Staid is a good response — there isn’t a lot of personality in many of these reviews. I’m not sure who the audience is supposed to be.

Lynn — I’m not sure that readers expect to see only ads for books, but that’s what they get.

Now for the biggest issue from today’s LAT books section: where the hell is it? I carefully peel apart the paper on Sundays because the actual content is wrapped in layers of ads and a less-than-careful consumer will lose both Comics II (another rant) and other sections. Maybe one reason for the decline of readership is that people accidentally trash the section with other ads!

Barely anything from small presses, nothing foreign, nothing *new*. Just the same old, same old. I’m more concerned about the gender disparity than anything else, although more genre work would be nice as well.

“The dedicated book review section has a fair bit of advertising, but, not surprisingly, the ads are completely out of sync with the content.”

Doesn’t this go to reader demographics? Advertising is all about demographics. I know readers expect to see only ads for books in the book review section, and that’s the way it is for the most part in the New York Times Book Review (well, there was that ad by Lulu, not selling the books, but soliciting authors), but I could understand it if ads for cars, trips, jewelry, etc., were there, too. Someone is holding the line.

I blogged recently about trying to make money off my “literary” blog. I went out and got two “sponsor” ads (a smart CPA whose clients include authors) and a search engine optimization service (who can help drive traffic). I’d be seen cartwheeling around New York City if I could snag an ad for an international airline. My visitors are from around the world. I’m not holding the line.

Lynne AKA The Wicked Witch of Publishing

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2006/08/why-do-critics-ignore-certain-books.html

However, the critical point is not that Nora Roberts (or James Patterson or John Grisham or Tom Clancy) would increase readership — these particular authors are beyond needing reviews to sell books (though certainly fair game when it comes critically analyzing their work). If readers feel excluded from the book review section — and the LAT has improved somewhat since Ulin took over, though I have a habit of picking up the section during the bad weeks. They remain a little too oriented toward “Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Mishugas of the Yiddish Theater in America” — which is probably a great book if you’re interested in the subject — than reaching out to a broader readership.

To bring in readers, I really believe that book review sections need to mix it up a bit. If you want to introduce a broader audience to Yiddish theater or disaffected Hungarian moroseness (yes, being Hungarian, that is a topic near and dear to my heart), then you need, well, a broader audience. Creating a review section that says to a large segment of the book-buying public “nothing to see, move on” reduces the potential audience for that book.

Newspapers are advertising-supported businesses. Advertisers go where the readers go. Readers go where they find content that interests them. Arts coverage in newspapers needs to pay for itself, just as news coverage does. If you increase the readership of the book review section, then you increase the value to the people who pay the bills. And I really think that has to start with valuing readers — all of them.