Letter to Readers

Begging your indulgence

Dear Readers,

Begging your indulgence, I would like to propose a little pause. My idea is to take a two week “company retreat” (just me), to look inside the gears here at Book Post—something I usually don’t have time to do—and think through a shift in our cadence to adapt to the evolving moment.

The Book Post we have before us is not quite the one I pictured when I began in 2018, after nearly a year of scheming. I had my eye on a more popular medium that drew new readers into the world of books; you can see that orientation if you look at the early installments. I hoped that, in a small way, alongside other initiatives, delivering little book reviews into people’s daily lives might restore—even broaden!—some of the country’s commitment to informed discourse and culturally rich expression. As I worked on the Notebooks for you over the years this vision developed. I had a growing impression that a corrosive estrangement in America is being aggravated by conglomerated media and a technological infrastructure that pitches to the figment of a mass audience—a generalized reader conjured by easy resentments and stereotypes—rather than individual human needs. I wanted to work in at least a small cultural corner of the civic project envisioned by writers like Eric Klinenberg and Robert Putnam, the project of building common space for human-scale gathering—in our case, gathering of the mind. Hence Book Post’s preoccupation with bookstores, libraries, small publishing, local in-person reading. It is an old argument, one I often had with my friend Joseph, whether more culture takes people in the direction of more empathy, understanding, tolerance, wisdom. I’m not sure it does, and I see the potential sentimentalizing in that argument, a defanging of literature. I favor answering it in the plural: put the culture, or cultures, out there, and let them do their magic. Let the labor of weighing them be the shared project, even as it is a solitary one. Perhaps mediating the solitary and the shared is the labor of culture. Perhaps fidelity to both the solitary and the shared is its test. Creating a field for appraisal and growth rather than advancing a single argument is a gesture of faith in human capacities. As an editor (a bookseller, a publisher, a librarian) one commits to the work, not to its fruits.

In the end I seem to have gravitated to something more learned than I intended, an outcome driven possibly by my own local associations. I feel a gap between the works of ambition and insight that I’m trying to introduce readers to and my own more worldly excursions into the business of publishing and news. I wonder if you readers feel that these halves of Book Post harmonize in practice. I’m not sure how whatever struggles we have at Book Post to grow our audience has to do with the awkward gate of this chimera and how much is just the difficulty of “breaking through,” as they say, with complex work in an environment that keeps magnetically orienting itself in other directions. Do I indulge my personal affinities at the expense of a vision that could be meaningful to more people? Or is making something culturally durable and widely persuasive in this moment actually very difficult? Probably both.

It has been challenging for me to bring in enough paying subscribers to pay Book Post’s writers as I feel they should be paid, which is a foundational commitment here, the reason I sought out a reader-supported model. I believe that the labor of writing must be acknowledged and fairly compensated; I also believe in editing—providing readers with a layer of vetting and review, not just unadulterated thoughts—and in an editorial vision that gives readers a multi-vocal experience—not just one pov. The Notebooks I write myself for free readers, and also the headnotes with news that I send with our reviews to paying subscribers, are an afterthought: I didn’t mean for Book Post to be a first-person enterprise. I wrote for you myself in order to have a free offering to share more widely to bring readers into the fold. Now that social media have become a much-diminished source of discovery for writing, I’m not sure how meaningful my free writing is for reaching audiences, but on the other hand when I meet you folks in the wild you say you like it—maybe you’re being polite.

The writing and research on my own posts has eaten into the time spent commissioning and editing the reviews—seeking out new writers, keeping track of new books, going over pieces—the process that is the raison d’être of Book Post. I am always running to catch up and have not been able to increase the proportion of writing by others v. writing by me. In recent months Substack’s recommendation tools have brought in a lot of new free subscribers, but I labor to bring them to the commissioned writing that was our original purpose. I also perhaps mistakenly wish I had a way of attracting readers who are not already in the Substack ecosystem, reading lots of other newsletters as it is. I’ve wondered if I had just a little funding and professional help marketing Book Post out in the world that would make a difference, would help me navigate the distance that books have to cross to find their way into more people’s hands. The pace of a newsletter schedule and the challenge of creating a sustainable model for commissioned writing are out of sync. I would like to bring you more more more books and writers, but maybe the answer here, for now, is to bring a bit less.

So off I go my little retreat to brood on a way forward. I’m all the time advised to be more personal as a newsletter writer, to take readers behind the scenes. I think the expectation there is to open a porthole on one’s daily habits, the local color of life, its small victories of progress and relatable wells of lassitude, not inner struggles over purpose and ambition and value. Another imbalance to consider as a “first person.” We may meanwhile take the moment to revive some of our greatest hits from posts past. We’ll come back with a little plan in early March. If you feel cheated by the diminished pace write to me at office@bookpostusa.com and I will draw out your subscription to make up the difference, though I’d appreciate it of course if you’d extend to us this bit of financial largesse. If you like Book Post and hadn’t considered that we might need an assist—extra help, partnerships, syndicating or sharing our posts, covering our work in press or podcasts, urging us on aggregators, collaborations in your community, gifts to friends would be deeply appreciated and perhaps life-giving. (Publishers, please subscribe and share our reviews with your audiences. Books coverage needs your support.)

Deepest thanks for being a Book Post reader, and more soon!
Your editor,
Ann

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Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.

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Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Some Book Post writers: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Jamaica Kincaid, Marina Warner, Lawrence Jackson, John Banville, Álvaro Enrigue, Nicholson Baker, Kim Ghattas, Michael Robbins, more.

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Image: P. C. Skovgaard, View from Frederiksborg Castle (detail) 1842. Ordrupgaard, Charlottenlund, Denmark