The Book Club Industrial Complex, Speculative Detectives, Remembering Maxine Clair, and Other Sunday Sundries

A Sunday roundup of writing-related things from the past week.

The Reading Room by Heinrich Lukas Arnold, 1840

Attention Speculative Fiction and Detective Fiction Readers (and Writers!)

If you’re a fan of SFF and noir fiction, then I hope you’ll check out—and consider supporting—this Kickstarter for The Speculative Detective Agency anthology. I have a story in the anthology alongside writers like Amber Sparks, Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, and Monique Laban. My story was a blast to write and the whole anthology sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Also, if you’re a writer of SFF/detective fiction, they are taking submissions (although there are only a few days left to submit).

The Book Club Industrial Complex

Literary Substack loves to grouse about how x, y, or z is ruining literature and warping publishing. (I include myself, of course.) But many of the favorite targets, like MFA workshops or the blurb economy, always feel off to me. It’s easy to forget that our little slice of literary interests is a fraction of the gigantic publishing pie. If you want to know what has enormous pull—what truly determines what is published and how marketing budgets are allocated—then you need to look at the Book Club Industry Complex.

The power that the big book clubs—especially Oprah, Jenna, and Reese, but also Book of the Month and a few others—have on publishing is enormous. Their picks trickle down to smaller book clubs around the country and much of the bestseller list is decided by these big names. But their influence is even bigger than that. Publishing people have told me that in both the US and the UK, clubs will sometimes pick books that haven’t yet been acquired by a publisher and thus ensure their publication. This is sometimes formalized and public. For example, Penguin Random House has a partnership with Jenna Bush Hager called Thousand Voices Books. Sarah Jessica Parker has a partnership with Zando (formerly it was with Hogarth). In such cases, the celebrity BCIC is literally deciding what books are published.

Connections, networking, and cronyism play a role in all parts of publishing. Perhaps all parts of life. But it can get extreme in the Book Club Industrial Complex. Case in point, the New York Times has a wild article this week about Amy Griffin’s bestselling memoir The Tell. The whole story is… something. Go read it. The gist is that Griffin did MDMA therapy and believed to uncover previously unknown memories of violent sexual abuse by a middle-school teacher. The article casts doubt on the claims, which do not have corroborating evidence and did not bring forward any other alleged victims. I will not weigh in on that aspect of the story. I haven’t read the book and will not pretend to know if the claims are true or not.

(I will say that I saw many people surprised to learn that publishers didn’t flag anything when fact-checking the book. Publishers do not typically fact-check memoirs. They probably should! But currently, publishers give memoirs a legal read and that’s that. The rest is on the author.)

Outside of the question of the veracity of the claims, what stood out to me is that Griffin is a venture capitalist who is “part of a rarefied world where billionaires and celebrities share private planes to remote getaways and display their friendships on Instagram.” She was personal friends with many of the celebrities who decide what books sell. They put that power to work for Griffin, seemingly without disclosing the connections: “‘It’s an unbelievable book,’ Gwyneth Paltrow said on the Goop podcast, introducing Ms. Griffin without revealing that the author was an investor in Ms. Paltrow’s business.” The book went on to be an Oprah Book Club pick and promoted by Jenna Bush Hager, Reese Witherspoon, and many other rulers of the BCIC.

While most book club market manipulation isn’t this ridiculous—where a venture capitalist can call upon their celebrity yacht vacation connections and heads of companies they’ve invested in to ensure their book is a bestseller—their influence on what gets published is huge. And I think it would be a mistake to think their influence is limited to memoir or even commercial fiction. Soon after Griffin, Oprah picked Substack’s most-discoursed literary author, Ocean Vuong. Many bestselling literary fiction titles are bestsellers because of book clubs.

And even outside of the specific BCIC picks, there is a knock-on effect of publishers spending more money on the type of books that might be book club picks. If you are annoyed at how commercial so much literary fiction has become, well, Oprah has a lot more influence than Iowa.

The Nub and Rub of Track Records

If you’re interested in a good but depressing article on the state of publishing, Tajja Isen at The Walrus has a long article on how track records determine sales.

Sales track—or simply track, in industry parlance—is an invisible force shaping contemporary literature. Much depends on that number. On the basis of track, published authors struggle to keep going; those just starting out fear their careers will be severed at the root. Track shapes how an agent pitches a book and how editors assess whether to buy it. Track restricts reader choice by dictating which books are served up as the next big thing (and the next, and the next) and by kneecapping writers deemed insufficiently commercial. The primacy of track, in other words, is a barometer for the health of literary culture. Right now, when the industry is especially skittish, the obsession with finding the next blockbuster hit privileges the survival of the few at the expense of the many.

One point I’d add to the article is that accounts—that is to say bookstores, Amazon, Target, book clubs—are a major force behind why track matters. Basically, publishers do not sell to readers. They sell to retailers. And these accounts tell publishers how many copies of a book they will buy. If an author’s last book sold poorly, the accounts will say they’re not buying many of the next book. It isn’t merely a matter of risk-averse editors.

I probably will write a whole article on this in the future. But the sad truth is that much of the success or failure of a book is determined long before a book ever reaches the hands of readers, because of factors like account buys and book club picks.

Remembering Maxine Clair

Friday morning, I saw a New York Times obituary for the author Maxine Clair, who passed away at the age of 86. Clair was an excellent author. Her most famous book, Rattlebone, is a Winesburg, Ohio-esque novel about a fictional African American neighborhood. It is well worth your time. Clair is also one of the reasons I’m a writer today.

Clair taught at my undergraduate college, and I took one of her creative writing classes back when I still dreamed of being either a philosophy professor or a punk rock singer. (Not sure why I thought those were the two options for me.) While I’d always been a big reader, I hadn’t ever thought of writing as a career. Clair was the first person to see something in my fiction. She challenged me creatively and encouraged me in office hours, and helped set me on the path to, well, where I am today.

A particular memory I have was a time Clair gave us one of those in-class assignments meant to expand a writer’s range by making them write about a topic they normally would avoid. She told everyone in class to write about disposing of a mouse caught in a mousetrap, but—having clocked me as someone who was at home in the weird and macabre—said, “Except for you, Lincoln. I want you to write about a man taking care of his elderly mother, whom he loves.” (I found the exercise in my old files just now. It begins with a mechanic scrubbing grease off his hands so he can prepare a meal for his mother.)

I wish that I had kept in touch with Clair. And I hope one day for students of mine to remember me as fondly as I remember Clair. She was a great writer and an excellent and thoughtful teacher. RIP.

Substack Bits and Bobs

My last article, “Style Is More than Sentences,” got included in the “Best of Substack” roundup for the week. If you missed it, here’s a link:

Style Is More than Sentences

I also passed 18,000 subscribers this week, which really is a bit mind-blowing. When I started this newsletter, I thought it would probably max out at a couple thousand. Thank you for subscribing, all 18,000 (!) of you!

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My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.