Announcing Our Winter Partner Bookseller: Tertulia!

We note with pleasure that this Tertulia illustration features two writers we have reviewed! Fernando Pessoa was reviewed in Book Post by Joy Williams, and Oyinkan Braithwaite was reviewed by Elaine Blair.

As our regular readers know, Book Post partners with a different bookstore every few months, to bring readers news of book communities across the land and to support independent bookselling with the links in our posts. This December we are doing something a little different, partnering with a brand-new book discovery app called Tertulia!

Tertulia operates like an online bookstore in that you can order any book in their app or on their website, but they aim to do something more. As developer Sebastian Cwilich, who co-founded Artsy, the world’s largest online art market, told TechCrunch: “The way people actually discover books is through this wide variety of sources. You hear about some book from a friend, you see something on Instagram or TikTok, you read about a book award, or you hear a podcast. What if you could have all of the world’s book conversations in one place?” “It’s a pretty complex problem,” he acknowledges, “to take a conversation and figure out if it’s book-related” and gather it before the eyes of book-buyers. Drawing “all the world’s book conversations” together and making that encounter rich and relevant and meaningful is the technological challenge animating Tertulia.

Book Post readers also know that here we have been a bit skeptical of algorithms and machine learning that simply reinforce popular trends and manipulate us with furtively extracted data. That’s why we’re interested in efforts to take these capabilities in more transparent and enlightening directions. Tertulia uses your guidance, its (evolving) machine learning, and a human editorial eye to refine the recommendations they offer readers; and they do it without selling your data to third parties or allowing third-party advertisers to buy your attention in the app.

It’s notable that some of the success Cwilich had with Artsy was attributed to a “fundamental strategy of partnership versus disruption” with the existing art market; disruption has certainly been the order of the day for the relationship that Tertulia’s main digital bookselling competitor, Amazon, has had with the book business. Cwilich has said that “every decision we make is based on developing a great discovery experience” for readers, but they also consulted with authors and agents before releasing the app and are committed to working with publishers to improve the visibility of books old and new. That would be certainly be a change.

Tertulia, whose name comes from the Spanish and Latin American variant on the European tradition of the salon, which began, like the French and Italian version, in aristocratic households but migrated into bars and cafes and other public gathering places, draws its strength from the magical power of word of mouth, consistently recognized as the most potent recommendation engine for books. The app’s designers have vetted ten thousand different sources for what they bring to you, according to co-founder Lynda Hammes, including social media platforms, podcasts, book club picks, awards, and recommendations by individual writers and other trusted entities (how they crack podcasts is a bit of a mystery). Tertulia asks you questions about your reading interests and whom you’d like to hear from, settings that you can change and adjust, and they bring you daily updated recommendations based on these preferences as well as trending book news. (If Twitter continues to decline as a reliable forum for book talk, Tertulia will be deprived of a significant source of information, but the need for such an app will become even more salient for the rest of us.)

Many covering the development of Tertulia have noticed that since Amazon bought the reader-driven book-recommending platform Goodreads in 2013, they have not done anything to improve the site or bring it up to date. Other efforts to fill the breach and crack the “discovery” conundrum—how we find things of value amidst the swamp of electronic information—include the celebrity “book club” Literati, which offers packages of books recommended by various public figures; as well as the book “dating app” Booky Call, the Goodreads alternatives StoryGraph and Booqsi, and the distributor-sponsored discovery engine Bookfinity. These offer readers book selections based on their stated affinities, and some create opportunities for sharing reviews and building followers as Goodreads does. But Tertulia is the first, to my knowledge, deliberately to embrace book criticism and fold it into a more panoramic view of the larger reading conversation. (The capacity to share lists and personal reviews on Tertulia is coming soon, I am told, as are ebooks and audiobooks.)

The books Tertulia surfaces are “almost like a bestseller list,” says Cwilich, but “the currency is word of mouth.” Sometimes older books rise on the app because they are in the news—for an anniversary, or an event, or (alas) because they have been banned in a public school system. As I write the home page is showing books on soccer, and a comment in the Times from Mel Brooks about Gogol, and an Instagram post from musician Amelia Warner about how much she loved Jennifer Egan’s 2011 book A Visit from the Goon Squad, as well as talk about recently published and reviewed books. Readers who become Tertulia “members” get an ownership stake in the company and a say in policy, as well as a 10 percent discount and free shipping and other perks. (Book Post subscribers are eligible for a free three-month membership: see this post for a link.)

One thing I should tell you: Tertulia offers partners like me “affiliated” revenue, a portion of sales made through links to Tertulia in our posts. For many years affiliated revenue from Amazon was a substantial, shadowy, and virtually exclusive source of earnings for all sorts of outlets—one of the reasons for the proliferation of recommendation sites like “Wirecutter.” Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova was famously outed in 2013 for accepting Amazon affiliate revenue while appearing to run on donations. When Buzzfeed started a book club in 2018, the promise of affiliated revenue from book sales was cited as a motivating force. The Amazon alternative Bookshop.org was founded in 2020 in large part to direct affiliated revenue from books coverage online toward independent bookstores.

When I envisioned Book Post in 2018 I did not want to take affiliated revenue from Amazon, so I started our bookstore partnership program. Some large independent bookstores, like Books & Books in Miami, offer an affiliated links program, but most do not. I found it unseemly though for a reviewing outlet to benefit from the sale of books under review, a position that has come increasingly to seem antediluvian. In the world of “influencers” the line between opinion and marketing becomes murkier and murkier. (The New York Times Book Review notifies readers that the company benefits from affiliate links, but few other book reviews do.) I’ve decided to take affiliated revenue just for this winter’s partnership with Tertulia, as part of their experiment with setting up partnership arrangements with reviewing outlets to make their app friendly to books criticism. So your purchases this winter through Book Post will give us a little lift.

In any case, I’m really looking forward to seeing how this unfolds! We could be paranoid, and I concede that history gives us reason to be (will they always protect our data? will they always keep the algorithm honest?), but they are at least starting from a point of respect for readers and reading and a sincere appetite for substantive coverage of books. If you don’t like where they’re going, show up at a members meeting! I hope it’s interesting for you, too, dear readers. Of course, we will never stop encouraging you to walk into a physical bookstore. Not only can a live person speak to you as a reader in ways no machine ever can, a bookseller also serves your neighborhood in ways it very much needs, putting books in the paths of your fellow citizens and in the hands of schoolchildren and giving your community a complex, evolving mirror in which to think about itself. These gadgets are here to stay, though, and we need to find ways to teach them not to stomp on our higher and deeper needs. So let’s plunge in and see how it goes! Whether Tertulianly or not, please spread reading this holiday season, either by giving actual books or the evergreen gift of Book Post! We’re working on a collaborative offering for you, so, stay tuned…

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The book discovery app Tertulia is Book Post’s Winter 2022 partner bookseller. Book Post subscribers are eligible for a free three-month membership in Tertulia, sign up here.

We partner with booksellers to link to their books and support their work, and bring you news of local book life as it happens across the land. Book Post receives a small commission when you buy a book from Tertulia through one of our posts.

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