I loved speaking to about the gothic elements in my new novel and internet addiction and to Yael and Chaya Leah on the
podcast, where I learned all about the high bar that Orthodox influencers are setting with their elaborate Rosh Hashanah tablescapes. I laughed a lot during both these interviews. Thanks, too, to my friend for the incredible blurb for my novel and this Substack interview, where I spoke about what I learned from months of rejections.
In the year 2025, to even pose the question, “What about reviews for my book?” is to reveal your naiveté, your faith in an extinct paradigm.
Oh, you expected your book would be reviewed? By a professional book critic?
When I say “you,” I’m talking to myself.
When my novel Self Care came out in 2020, it was reviewed in The New Republic, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, Bitch, ELLE, VICE, Refinery29, AVClub, and Esquire. I don’t mean it was included in meaningless roundups of “200 books that ate this summer” that recycle the marketing copy on the back of the book—I mean it was reviewed. New York mag put it in the “higbrow brilliant” quadrant of the approval matrix. I was interviewed by Fast Company and the New York Times. VOX’s book critic named it one of her Top 10 books of 2020. This was all accomplished by my in-house publicist.
At the time, I knew how lucky I was, but it’s even more glaring in retrospect. Ninety-eight percent of new releases in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies. I was lucky that the summer my girlboss novel—the same novel that was rejected by more than twenty editors—came out, no one could stop talking about girlbosses.
I wrote the very first “The End of the Girlboss Is Here” article (The Atlantic published their version 48 hours later). It went viral and was one of the Top 10 most read stories on Medium in 2020.
In the five years that followed, Bitch folded. VICE folded. GEN Mag, the Medium publication that had paid me $3,000 to write “The End of the Girlboss Is Here,” folded. The LA Times laid off 23% of its newsroom, including its books editor. The Chicago Sun-Times published a book listicle that was hallucinated by AI. The Associated Press stopped publishing book reviews, which were syndicated to local papers. Congress approved $1 billion in funding cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
At the Intelligencer, a vertical of New York mag, Charlotte Klein recently wrote about the value of cultural critics to legacy media publications:
Criticism has been in decline for so long that you can count the full-time staff positions in certain critical fields on one hand — which makes every loss reverberate even louder and the questions more pressing. Do reviews draw readers? Boost subscriptions? Sell ads? And if the answer is “no,” how do reviews fit with both a publication’s identity and its quest to stay afloat?
Without google, how many full-time professional book critics can you name? I can think of nine.1 Penguin Random House alone publishes 15,000 new titles a year.
If it seems to you that some books that get all the coverage, while the majority of new books get none, you’re not hallucinating.
Klein writes that “stand-alone reviews just don’t generate traffic,” but it’s not traffic (views) that publications need to survive—it’s engagement. Whether you’re a content creator on TikTok or The New York Times, your goal is to get your audience to participate in your content. That’s how you succeed in the attention economy. I wrote about how the Times did this with their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century content.
The Times is ahead of its peers in recognizing that the next generation of cultural tastemakers are reaching audiences through video content and podcasts. Broadway marketer Katharine Quinn posted about the job listing for the new theater critic at the Times: they’re looking for a “digital first” writer who can write criticism and podcast and create video content.
The legacy publications want to work with writers who know how to engage audiences through digital content. A friend DM’d me this Kim France video last night. Kim is a legend in media; her career has taken her from Sassy to SPIN to founding Lucky to… talking to camera about her new advice column for New York’s shopping vertical.
To quote Dayna in If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, “The future of media is retail.”
If we think from an editor’s point of view, about what book coverage is going to get the most engagement and audience participation, knowing full well that standalone reviews rarely get that unless they’re scathing takedowns, we can understand why Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir All the Way to the River is getting so much coverage right now: it’s a book that opens the discourse to lovers and haters alike.
It’s a book that invites what I call “recreational judgment.” Gilbert is a rich, successful, beautiful white woman. Like a Kardashian, she’s willingly put her life on display in public, so we feel like we’re allowed to form opinions on her choices and behavior, whether we’ve read the memoir or not. We went through this same cycle last year with Molly Roden Winter’s memoir More.
There are the profiles and the reviews, and then the content posted in response to the coverage.
My Hype House students asked how much time I spend creating content every week, so I started time tracking: it took me twenty-one minutes to listen to an AI voice read me Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker review of the new Gilbert video while I was out for a run, and another twenty-one minutes to make a TikTok video about the review. My video has been viewed 30,000 times.
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After posting my video, I read the excerpt of All the Way to the River published in The Cut. Then I listened to a podcast episode about the excerpt. I watched several videos on Instagram and TikTok of friends of mine who had been invited to the Starbucks in Times Square for an event with Elizabeth Gilbert and Oprah. Then I read an opinion piece by my friend Kat about the memoir.
For book coverage, in legacy publications like the Times or New York, to make a meaningful impact on the sales of a new book release, in the year 2025, it has to be coverage that generates controversy, discourse, and content. The literary criticism is not enough without the derivative content.
