It Needs to Be Said

I am really starting to dislike the New York Times. I mean, more than I used to. And it's not just the snobbish, incestuous book reviews, or the fact that a significant portion of their "news" is stuff I read about in another publication (not infrequently somebody's blog) days before. It's the fact that so much of their coverage is just... not good.

Take this article from this past Wednesday, "Favorite Author Not on Tour? See the Movie."

Can video save the literary star? Ask the tastemakers at Powell's Books, the venerable independent bookstore in Portland, Ore., who are planning a new series of short films featuring authors, to be shown at bookstores, movie-premiere [sic] style.

"New" isn't quite the word. Book publishers have tried using TV ads before. They don't work very well, and online book trailers appear to have been failing for quite some time now. Virtually every medium in existence has been used to promote books, and this is pretty much the only one that routinely has not worked. For some reason, the NYT is unaware of this.

Such films could eventually take the place of in-store book readings, which attract fewer attendees all the time, many booksellers say. "Some authors go to events and are really captivating personalities," said Dave Weich, the marketing manager at Powell's Books. "That does not describe most of them."

Okay, so let me get this straight: we can't bring people in with the promise of meeting the author, but we're going to bring them in with the promise of watching a freakin' videotape? I must have missed something here. Like, who's going to sign the books, for instance, which to my mind is one of the biggest attractions at in-store readings. And really, the fact that authors with unengaging personalities host those readings isn't a sign that the readings are a bad idea; it's a sign that the publisher's publicity department is screwing up.

For the record, the last two readings I went to had amazing draws. One was Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, for her latest book, Team of Rivals, at a Borders Books & Music in downtown Boston. The other was Lisa Randall for her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions (and if I'm the only person on this blog who's ever heard of that book, I won't be entirely surprised), at the Harvard Book Store. Long story short, the reason they both did so well was because they were both planned wisely and reached the right people. Goodwin was an automatic draw in a city Boston's size, but Randall got a ton of attendees because the reading was in a location that made sense for her target audience, and because the bookstore did a good job of letting people know who, what, when, where, and why. Most of the people who came hadn't even read the book.

I honestly can't see these films attracting anyone other than the authors' die-hard fans, and if that's what these bookstores are looking for, they'd be better off holding discussion groups or, you know, anything that doesn't involve sitting around a screen watching someone talk about a book that most of them have probably already read.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but this article really seems like a belated report on a development that's silly to begin with. Its only saving grace is that it wasn't placed in the Business section.

I wish there was some better place to get my news. It occurs to me that I read a ton of publications to begin with, so for the next week I'm going to experiment with the idea of just ditching the Times and using a combination of other sources instead.

To be fair to the Times, by the way, they are better than a lot of the blogs I read. I just don't pay for the blogs.

p.s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4QIJu4hBQ