it's like on Earth, they can hear about it. That has not gone the way that she wanted it to go. She didn't get to meet Carl Sagan. You can't just show up with an 8-track and say, put it on the disc. Right, but she gets off the bus...

The weather turns all of a sudden, like it gets really dark and she finds this box on the sidewalk and there is like a small black, there is a black blob in the box. And somehow she comes to figure out that this is a black hole. She takes it home.

She notices that it consumes random things. All of her left shoes. Gone. The family's really smelly hamster. Gone. Gone. And she names him Larry for singularity.

Incredible stuff. So, okay. So that's it. So what do you think? Yeah. So that's it. It's great. So as it goes on, this main character is tempted to like toss everything annoying from her life into the black hole. Like the itchy sweaters her aunt gives her, the homework assignment she doesn't want to do, all the Brussels sprouts from dinner. And eventually some of the painful, some of the things that remind her of painful memories of her dad. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right.

It's your dog died. That was your emotional catharsis you got. That was it. Your dog dies and we're all sad. That's it. It's charming. It's funny. It's really clever and creative. Rowan told me it would destroy me and it basically did. But it also gave me one of my new favorite jokes, which is, have you heard the one about the new anti-gravity book? Oh, yeah. I have, but tell the people. It's impossible to put down.

It's good stuff. I texted our good friend Amanda Nelson and she was like, first of all, how dare you? Yeah.

When was the last time you read a middle grade book, Rebecca? Oh, God. I don't know. Like, I don't know. But it was really lovely and, again, like, so funny. I think if you have a kid in your life who is reckoning with something related to grief, it would be a great thing to give them. But I just thought it was lovely and charming and sweet and a good read all the way around. And I hadn't heard of it before. So, Rowan gave me...

something new, an A-plus recommendation. A wonderful audiobook experience, I should say. Oh, I'd love it. If you've got a mixed age group, really, of any kind. Yeah. There's little songs and funny characters. It was a good time. And I'm also reading Who is Government, which is edited by...

Our boy, Michael Lewis. I'm interested to hear about this because edited by Michael Lewis is interesting, but edited by is also not interesting. Right. Well, so Michael Lewis wrote two of the pieces in the book. I did not know this was coming out, but he's making the podcast rounds and I heard him talking about it. So here's, I think I can get you with the setup. I'm sure you already, I mean, yeah.

When Donald Trump was first elected in 2016 and they had all the like transition team of hundreds of people that are going to compile their binders about what their specific department in government does and then train the incoming government on it. Trump just fires all the people and says, we're smart enough. We can figure this out on our own. But those binders of how the government works continue to exist. And somehow Michael Lewis gets access to them. He does. Yeah. And then,

Also, because he's Michael Lewis, convinced the Washington Post to give him some money to pay reporters to go through those binders and find interesting characters, which this is the thing Michael Lewis is good at. Like, who are the people that we can capture in this who are doing fascinating things? And so this book is a collection of, like...

lifetime government workers who are doing important work that they have never been recognized for and they never expect it to be recognized for it. And they're also like Midwestern insensibility, if not in actuality, and don't want to be recognized for it. But fascinating stuff. So like a guy who figured out how to make a formula to actually help

prevent the roofs of coal mines from caving in. And once he did it, coal miner deaths decreased by almost 100%. The person who figured out the formula for how to determine when an object or a body dropped into the ocean, how it drips based on all of the factors so that if you fall off a cruise ship and they don't realize it for two hours, they shouldn't go back to the place you fell in. But where should they go? You gotta skate to where the corpse is going. Right.

Right. But how do you do that? One of them is a person who runs like the National Cemeteries, which have like an incredibly high customer satisfaction rating and how he's done this for decades, caring for families in a time of great grief, just like lifelong bureaucrats doing really incredible work. So Lewis writes two of them. W. Kamau Bell writes one. Sarah Vowell, haven't heard from her in a while. Oh, come on. All right. Yeah.

Yes. And I think the pieces ran in the Washington Post in like late 2024. So before Doge did all of its things, but this is a really nice moment as a person who, as you were saying earlier in the show, like believes in the value of our institutions and the work that is done behind closed doors where no one has ever been.

you know, cared about being praised for it, but they recognize it's important work. There are just thousands of these kinds of stories and reading them told like, and these are characters who were just never going to seek praise or recognition for it. So it's been a nice little like liberal morale boost. I would say.

Okay, I'm going to check that out. I hope there's an audiobook version. Oh, that would be great. Mine is a little bit boring. Well, not boring, but I did all my Bertino reading. I'm going to be talking to Marie-Helene Bertino. Yeah, not boring at all. Well, it's a little samey, I guess, not boring. I'm going to be interviewing her. A new format for first edition where just walking through her backlist all the way up through Beautyland. What's the story behind this book? What do you remember? So I went back and

There's only one I hadn't read, her initial short story collection called "Safe as Houses," which was University of Iowa in 2012.

And I read them in order. So I reread Parakeet, Two Amid the Cat's Pajamas, and Beautyland. It's going to, they're great. I think Two Amid the Cat's Pajamas is both better and more bawdy than I remember. I remember it being a little cozier, but it's a little more difficult. Okay. It's been a while. Well, I think one of the reasons we like it is it has a little more, if it were as cozy as my memory has it, we wouldn't have liked it, if that makes sense. It's got a little more edge to it. Here's the thing I'm finding. I'm a little nervous about talking to her.

For a lot of reasons. Well, I've gotten to a point where I'm not nervous about talking to people for first edition. I used to be. I've done enough of them now, and I feel like I can have a good 30-minute conversation with someone who read their book. Like you hung with Katie Kitamura. You did great. Did I? I hope so. But I feel like I know what I'm doing. With this situation, reading someone's whole body of work, and quickly, it feels very personal all of a sudden. And there's certain recurrent themes that...

There's not a lot of great dads in these books, for an example. You're going a little James Lipton here. And that's not my want. Even for people I do know intimately, I'm not really comfortable talking about those things.

I will attest to this for our listeners. So I need to be very careful. I'm both interested, but, and I might even bring it up to her directly. That might be even a talking point, but it's been very interesting. I've never done this before because I read all of them in like a week's period. And you really do start to see things when it's not close together. You do, and I don't know that'd be true for every author, but I guess I wasn't quite ready to say a little bit more sense of like her personal, what I assume for the moment, personality.

being on Front Street once you sort of connect some dots and some recurrent themes and conditions. It's interesting, yeah. The only...

that I've had with reading a writer's whole oeuvre together was my one summer of Toni Morrison and then my other summer of James Salter. And those, they've been written about a lot and discussed a lot. And I've thought about them a lot and we've talked about them. And also I didn't have to interview them. Yeah, you were not in real danger of confronting either of them. Salter was dead and Morrison was Morrison. She was still alive at that point. We weren't going to get in touch. Well, I'm sure it'll be wonderful, but I'm looking forward to listening to that. Yeah.

And this is all in anticipation of. The excuse I have with their publicist is Exit Zero comes out in a couple weeks, which I also read. It's also very good, unsurprisingly, and different and strange. And we will be doing a Patreon episode where we rank the stories in Exit Zero for how Marie-Helene Bertino they are. I was a little worried when I suggested that because we initially used that format for Saunders. And I had a little bit more data in the Jeff GPT for processing those new stories, but

And since I hadn't read the Bertino in a row...

I wasn't sure I was going to be able to have a ranking algorithm internally, but now I absolutely do. By the time I got to Exit Zero, I know how to handle some of this stuff. I mean, I read Beautyland at the end of last year, so it'll have been a while for me. I haven't revisited 2AM or any of the previous ones, but we'll see. She's a vibe. I think we're on a low-key mission here to have Marie Halina Bertino be much more like Red. Is it even low-key? No. What else could we do? Tattoos? I'm high-key.

Team Marielle in Bertino. I also say for people who have read Beautyland and or Cat's Pajamas, which are the two most popular, those are Bertino at her most normal. If that's good or bad. For me, that is. It's not bad. It just is. So that's something else to know. Okay. Shoes to email. Podcast at bookriot.com. Bookriot.com slash listen for show notes. The Patreon, the subs deck. Oh, I put myself on her Instagram. I know. A picture of me.

doing stuff with books and you have to go follow. I'm very proud of you. I mean, look, everyone laughed at me and I'm not sure that this dispels any of that, but I just wanted to, I just wanted to lean into that. Does that make sense? Good job. All right. Thanks so much, Rebecca. We'll talk to you soon.