The Search for What Sells Books, or The Failure of Institutions

The Washington Post, Geese, Sinners, Book Clubs, and What Makes Something "Work"

Institutional failure is all around us. It is safe to say that the book publishing business is far downstream of the most concerning of the widespread collapse of places that were once meant to protect, help, or inform us.

There is little of the consensus of how most Americans feel reflected in the policies adopted by our elected officials or in the largest, most-resourced news organizations. One piece of the powerful media organizations is taken up by outright propaganda, a purposeful lying about reality. The remaining piece is an establishment that seems to offer the same tone of political conversation from fifteen years ago, ignoring the dire situation people can see and hear with their own eyes and ears. It’s no surprise that this disconnect between institutions and people extends to the arts.

This week, The Washington Post seems to be giving up on covering culture entirely, laying off hundreds of writers, and ousting one of the few remaining book critics that literary people might know by name, Ron Charles. The latest nail in what all consumers of arts and culture—books, music, and movies—have known for a while: the age of hallowed institutions being able to make a piece of art successful are long over.

Few institutional players have the power they once did to draw attention to a subject and drive demand for it. To “make” a book, a tv show, or band with coverage like a review or interview. The same disconnect between politics and community is happening for culture as the big organizations covering art are increasingly failing to deliver and, not helping the matter, are rapidly disappearing or defanged.

Stop Trying to Make GEESE Happen

Geese is a band that came out of nowhere and has the most institutional backing of any indie band in recent memory. If you started to hear about Geese recently, you likely heard about them in the same way: “this is the greatest band you don’t yet know about yet.” But, somehow, that’s what everyone was saying about them. Every write-up of Geese’s performances is some version of “the hottest ticket in town” and “something that will be remembered for generations.” Pitchfork gave their album a 9.0. They’re in the lineup for Governors Ball. According to The New Yorker Geese “Won 2025”. Tickets to see this “best kept secret” are already $200-400 dollars.

Geese have the full monte of institutional media support and yet they only have two million monthly listeners on Spotify. That puts them ranked 7,193^rd just above other household names (just kidding) like Jax, Junior Senior and Layton Greene, and just below Mc Ster, Wegz, and Luma Elpidio.

This is not a judgment of Geese or their music. You can have legit influence and fans even if you aren’t pop stars. Every artist does not have to be big to be successful. The Clipse (Spotify ranking #5,464), a brilliant rap duo, have made a similar full-force media push around their first album in 16 years, including performing at the Vatican and a delightful interview between the two brothers at GQ, among many other publicity . Granted, including Pusha T as a solo artist, they are much more popular. Still, the point remains: massive institutional support has brought Geese all of the attention, cache, and venues, but the legacy institutions can’t make Geese happen no matter how hard they are trying to.

A Book Review No Longer Sells Copies

Just like the power and influence of traditional publicity vehicles are waning in music and other parts of culture, it is also happening in the world of books. Every editor and publisher has experienced getting a raft of glowing media and review coverage only for the book to sell a couple thousand copies. A great review in The New York Times or NPR guarantees increasingly less in terms of conversion to readers.

As little as five or six years ago, nearly every Read with Jenna or Reese’s book club pick had a better than decent shot to hit the bestseller list. That’s no longer the case. For Reese in particular, the results have been far more bifurcated than ever, especially when taking chances on new authors, some selling half a million, others only thousands. However, institutions whether they are news organizations, celebrities, and tastemakers don’t want to just go silently into the night, they figure out ways to stay relevant and maintain their power even if they can no longer mint the next star. In real time you’re watching these book clubs and other media pivot as a result.

Consumers Make Things Happen, or The Age of Vampire Mass Media

Established publicity machines no longer lead culture, they follow it. What remains of book coverage goes many times to books and authors that already have an established record of success (George Saunders, Michael Pollan, etc.) or have already achieved success by the time they make the news (Heated Rivalry, Alchemised, Mona’s Eyes, etc.). You may notice that every highly successful book has the same wall-to-wall institutional coverage, dozens of reviews and best-of lists, but it is folly to mix correlation with causation. Institutions are flocking to something when they feel the heat, but many times this happens post-fact of the book’s success. Or, even if they are there at the ground level, it seems dubious at this point to assume it is the coverage that is the secret ingredient to success.

The same thing is happening in every creative industry. Take Sinners, the blockbuster movie directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan, as an example. The initial coverage and industry support was not just lacking, but openly critical of the film. Prematurely, a narrative began to form early on that the film was a flop because it wasn’t on track to recoup its budget after opening weekend. As the year went on, Sinners defied the long-held industry belief (based on prior results) that success is determined in the first week (book publishing is just as guilty of judging winners and losers too quickly in this new environment as well).

Sinners gained momentum through word of mouth, until the force of the audience adoration for the film was undeniable. Despite early dismissiveness, Sinners grossed nearly $400 million at the box office. It may have not been the industry’s, the publicist’s, or the critic’s favorite film, but it was the people’s. In the past, the establishment powers might have ignored Sinners success and been able to put their finger on the scale for a film that fits more in the mold of what they traditionally reward. No longer. Sinners, a popcorn and horror film, both genres that typically aren’t critically rewarded, received the most nominations in Oscar history. To stay relevant, established players must latch on to a product they didn’t co-sign or push from the start.

Films like Sinners provide a working model for how music, film, and books will become successful going forward and how media will respond. We’re in a vampiric media ecosystem, where the most powerful players, instead of trying to drive conversation, will be latching onto what’s already working, amplifying it, and trying to own its popularity and take a piece of it for themselves (see: every Taylor Swift album rollout).

You can see this vampiric dynamic even with the big celebrity book clubs, which are making more sure bets as their influence dwindles—they are choosing authors that have already had huge bestsellers, classics with enormous, generations-old established fan bases, and branching out into once-mainstream-shunned genres like fantasy. Early last year we talked about the ubiquity of Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Espresso” and the big business support looming behind this inescapability. “Espresso” is not a contradiction but an extension of the idea age of vampire mass media. Institutions have plenty of the power left, not to start the fire, but to be the accelerant for explosion if an undeniable earworm, page turner, or blockbuster comes along.

If Not Institutions Then What?

The natural question becomes, if you can’t rely on an institution then what makes anything rise to the level where institutions decide to jump on the band wagon and blow something up?

Parasocial Relationships

A large part of what drives popularity in art and its consumption are parasocial relationships between creator and consumer. A YouTuber recently self-financed a film, Iron Lung, with a $3 million dollar budget and was able to secure his own distribution in movie theaters. Iron Lung grossed $27 million its opening weekend, not off of any large marketing or publicity campaign in traditional media, but based off of the creator’s personal connection he had built directly with fans, letting them follow him for every step of the filmmaking process. Another OG popular YouTuber John Green now has all of the support of the institutional media apparatus, and yet as we know that’s not enough to make his work of nonfiction one of the bestselling books of the year. The success of his most recent book probably wasn’t based on the topic, tuberculosis, but the one-on-one connection he has been building with millions of fans for going on twenty years.

Parasocial relationships is not a synonym for “platform.” A large microphone and the ability to reach a lot of people as evidenced by the decreasing power of institutions is simply not enough. A Bonafide celebrity like Jeremy Renner has access to more institutions and is more of a household name than someone like John Green. Renner has twenty million followers on Instagram; John Green has two million. Yet Renner sold one fifth of the number of copies of his memoir (still a strong number) as John Green’s history of a disease. Success is based on an individual’s intensity of connection to an artist. Intensity, not overall visibility, is what is driving culture.

Hidden Networks

As we saw from the streets of Minneapolis, when institutions fail people, localized communities step in to fill the void. Protecting and taking care of each other where the traditional infrastructure will not. This is what is happening, with lower stakes, for art and culture. Often hidden, unnamed groups coming together to form their own networks in lieu of institutions being able to accurately identify what people want or care about. It is quite heartening.

The number of independent bookstores that opened last year numbered 422, an increase of 24% over the prior year. Overall, the number of independent bookstores has doubled since Covid. An all-star local bookseller like Books Are Magic can pack a 70-person book event for a literary novelist on a given Tuesday in below freezing weather. That’s not a concentrated, institutional level of influence like Good Morning America, but indie bookstores provide the perfect metaphor for the thousands of little nodes that can replace one big institution. Book clubs, churches, recreational sports leagues, online forums, niche hobbies, these are the small-network spaces gaining power to break through to people as we see institutional influence recede. Are big publishers, giant film studios, and the oligopoly of music labels setup to reach these groups? Most definitely not. But it behooves them to figure it out and quickly.

Clutch also received a glowing NYT review, but I purchased the book long before, seeing the event at Books Are Magic and finding the description intriguing

Podcasts & Substack

Publishers, film studios, and record labels are still figuring out what this new paradigm means in terms of creating and predicting success. An extension of the more extreme direct parasocial relationships are slightly gentler forms of direct connections with readers.

Podcasts provide one such form of media with the direct one-on-one “conversation” they can establish with listeners (you can include the podcast’s predecessor radio as well in this). Of all people, Joe Rogan remains the most surefire podcast to deliver book sales. Not every author, but especially in the spaces of true crime and military books, a relatively unknown writer’s one appearance on the show can single-handedly kick off an entire publicity tour and generate tens of thousands of copies in sales. Displaying the kind of attention that turns into action that a major television appearance might once have had. Call Her Daddy, a pseudo-Rogan-equivalent for women, may have a similar power in time to sell books—Jennette McCurdy was on and her new novel has been near the top of the bestseller list for its first two weeks (it is hard to tell how effective the podcast is in selling books, Reddit says “yes.” McCurdy is publishing coming off of a massive, millions of copies, bestselling memoir, but that doesn’t always translate to fiction sales). And there are of course numerous podcasters who have successfully followed more of the parasocial example above, building their own relationships, and then producing a book for that audience.

Substack (putting bias aside) is one of the few modes of media, newsletters, that along with podcasts offers a low-entry cost to establishing connections directly. Substack, although becoming more crowded and social-media-like by the day, feels like it’s stepping in where traditional media coverage and conglomerated social media get farther afield of delivering the art and culture people actually want.

Guess what? Ron Charles days after being let go from The Washington Post is already on Substack and has 19,000 subscribers (up from 14,000 in the two days it took to write this!). Now that he’s writing serious, long-form posts replacing his beat fully at the paper, the engagement on his posts is through the roof (from dozens of likes and comments to hundreds). His first proper post-Post post was highly enjoyable and felt freer than his strictly book review coverage for the newspaper did.

America’s Best Idea — Sabotaged

Charles included his own personal politics (a takedown of this administration’s embarrassingly false religiosity), a round-up of book-to-film projects, a shoutout to a custom book-related Valentine’s Day card printer, and more. He writes that his newsletter will be “about books, writers and whatever’s rattling around our literary culture (and my head)”— now that’s not a bad idea for a newsletter at all.

Who knows, with a direct line to readers untethered from institutional machinery, Charles, plugged directly into your inbox, might have even more influence on what people read than he did before.