When Malcolm Boyd (Painted Horses, Cloudmaker) saw the article ” All You Can Read” by Parul Sehgal in the November 1 New Yorker , his reaction was “It reads like dystopian science fiction!”
Further: ” .., the book ( his recent Cloudmaker)did not garner a single meaningful review in any significant outlet, nor did Grove put any effort into publicity or promotion, which just seems bizarre after the initial investment. Probably some of it is pandemic fatigue, but I think a lot of it has to do with the identitarian politics of media in general at this point. My editor’s former assistant (who happens to be an enrolled Kiowa!) told me there was some concern at Grove that the book would be interpreted as endorsing “American exceptionalism,” which is a baffling assertion in any case, but may explain why they tried to publish as quietly as possible. Crazy times!”
I think the problem is in the system and is bigger than that, affecting books as disparate as mine, Malcolm’s , and even Michael Gruber’s (why he is forced to self -publish these days). Amazon is just not set up for sale of our books, which tend to start by selling slowly and whose virtues are spread by word of mouth.
Consider:
“On 2018, some 1.6 million books were reportedly self-published — all of this on top of the tens of thousands released by traditional publishing houses. How can a writer work within this flood? It’s not an entirely new quandry. One of the “women of the inkiest description” from “New Grub Street” surveys the deluge of her own era with dismay: “When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. What unspeakable folly!”