Episode 56: Ann Kjellberg on the Importance and Future of Book Reviewing

Ann Kjellberg is the Founding Editor of the Book Post book review, an innovative newsletter-based book review service which delivers thoughtful, in-depth literary criticism from distinguished writers directly to subscribers’ inboxes.

With nearly 30 years of experience at the New York Review of Books, Kjellberg brings a wealth of expertise to the evolving world of literary journalism. She joins the BookSmarts Podcast to explore the changing landscape of book reviewing, offering a unique perspective on the challenges facing book reviews in the digital age. This episode delves into the decline of traditional book reviews, the limitations of short-form content platforms like BookTok and Bookstagram, and the critical mission of preserving the influence of book reviewing for the future.

Subscribe to the Book Post newsletter at books.substack.com or bookpostusa.com. Follow them on all social media platforms at @bookpostUSA.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
This week on the Booksmarts Podcast, I’m chatting with Anne Kjellberg, who is a book reviewer and served on the staff of the New York Review of Books for 30 years. She’s the editor of the book reviewing newsletter Book Post, which she started in 2018. Book Post aspires to fill some of the gap that was left by the disappearance of the daily newspaper, Book Review, substantive book coverage for a broad audience. Ann, thanks for joining me today.

Ann Kjellberg
Thanks so much for having me on.

Joshua Tallent
I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you. I mentioned to you before we started recording that I don’t think I’ve talked to book reviewers before on the podcast so this is kind of a new experience and kind of an interesting area of publishing that maybe we need to talk more about. Ann, you’ve got a very long history, a long experience in this part of the industry, and you’ve been involved in book reviewing for a really long time. So tell us about the field and how it’s changed, and how you think that affects what you did when you were starting Book Post in 2018? Where is book reviewing right now?

Ann Kjellberg
That is the question I was trying to answer, which was an obscure question even at that moment. I suppose everyone feels as though their own career spreads over some historic span but when I began in publishing, I actually worked in a publishing house first. I worked at Farra, Strauss, and Giroux in the 80s. Back then, the main job of publicity was placing review copies in the hands of local newspapers and radio stations. That was what you did, and that was how you got the news of books out. During the time that I’ve been a book review editor, after FSG, I went to work at the New York Review in 1989. That has been completely transformed. That way of reaching people about books as part of their normal daily reading diet has just kind of disappeared. I think you hear the loss of that when you speak to people in publishing and in publicity all the time, that there’s no longer a way to talk with people about books that is something that they encounter as part of their daily reading diet. That there’s this big division between people who are intensely interested and everyone else. A feature of that was when I began working in a magazine, a big part of magazine editing wasn’t just arranging to get articles that are great. It was lining them up together to be a part of a whole experience. You put together a magazine that people would read as a whole, and it would include things that grab people’s attention, but it would also include things that they didn’t know they were interested in. So you would end up reading about physics, even though you thought you were only there to read about Norman Mailer or something really attention grabbing. Without that kind of, people now use the word curated, which I feel we used to just call editing, without that experience where you’re kind of guided through past one thing and another, what tends to happen is that the headline-grabbing stuff gets all of the attention, and the things that people used to see side by side or be kind of drawn into just falls away. And it’s very similar to the discovery problem in bookselling that it’s now become much easier to sell the big sellers and harder to sell the smaller things that you used to be able to put in people’s path as they walk through a bookstore, as they made their way through a magazine. The big challenge. I talk to people in book publishing all the time, and they’re angry. They are always coming after us, and even more than me, big media for more coverage. But what they’re not noticing or taking fully account of is the catastrophic damage that’s been done to journalism during that period of time. Book publishing is arguably more healthy than serious journalism. Everybody in the world of journalism is trying to find ways to get attention for more substantive nutritious information, and in lieu of the frothy or propagandistic or excitable stuff that tends to rise to the surface. Books coverage has been a part of this whole problem that we face politically and everything, the difficulty of getting intellectually challenging things in front of people’s eyes.

Joshua Tallent
We’re talking about a collapse of journalism. We’re talking about a collapse of even the expectation that there would be certain amounts of content that you would not expect, but then be exposed to. How much do you think is actually the result of short form content? It’s almost like the human brain, and over the last 10, 15, 20 years has kind of been changed, and we’re expecting content to be short. That, obviously, is impacted by how we use the internet and how we use social media and those kinds of things. I wonder if the day of the book review, at least this idea of the Book Review magazine, if it’s actually past. I don’t want to say that. I don’t want it to be the case necessarily, but how do we encourage people to think that that’s beneficial, right? To go search out that kind of longer form, surprising content. Is that even possible in today’s world, do you think?

Ann Kjellberg
I totally think so. When I started Book Post after leaving, I was at the review for a very long time. Substack actually came to me in the early days before they began, and invited me to do a, I had started a literary magazine, and they asked if I wanted to do a literary magazine on substack. And my boss at the Book Review, at the New York Review, Bob Silvers had just died, and we were kind of adrift and trying to think of what came next. And I really felt like we needed to do things that were shorter in this environment if we wanted to hold people’s attention. When the Review was founded in 1962, a great weather was made of how the pieces had to be long. Previously to that, there were complaints in the intellectual world that book reviews were too short and too superficial. I used to teach literary journalism, and I had this very funny little essay by George Orwell complaining about how he had to pack in these totally disparate books into an article, 200 words and how it was impossible. Book reviews have been at all different lengths over the course of their history. When they came to me with substack, they had this idea that I thought was insane at the time, that email was going to be the way that people communicated with each other in the future, which seemed dead. I mean, my child never opened his emails in 2018, and but then newsletters did become a real thing because it was this more intimate, direct way of communicating with people. It was something purposeful that you had sought out. Now you have self-published writers developing their own email lists. That’s an important part of having an audience. So, email came through as an unexpected way of reaching people directly. And I think, you know, podcasts, there are all kinds of new forms in which we can talk to people, and we just need to find ways to get books into that.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I still decry the death of RSS feeds and blogs that were in RSS readers. I used to read tons of blogs in RSS readers, and then they all shut down, and basically all went away, and people stopped using that method. But audio, as far as especially podcasts, has become another staple of mine. You’re right. Things change. How people consume content, what they’re looking for, how they discover new content, is always changing. This kind of leads to a question about that kind of content, those different platforms. BookTok, obviously, is really big, and Bookstagram, and they sell a lot of books, and they introduce a lot of readers to books, and a lot of celebrities to lead readers. That’s a new idea in platforms that in the last decade or so has really become popular. So what do you think is missing in that approach that reviewing can still accomplish? Where do you think book reviews, the way you’re doing them in the Book Post, what are they missing?

Ann Kjellberg
Well, I think BookTok on one level is great, and one of the huge crises of our moment is trying to find ways to make people feel more drawn into reading. I do think that reading is fundamentally different from other ways of gaining information, and that we need to try to promote a grounded reading life in America and not let that go. BookTok and before that, you had Bookstagram, and then before that, we even had BookTube, which was a thing at the time. And all of what all of these media have in common is that they’re primarily visual. BookTube maybe less so, but there’s only so much that they can communicate about the complexity of a book, and the engagement with them is always either enthusiasm, promotion, excitement or canceling and denigration, and we’ve got to find ways to cultivate in our society more subtle ways of addressing ourselves to information than just promoting and decrying. The great critics in the past modeled for us engaged exciting ways of being a human wrestling with ideas. I think if we can try to find ways of insinuating that kind of more subtle, textured, critical way of thinking into books coverage, that that’s a piece of making more critical, subtle ways of thinking a part of our sort of entire information culture.

Joshua Tallent
I’m curious how you see book reviewing pushing the other direction? All of that that you were just talking about, those subtle qualities. Do you think that it’s possible to do that in the BookTok, Bookstagram, short form video-based content. Or do you think that it needs to be done in print or in words? It needs to be done in a different form? How do you see those things potentially interacting, or maybe a way to encourage more of that in that other short form side?

Ann Kjellberg
Well, I think that Bookstagram and BookTok wouldn’t even exist if there weren’t some words and captions. In my book reviews, I try to keep them short. I ask for 700 words. I also come out of the world of poetry, so I think you can say things fast. I do believe that it’s an important part of talking about books with people, to be able to communicate the qualities of a book quickly enough to someone else to be able to draw them in, not to have to assume a lot of knowledge on their part as they enter a book review. All of those qualities, there’s a connection between having to communicate something in the one-minute span of a BookTok and in a book review, where you have a whole book before you, and you’re trying to capture someone’s attention around it. So I do think that it serves a role but it’s only going to go so far, because oral culture and visual culture just do not have the staying power. You’re not called to account for something that you said and was heard in passing, in the same way that written culture lingers, becomes a part of the discourse, a part of history. And that’s the reason why books remain the sort of repository that they are for our kind of developed thinking.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, so you chose newsletter form and got in on the ground floor with substack. So what were you reaching for with deciding to go with publishing book reviews in newsletter form?

Ann Kjellberg
Well, I had no idea it would become what it became. I was initially skeptical, but I did love this idea of the writer speaking directly to the reader, like it’s a kind of letter. The first newsletters have the word letter in them. I try to use writers who have well established reputations and are writers of books and accustomed to working in big forms. I’m always encouraging writers to invent with this a little bit and try to speak in a more intimate way with the reader. I think that piece of it is exciting.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. When you talk about marketing today, especially. I’m gonna bring up the AI thing all over again. We have these conversations about AI all the time now, but there is an element of human connection that we still look for in any kind of marketing. I feel like people, as we get more and more down the AI path, are going to be looking more and more for the human connection in things, having a real person who really can express things in a human way. There’s a limit to how much of, at least right now, AI can really do that. There’s a point of saying this newsletter is me talking to you. It’s not some computer talking to you. It’s not even just a short form video or something, but it’s something deep, it’s something different, it’s something interesting, and it’s something personal. There might be an element of that that I think we’ll be looking for more and more in the coming years.

Ann Kjellberg
Yeah, that’s so a part of the way that my thoughts have developed while I’ve been working on this. I started, as I mentioned to you before. Alongside my book reviewing, I do some writing about the publishing industry and the book selling industry, and I partner with local bookstores to link to them in my reviews so that I won’t be linking to anybody else. And I feel that what I communicate to readers with that is this notion of local book cultures, of being close to the people who are doing the work, of the importance of supporting the people who are doing the work, buying the books, paying for the newsletter. Your financial contribution isn’t just in the form of your attention through this sort of data harvesting algorithm method, which is sort of harmful to inter-human connection. For me, it’s all connected with the personal voice and developing a connection with the audience, and then also developing these human scale readerly connections through book selling and libraries and kind of thriving book cultures where people live.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah. So do you think it’s possible to revive the influence of book reviewing?

Ann Kjellberg
I do think so, but I think we have to try to be creative and not despairing. I have a lot of trouble getting attention out. Even though books publishers complain a lot that there isn’t enough reviewing, they’re very distracted by influencer culture, and I wish that they were more supportive of book reviewing, shared book reviews more online, subscribed, talked us up, because I think that that book reviewing, writing about books in an engaged and critical way, instead of just a kind of consumerist, sort of celebrity or promotional way, in the end, benefits publishing and benefits the growth of a readership. There are so many opportunities within the current technological environment to grow those ways of communicating with people. I was just going to say I stumbled into newsletters as as one try at that but they are always new things coming forward.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, I am curious. Changing gears just briefly here before we finish up but I’m curious to learn a little bit, since I don’t know very much about it, how do you choose what books to review? How do you decide which ones to include in your newsletter? What’s the process of doing that review? Give me a little bit of the background on that.

Ann Kjellberg
Oh, well, that’s the incredibly fun part. That’s barely even a job. In the old days at The Review, everything came there. Books would pile up in the mail room, and I would sit there opening them up with the mailroom people and combing through the piles of them. I would sit up late at night with my boss, Bob, and we would just flip through them and brainstorm about who they should go to. We’re always trying to read smaller journals and stuff. Finding the right people. The real art of it is to find authors who were not obvious connections, where there will be a little spring of surprise that you connected these people together and that the author was already waiting to write this thing. So there’s a spring of surprise in that. I think we’re expected to be kind of scientific and thorough in a way we can’t possibly be. I’m not looking out over the whole world and picking the 18 books that are the most important and the 18 writers who are the best. I’m also trying to have a diversity of subjects, to cover science, to cover history, to cover economics, to cover fiction, to cover poetry. Very often things fall away, just because I couldn’t find somebody who wasn’t busy or whose kid wasn’t sick. There’s a lot of circumstance involved, but mostly you’re trying to find kind of a magical connection between a writer and a subject.

Joshua Tallent
That makes sense. Again, we’re talking about, how do I as a reader find new content, new things that I’ve never would have seen. The idea of going to one place and seeing a breadth of interesting content, interesting books, having something revealed to me. That’s appealing to people who are readers. I think that there’s a value to that. And it’s interesting that there are people like you who are still doing that process and doing things in kind of, I wouldn’t say a random way, but really thinking about it in a thoughtful way. There’s a bunch of books. There’s hundreds of thousands of books that are published every single year. You can’t possibly review them all, but the ones that you pick are the ones that you found for some reason and found the right person to write about, and found the right reason to bring it to your audience and there’s something to that. I think, that for a reader, that that has to be a reason to go and to subscribe to Book Post and to have that connection to the literary world in a way that I won’t get walking into a bookstore and randomly grabbing a book off the bookshelf, right? There’s somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about, who’s able to tell me, hey, this is a book you should think about reading.

Ann Kjellberg
I always used to think that a magazine is kind of like walking into a room full of people, or it creates the illusion of that in a way that readers sort of like, even though they’re not actually so sociable. It’s like a kind of readerly invocation of being in a room full of people, and you’re not covering the whole field of everything, but you are giving this kind of sense, this tip of the iceberg sense, of being in a cultivated universe. We are people who read together. It’s just a little tiny fragment, but you have the feeling that, like you open the door, you hear this conversation, and when you close it, it goes on, but it’s always there.

Joshua Tallent
And I’m going to encourage people to go and open the door, because, that’s what we need, right? We need to have that opportunity to hear those people talking, have that engagement and have that ability to see what other people are saying about things we would never talk about or never hear about ourselves. That’s really cool. I really appreciate you joining me today. I really appreciate your context here and and tell us a little bit more about Book Post. What is it about? How does how do people get access to it? Well, we know what it’s about. How do people get access to it? What do you want them to know about that?

Ann Kjellberg
It has a very simple substack, which I thought up before I even had a name. It’s called books.substack.com. Easily remembered, and then I also have a landing page called bookpostusa.com so if you just go there, you can subscribe. There’s a free subscription where you get a little bit of a taste of everything. Or the paying subscription, which really mostly goes toward paying the writers. It’s important to me that they be paid a professional rate to write these pieces. And once a week, you’ll get a review. And then once a month, one of my sort of commentary things about the state of book publishing. I’m happy to give a discount to any sort of student or person in financial distress or who needs it. So you just contact me and ask me for that. Why don’t I just say, lsteners to this podcast, send me an email and I’ll give you a comp so you can try it out, and then I’m on all of the usual social media at @bookpostUSA.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. Thank you for that. Okay, so everybody listening, you need to go to Book Post and let Ann know that you listen to the podcast and take a look at Book Post. It’s a great review magazine. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. And thank you so much for joining me today.

Ann Kjellberg
Thank you for having me on

Joshua Tallent
That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a rating or review on Apple podcast or Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also, we really appreciate it when you share the podcast with your colleagues, and if you have topics, suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at Joshua@Firebrand tech.com thanks for joining us and getting smarter about your books.