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- [00:04]
A
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom, 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.
- [00:27]
B
Learn more@WhatsApp.com this episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios New film Springsteen, Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strom. Scott Cooper, the director of the Academy Award winning movie Crazy Heart, brings you the story of the most pivotal chapter in the life of an icon. Springsteen, Deliver Me from Nowhere Only in theaters October 24th. Get your tickets now. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:06]
A
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.
- [01:08]
B
And we're here. We just crowned Professor Laura McGrath Assistant Professor professor at Temple University, our official data correspondent. And she smiled. Laura, so I assume you accept acceptant.
- [01:19]
A
Okay, great.
- [01:20]
B
And you are here to bombard, pepper, entertain, bewitch, bewilder us with stats. Is that right? Do I have my head screwed on right? What we're doing today?
- [01:29]
C
Yeah, a little less statistics today and more head exploding. Paradigm shifts.
- [01:35]
D
Whoa.
- [01:35]
A
Yeah. Laura sent me this email a couple weeks ago that was like, I have been reading things and these things are weird and they are exciting and would you like me to come talk about them? And I've never answered an email so fast.
- [01:46]
B
Laura, before you tell us the actual things, what do you mean you've been reading things? From once depths have these things arisen?
- [01:54]
C
Well, I am a scholar of contemporary literature. My research is focused on the contemporary publishing industry, and I use a very weird, idiosyncratic, bespoke, I guess, collection of methods to do that sort of work. Which means I spend a lot of time reading in cultural sociology and the sociology of literature. I also spend whole lot of time talking to people in publishing. I also get really dusty in archives, looking through correspondence, things like that. So this reading that we'll talk about comes from the nexus of cultural sociology and digital humanities. So thinking about data and literature together, cool.
- [02:37]
A
It's very exciting stuff for us. Thank you for being here.
- [02:42]
C
Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure.
- [02:44]
B
All right, Laura, where would you like to begin?
- [02:46]
C
Okay, so I wanted to start. I think it's useful to kind of get our priors on the table. I believe that this is a sort of mind blowing paradigm shift, but because these are often unspoken assumptions. We can sometimes lose sight of how much of a shift is going on because these things tend to feel very natural. So I want to get our priors on the table so that way we can come back to them at the end of the episode and see how much ground we have covered.
- [03:16]
A
Colleen Hoover fans, get ready. Her best selling novel Regretting youg is coming to the big screen from director Josh Boone who brought us the fault in our stars. This powerful story follows Morgan, played by Allison Williams and her daughter Clara, played by McKenna Grace, as they navigate love, loss and the secrets that can tear a family apart. With an all star cast including Dave Franco, Mason tames Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald, Regretting youg brings to life everything readers loved about the book first love, second chances, heartbreak and the complicated, beautiful bond between mothers and daughters. It's the kind of film you want to see with your mom, your best friend, your book club, anyone who loves to laugh, cry and gasp together in a theater. Don't miss Regretting youg. Only in theaters October 24th.
- [04:03]
D
Today's episode is brought to you by Amazon Publishing, publishers of Sarah's Riches by Tanya BOLDEN in early 1900s, Oklahoma, Sarah Rector became a wealthy oil heiress at just 11 years old. Her story of sudden fortune and racial scrutiny reveals a complex chapter in American history. You can read or listen to the short story by award winning author Tanya Bolden, now with prime and Kindle Unlimited. It's about wealth, race and power in Jim Crow America. Sarah Rector's sudden transformation from poverty to wealth highlights how black prosperity was often met with hostility and exploitation during this era. But there's also res and legacy. From a two room shack to hosting cultural icons like Duke Ellington, Sarah's journey shows resilience and the enduring impact of unexpected opportunity. Make sure to pick up Sarah's Riches by Tanya Bolden and thanks again to Amazon Publishing for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Simon, Teen publisher of Cold Wire. By Chloe Gong from number one New York Times bestselling author Chloe Gong comes the start of a daring new YA dystopian series. It's perfect for fans of Severance and Black Mirror. So in a near world future where humanity is divided between the glittering virtual reality upcountry and the deteriorating physical world down country, two young soldiers on two parallel missions start to suspect they are puzzle pieces in a larger conspiracy. And the closer they get to the truth, the closer their worlds come to a shattering collision. Let me just say dystopian YA is back with a vengeance. And Chloe Gong is here to make the genre feel new again with the cyberpunk world of Coldwire. Coldwire has not one, but two soulmate level slow burn romances that are synonymous with Chloe Gong. And the twists and turns don't stop with Cold Wire. It's just the first book in an electrifying new series and we love having something to look forward to. Make sure to pick up Cold Wire by Chloe Gong and thank thanks again to Simon Teen for sponsoring this episode.
- [06:12]
C
So I wanted to ask the two of you, first of all, as readers, what is your relationship with genre when it comes to selecting a book to read? And here I recognize that you are professional readers and so this is kind of a stacked deck. But if you were choosing something to read for fun, you're on vacation. No one is making you do this. What are you going to pick and how does genre influence your selection of a book?
- [06:41]
A
I guess I'll go first. I am not much of a genre reader, as listeners of the show know. I will dip my toe into like the occasional thriller or the occasional romance or something that bubbles up because it's like really popular and people say it's good. God of the woods last year is a great example of that. Like, I'm not reading a bunch of thrillers, but everybody loved God of the woods and I trusted the chorus on that one. So yeah, I tend to reach for things on vacation that are pretty similar to things that listeners hear me talk about here. Literary fiction, middlebrow to serious nonfiction. I love a memoir, pop science, that kind of thing. But in terms of what we think about as like genre fiction, I would say I am very casual. Not much sci fi is happening with me. And one of the glories of the way that we do this show is that we nobody tells us what we have to read, so we tend to read the things for the show that we are already interested in. So I'm actually not that sure that my reading would change much in a world where I wasn't doing this job. I would just be less anchored to publication date. I'd be reading like older literary fiction works rather than what's coming out in the next two weeks. But I think I'd still be pretty mostly literary fiction. But of course, a lot of literary fiction is getting a genre bend these days, and I'm into that.
- [08:03]
C
You've just like teased everything we're going to talk about. Rebecca, this is great. Would you, before we hear from Jeff, would you describe yourself as an eclectic reader? Is that A phrase that you would use.
- [08:11]
D
Okay. Yeah.
- [08:12]
A
I would say I'm an eclectic reader. I'm open to just about anything.
- [08:15]
B
Okay, Jeff, let's do a little. What we talk about when we talk about genre. We're doing romance, sci fi, fantasy, mystery, thriller, horror. Nonfiction, I assume in this context is not a genre, even though we sort of use it as a genre sometimes on the show. What about, like, historical fiction, which is increasingly both a genre and just commercial crossover, whatever. Like, am I in the ballpark, Laura, about how you're understanding genre?
- [08:41]
C
Yeah, yeah. It's less about a specific and more like, you know, you're walking through Powell's, you see a cover that strikes you as interesting. Are you inclined to say, I don't know, was really in the mood for a romance? I think I'm gonna let this one. It's not.
- [08:53]
A
This is like, what section of the bookstore do you shop in?
- [08:56]
B
Almost zero. Almost zero of that for me. Like, I really am an open target for whatever. I mean, I think I know enough about packaging and marketing now, and I don't know that most readers are like this, so I can't even metacognition my way out of this. Like, I know what a genre of mystery looks like. I know what a genre romance looks like. I know what a genre sci fi fantasy book looks like. So I'm not. I'm going to sort of just. I'm not going to dismiss them out of hand, but my eye is not going to fall on them. I'm going to fall on something that. What is that? I'm not sure. Have I heard of the author? Do I look at it and think it sounds interesting? Do I read the first couple pages? Does it strike me at all? So, like, I would say almost zero impact of genre, except for maybe, like, category avoidance, if that's straight down the middle. Genre. And I can tell, I'm not going.
- [09:44]
D
To pick it up.
- [09:46]
C
Interesting. Okay, and then same question for you, Jeff. Would you characterize yourself as an eclectic reader?
- [09:50]
B
If I am not, I don't know who is. Let's put it that way.
- [09:54]
C
That seems. That seems very fair. Okay. And do you two. Do you think that you are typical readers?
- [10:00]
B
No. No.
- [10:03]
A
We're big weirdos. If There are only 20,000 people reading literary fiction, as those essays would have us believe, we're two of them.
- [10:11]
B
Well, I guess I'll put it this. I mean, is that. Is the. Is the question you're asking, do you. Do we think other people, Most other people consider themselves eclectic readers? Because I think we're eclectic, but also unusual in the nature of our eclecticism. Like, we just know too much. We can see the Matrix a little bit.
- [10:27]
C
Yeah, that is hard. You can't. You can't unsee it. Like, you can't unsee a cover that is very clearly a book blob cover that is significant uncertainty about what? No, I suppose what I'm asking is, do you think that people tend to read according to genre? Do you think that tends to structure a lot of readers approach to reading?
- [10:45]
A
Yes, the civilians in my life, their reading seems much more structured around a genre or increasingly around particular tropes within a genre.
- [10:57]
B
I guess my sense, Laura, is that I agree with Rebecca's saying. I think there is a. There are veins of that readership that are very deep, but I actually think there may be more narrow. Like the people that only read one genre, they may read hundreds of books in a year. But I think in terms of a median reader, I think, like everyone says they're middle class. I think a lot of people are going to say they're eclectic readers. Even if they actually don't shows up in their actual reading, I think they're going to say they're eclectic. That's my.
- [11:23]
A
I have a question about this. Do we think that there's like book nerd cultural capital to be found in saying you're eclectic?
- [11:32]
B
Oh, like saying you watch more NPR than you do Rebecca, right? Yeah.
- [11:36]
C
There's a norm core aspect of it. Yeah, it's a good question.
- [11:40]
B
I don't know. The. My first blush is I'm not sure if eclectic is where people would think there's cool points to be schooled.
- [11:48]
A
I guess I'm thinking about people who, like, if you ask them their favorite kinds of music and they say, oh, I listen to everything, like, that's very rarely true. But they're trying to signal that they are open to a bunch of different kinds of things. And I'm one of those people. I will say I listen to everything, but that's not. Like, I don't have an EDM playlist, but there's a bunch of variety. That's not edm.
- [12:08]
B
Your Brazilian bossa nova cuts are pretty shallow, right?
- [12:12]
A
So I don't know. I wonder, like, that's interesting. Maybe this is maybe outside the scope, but I'm really interested in, like, what is motivating people to identify as eclectic or not.
- [12:22]
B
So are you going to hit us with what percentage of people say they read eclectically, Laura? Is that where we're going here? Is that Is that where we're headed?
- [12:28]
C
We'll get to a version of that. Yes, but I don't think I can tell you precisely. But we'll get to a version. But we're backing up genuinely exactly where Rebecca left off, which is classical music. So there's a really influential strand of sociological research that's been active for about the past 30 years that has revolved around what is called the Omnivore hypothesis. Are you all familiar with the Omnivore hypothesis?
- [12:56]
D
Okay, so we saw this.
- [12:57]
B
Oh, go ahead.
- [12:58]
D
Sorry.
- [12:58]
C
Are you thinking Omnivore's Dilemma different?
- [13:00]
B
No, there we saw something, Rebecca, and I don't know where it was. Maybe it was with you, Laura, that brought it up that people who read books also read or also watch TV and also watch movies. So, like, there's a certain kind of cultural consumer that will not only hop genre theoretically, but hop format. Like if you're going to consume, you're going to like. I think, Rebecca, you and I are probably like this.
- [13:19]
A
We'll go look at it.
- [13:20]
B
And it did watch a documentary.
- [13:23]
A
Laura talked about that with us when she was on the show back in. It was like late spring or early summer. So listeners, if you missed that episode, you can scroll back and it's like five mind blowing stats about the world of books and reading. Is that the omnivore thing we're talking about here, Laura?
- [13:36]
C
It kind of is. Although that particular study did not engage in this kind of robust literature around the Omnivore hypothesis. So the sociologist Richard Peterson comes up with the Omnivore hypothesis, looking at listeners of classical music. So traditionally, the way that we've thought about taste and cultural sociology is the division between high and low and the middle brow. So you can map this out on like the characters of Frasier, right, in terms of how they are defining and thinking about their own cultural capital. In regard to taste, there is Niles, who's the highbrow brother. There's the dad, Marty, who's like cracking the beer is the very low brow situation. And then there's Frasier, who's kind of the classically middlebrow with his radio show. And like, that's the biggest insult that Niles could possibly level at him, right? That he's the middlebrow taste. But that's what he's kind of negotiating. He would not admit that about himself, but he is. What Peterson finds in 1992 about classical music is, in fact, people are much more like Rebecca, that rather than these cultural connoisseurs about music being only invested in classical music and really reinforcing this high, low divide. He finds that connoisseurs of classical music or love music just period, they love music of all sorts, of all varieties. They are just as inclined to listen to Bach as to the Beatles, as to Billy Joel, as to bleachers. I love this rather than this kind of stark divide of like, oh, no, no, no, I don't do Taylor Swift or I absolutely don't do Carly Rae Jepsen. But in fact, loving music means loving all kinds of music. And that is the general omnivore hypothesis that people are more invested as cultural consumers in whatever particular media form that they're in, rather than stuck in this high low divide any longer.
- [15:23]
A
Okay, so applied to readers, this would be. I love books. I love all kinds of books. Sometimes I read the Ishiguru Nobel Prize winning novel, and sometimes I pick up a romance.
- [15:34]
C
Yes. Yep. But what's really interesting is that it's taken about 30 years for any of this research to extend to books. The omnivore hypothesis is kind of stuck in other cultural spheres and people. Sociologists have talked about it in two ways. So one is what we were talking about before, that if you like one sort of media, you're probably going to hop media. Right? So if you really like classical music, that means that you probably are also someone who is going to the opera or to local theater or who is going to your art museum or who is donating to npr. And here you can hear the choices that I'm making about cultural capital and the. The sorts of media forms that I'm choosing. Right. There is. There's a kind of a highbrow approach to being an omnivore. Or there's the other hypothesis, which is the one you just mentioned, Rebecca, which is I read everything or I engage with everything. So I love classical music, but then I also love Taylor Swift. Everything kind of in that vertical space of cultural engagement. So that's dividing the high and low within a particular media. And that's been the debate. The debate has been going on. It's been this huge active space of scholarly research and has weirdly, I think, very weirdly not extended to books up until now.
- [16:53]
B
Why do you think that is, Laura? Do you think the book people are even more resistant? I mean, you would think if there's any Niles Crane era, it would be classical music. Like, if it's true for classical music, it seems like it would be true for anything that seems the ivoriest of Ivory Tower. When it comes to cultural consumption, to me at least, like classical music, like Mozart seems way more, it seems way less approachable even than like, Dostoevsky. On the book's point of view, like seems like more of the people I know. When Rebecca and I talk to people who want to read the classics, they're much more interested in. Like Dostoevsky seems like it sits alongside Sally Rooney much more than Mozart sits alongside, I don't know, Somber or Whoever's on top 40 right now.
- [17:37]
C
Yeah, I think so. The long debate around taste and sociology has to do with the relationship between cultural products and cultural class. So Max Weber would say that there is no necessary relationship between cultural products and cultural class. Post Bourdieu, we would think instead that there is, in fact a really tight relationship between cultural product and cultural class. So what that means is you tend to read Dostoevsky if you are better educated, if you are also wealthy and white, but not necessarily right, if you are taking a Babarian perspective, which is to say, you know, cultural products are not necessarily following on cultural class. I think books have kind of always been treated as a sort of rarefied high cultural space. And so I think perhaps there has been some slowness to approach books because they're kind of often associated with the intelligentsia in ways that perhaps other media forms are not. But I also think that it's because it, it is really, really hard to get any good data on readers. And that's been the real impasse to doing that. And that is where our heroes for today, professors James English and J.D. porter of the University of Pennsylvania, have something new to teach us about readership and data and how the omnivore hypothesis translates to books.
- [18:59]
A
Hell of a pitch. Laura McGrath.
- [19:05]
C
I, I, I also just have deep fondness for Jame English and, and J.D. porter, and so. Wait, did I just call him Jim? Jim English. That's his name.
- [19:15]
B
Jimmy J. Bone.
- [19:18]
C
So I also love talking about this research because I just, I, I enjoy nerding out with these guys among, among others, actually more than most people. They're, they're just. So, before we get into that, I'm curious to return to the priors that I asked you that we started with, which is to say, to what degree do you think that the publishing industry thinks about genre as a primary.
- [19:43]
A
So much? Jeff, you take this one.
- [19:47]
B
So this is one where maybe I have a. It could be super interesting and reflective or because of the rooms I'm in talking to advertisers. This is my data set. When I'M in New York taking meetings with advertisers. One of the reasons that Book Riot has the product lineup we have is because how much advertisers, marketers want to put a science fiction fantasy title in a science fiction fantasy newsletter, podcast, you know, sponsored content, something else like that. I will say this is some hot data for you, Laura, is that when we see the click through rates on banner ads, we used to show science fiction fantasy banner ads against science fiction fantasy content on the site. I maybe tipped my hand when I say used to. We didn't see any difference in performance when those same banner ads were put sort of against general content not filtered by genre. So this is something we say like, you know, we see and now is a Book Riot reader typical? I don't know. Except the behavior across Book Riot readers has been the ads sort of perform similarly whether it's a targeted quote unquote ad or not. But we do know one reason we have a librarian's newsletter, a horror newsletter, is because they want to market to librarians. They want to market to people who signed up for horror newsletter. We don't see that much difference in performance. So my prior here is that advertisers and publishers really care where readers really don't. And Rebecca, that sort of is where we've been for 10, 15 years at this point.
- [21:15]
A
Yeah, I, I totally agree with that. I think publishers really care about genre. They my armchair psychology reading of what's happening there is they see the couple of things each year that hit really big and they extrapolate that is from this genre. And so we should make more of that genre and we should advertise more of that genre to the people who read the first big book in that genre and that sort of attempt to capture lightning in a bottle multiple times, which we're currently seeing with Romantasy, I think. And also this is how imprints function. Like an imprint is generally built around particular. Right. A particular genre or a particular type or flavor of book. And so they're spending all of their time publishing science fiction and they're trying to reach the people who read science fiction. But I think they underestimate the degree to which a general reader is also maybe interested in, in my example, science fiction. It's not just your hardcore sci fi fans, it's maybe the whole universe of people who read books that if you presented that book to them the right way, some percentage of them are also going to opt in, whether they've read a sci fi book in the last 10 years or not that could be the one they go for. So I think publishers overweight it significantly.
- [22:27]
C
Yeah, that's really consistent with my research. My book is coming out in April. It's on literary agents. And one of the things that I found through the 10 years of interviews I've done with agents is how much they specialize by genre as well. So even before we get to advertising, before we get to imprints, we've got authors that are submitting their work according to people who are working in presenting their genres.
- [22:50]
B
Comps. It's the comp industry. I mean, that's. That's where it all starts, right? My book is Gone Girl Meets the Da Vinci Code would read, by the way, but, like, that's how they would do that thing. And. And I think the weird byproduct of that is every time there's a huge blockbuster book, everyone's surprised because it's not the genre people were buying. Like, Gone Girl's a huge surprise. Da Vinci Code's a huge surprise. Romanticism, surprise. Colleen Hoover. It's all a surprise because they were thinking that the hard thing about culture writ large is you can't predict what's going to happen next. But you're always, you know. So you're using these strategies to get a genre book published when the forces that make where the Crawdads Sing a Hit are unrepeatable and, frankly, a little bit unknowable. So all they have to go back on is genre and category.
- [23:34]
C
And this is my contention. I am not editorializing, and I don't know if Porter in English would agree with me. But my contention coming away from their research is that at least in publishing, we talk about how unpredictable it is and how little we know about readers. I think we're doing this wrong by appreciating this through genre. Like, I don't think that most readers are approaching the world via genre primarily. I think that most readers are approaching the world much more eclectically and more eclectically than I think they are even realizing or giving themselves for.
- [24:09]
B
What do you mean by that, Laura? Like, I think I agree. My gut says yes, but my brain is like articulate, null return.
- [24:16]
A
It makes me want to modify my response from earlier in the show about how the civilian readers in my life describe themselves, because I think the different. There's a difference between how they describe themselves and what their shelves actually look like. And, like, to think about my mom or my sister, who are like very classic civilian readers, if you put them on the spot for what kinds of books do you like to read? They're going to reach for a couple genres that they're more familiar with. So my mom is probably going to tell you lady librarian, World War II spies, and my sister is going to be like anything about octopuses and how smart animals are. But their bookshelves actually have much more variety.
- [24:54]
B
The let them theory and Colleen Hoover and, you know, maybe the wedding date. Yeah, that's interesting, Rebecca. I think you're right.
- [25:02]
C
I mean, I think it's. For a few reasons. I think that I don't know which of you said this, but I think our boundaries around genre are becoming so much more porous. It's really hard. And part of what Porter and English try to do, and we'll talk about that in a bit, is try to think about what does a pure genre look like any longer. And those things are actually quite rare. Like, unless you're talking about Sue Grafton, you know, there's not really a pure mystery. We're much more like my dear Temple University colleague Liz Moore, or at least trying to hit that particular target.
- [25:33]
B
Yeah. What is Rhys's Book Club? What genre is that, Laura? I mean. I mean, that's what you're kind of describing there in a way, right?
- [25:39]
C
Like, what is book club as a genre, essentially? That's the question. I was having a conversation the other day about liking book club books or not, and we had a general feeling of what we were talking about, but it was not clear. That's not a genre, but it's an amount of a couple things, a couple vibes. Right. I also think that when it comes to maybe how the civilian reader is talking about their work, how the three of us might talk about our work, the omnivore hypothesis, you know, allows for and recognizes the fact that cultural capital is distributed amongst genre and along these particular generic lines. And so one way of thinking about this is the acknowledgement that a true connoisseur likes everything. They can tell you what's great, in fact, about Taylor Swift and why she's a true musician and also can be really into bachelor, to take our classical music metaphor, can be really into Mozart, too. Like that's a real one. Right? Like they know. And not because they're, you know, a die hard Swifty, but because they're a die hard musician. And so having an omnivorous taste of blending high and low, in fact, speaks more highly of you. That's the new form of cultural capital that's been associated with this sort of omnivorous world of taste.
- [26:52]
B
That's interesting. I Mean, I feel like I'm a little bit older than both of you, but, like, this feels like a real last 30 years phenomenon. And maybe that, that 1992, I could be anchored on that. But, like, the Gen X/90s moment of a lot of cultural cachet being about having an indie band T shirt, but then also knowing a lot about a bunch of bands felt different than sort of an 80s or 70s version of that. Like, there was like a specific. Like, almost the. The John Cusack in High Fidelity feels like an avatar for a kind of mode that we're still living in a lot of ways. And I don't know if that's. I don't know if this would have been true. I'd be curious about that omnivore thing in 1954. Laura, like post pre rock and roll, pre pop culture as we know it, pre tv. I wonder how much mass media has contributed to just the. The Omnivore's availability. Right? Like, you don't have to get tickets to the Met, or you can consume all this stuff from your desk right now, or books, movies and music at Borders or Barnes and Noble or something like that. I wonder how much of is a retail availability phenomenon, as much as I don't know what other strain it could be.
- [28:06]
C
I mean, that's certainly got to be part of it. Just intuitively that seems to make sense. But when culture is much more available to you and much more democratized in terms of its availability, but isn't in fact, restricted to who can afford access to whatever symphony, whatever ballet or that.
- [28:22]
B
You happen to live in a place that's close to a symphony or ballet or something like that.
- [28:26]
A
Yeah, Music seems to be the most available comparison for me, and I'm interested in that. And it's making me think about how I'm an elder millennial, the eldest of the millennials, and I grew up on. I think Jeff and I grew up on some of the same alternative radio stations in Cancer, Kansas City, that, like, it's impossible now to explain to a youth what alternative music was, because, right, like, you could hear Alanis Morissette next to, like, Meredith Brooks next to Sarah McLachlan next to, like, the Mighty Mighty Boss. Stones and Trent Reznor would come on after that and it would like, those are all very different genres. And that was the point of the. But they were all also alternative in some way. That was the point of those kinds of radio stations. And there was cultural cachet in that mode of consumption, which to me feels really different from like what we see happening in algorithm driven media, which identifies the thing you like and pulls you farther and farther down those very specific rabbit holes or those very specific tropes. Like, I got a Romantasy novel in the mail recently from a publisher and instead of a traditional synopsis on the back, it was literally like an emoji checklist of the tropes in the book. And that feels to me like turning on the radio and hearing 15 versions of the same song. And like, are we, are we wrong that readers are becoming more like narrowly defined? Are the algorithms. Am I just mad about the algorithm? Laura? That's what I'm asking you.
- [29:59]
C
I mean, yeah, I was at. Was it two years ago? I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I think two years ago, and they had this whole new adult hall that was there for the trade portion, or not the public portion of the fair, not the trade portion where, you know, it turns into Comic Con half the way through. And they had these big whiteboard walls that were asking people to list their favorite tropes from, from romance novels. And there was no. And they were filled. You know, I went on, I went into that hall finally on Friday, which is like really the first public day, and they were completely filled. I don't know how the rest of the weekend anyone could engage with that, because that was the assumption here. Walking into the New adult hall was, of course, this is the way that we're engaging with books. Not a question of what is new Adult, not a question about what is romance, what is fantasy. That was beside the point. The question was like, who's your favorite literary boyfriend? And that was the way that readers were being attracted to these books.
- [30:53]
A
So is the thing that the research is showing now that these readers who, they can answer the literary boyfriend question, but they're also reading a bunch of other genres? Have I personally pigeonholed them too far?
- [31:07]
C
You may have.
- [31:09]
A
Colleen Hoover fans, get ready. Her best selling novel, Regretting youg is coming to the big screen from director Josh Boone, who brought us the Fault in Our Stars. This powerful story follows Morgan, played by Allison Williams, and her daughter Clara, played by McKenna Grace, as they navigate love, loss and the secrets that can tear a family apart. With an all star cast including Dave Franco, Mason Tames Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald, Regretting youg brings to life everything readers loved about the book. First love, second chances, heartbreak and the complicated, beautiful bond between mothers and daughters. It's the kind of film you want to see with your mom, your best friend, your book club, anyone who loves to laugh, cry and gasp together in a theater. Don't Miss Regretting youg Only in theaters October 24.
- [31:57]
D
Today's episode is brought to you by Rakuten Kobo. For a limited time, you can earn 10% cash back on Kobo E Reader and Accessory purchases or plus new Rakuten members earn a $20 welcome bonus. The offer ends October 31st. Terms and conditions do apply, so let me give you more tea on this promotion. It's a collaboration between rakuten kobo and rakuten.com to get in on it, readers will need to join or log into rakuten.com then enable cash Back by clicking the Shop now button on the page or through the Merchant page. Get redirected to us.kobobooks.com There should be a redirect pop and then make an eligible purchase. The offer is available to both existing and new members, but new Rakuten.com members also receive the $20 welcome bonus. This welcome Bonus offer is available only to new Rakuten members who are residents of the U.S. to find out more, go to bookriot.com Kobo Again, that's bookriot.com Kobo thanks again to Rakuten Kobo for sponsoring today's episode. Today's Episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook Gone Before Goodbye by Harlan Coban and Reese Witherspoon. Now this is an unforgettable suspense novel that combines the storytelling talents of Academy Award winning actor Reese Witherspoon and internationally best selling author Harlan Coben. Gone Before Goodbye is the story of a woman trapped in a deadly conspiracy where uncovering the truth could cost her everything. So we have Maggie. Ms. Maggie McCabe is teetering on the brink, honey. She's a highly skilled and renowned army combat surgeon. Yes. But she has always lived life at the edge where she could make the most impact. And it was going nice. It was going well. Until it wasn't. So now she is halfway across the globe. She has agreed to provide some rather unconventional medical assistance to this person and this person, her patient suddenly disappears while still under her care. Now Maggie must become a fugitive herself or she will be the next one who is Gone Before Goodbye. Okay, make sure to pick up Gone Before Goodbye. Give it a good listen and you will not be disappointed. Thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode.
- [34:25]
C
But okay, let's dive into what the research is actually talking about.
- [34:28]
A
Let's do it.
- [34:29]
C
We're asking the interesting questions about this sort of work, but we have to show our work. So what Jim English and J.D. porter have decided to do is address this problem, which is a lack of data around contemporary readers, by looking at what readers are actually choosing to do. Not in focus group form, not in sales data, because sales data and readership are two different things. But by looking at Goodreads now, I am sure, like you want to wave your arms in the air.
- [34:56]
B
All the caveats in the world, the worst data, except for all the others, right?
- [35:02]
C
Yeah, Goodreads, there are problems. This is, this is clearly not a, you know, pure lab research environment. We know that Goodreads can be manipulated. We know all of the ways that this is problematic. Its owner is obviously, you know, at he who shall not be named level. But this is also more reader engagement than anything else else that anyone can find. And what's particularly useful about Goodreads for the purposes of this study is that it's not prefab definitions. Right? So a Goodreads user makes an account and they decide to begin putting books on their shelves. There's a couple shelves that come pre constructed. So every Goodreads user gets like a to be read shelf and I think a favorite books shelf. Just like very, very general, non genre based things. You can put whatever you want on there, but then they're encouraged to begin making and naming their own shelves. When they do that, they are not choosing between pre fabulated genres or prefabricated genres. It's not like is this a rom com or is this Romantasy or is this historical fiction? No, they get to name it whatever they want. So you have a fairly democratic approach to how readers are thinking about genre categories because they have the opportunity to construct that from the ground up.
- [36:23]
A
Fascinating.
- [36:24]
C
It is, it's very useful. And this, it gives us a lot of really useful way of thinking about how genre gets constructed, how readers are thinking about it. So what they do is they have looked at all of the super users on Goodreads who have contributed more than 150 reviews. Okay? So they are not interested in the bots, they're not interested on the dummy accounts, they're not interested in, in the user who goes on just to like flame one particular person that they hate. They want to find readers who are genuinely engaging on this site in some meaningful way. And they've hit that benchmark as 150 reviews. So this is less than half a percent of all Goodreads users.
- [37:09]
A
I was just about to ask that. I was sitting here doing math about the average number of books people read in a year.
- [37:15]
C
Yeah, this is like a less than half a percent.
- [37:17]
A
Okay.
- [37:17]
C
Yeah, yeah. Shockingly low percentage of Goodreads readers. But also, like, Goodreads is huge. I think thinking about it in that, in. In those terms gave me some sense of how impossibly huge engagement on this site is. Right. Yeah.
- [37:33]
A
A small percentage of a very large data set. So still a really robust pool that they're looking at.
- [37:38]
B
Do you want to do methodology now, Laura? Let's do the stats and we can look at it later, because I've got a couple of methodology selection questions about that particular filter.
- [37:47]
C
So they've got this. This 0.2% of all the Goodreads super users amounts to around 3200 users. From that, they begin to randomly select, just using random generator, random number generators. They randomly select users that they want to study who have submitted these at least 150 reviews. And what they're able to do then is extrapolate. These are all of the reviews that they've submitted, but more importantly, these are all of the books that they have on all of their shelves. So less interested in the particular reviews than they've published. More interested in, like, where they put them?
- [38:20]
B
Yeah.
- [38:21]
C
Yes, yes. And even books that they don't review. Right. You have to have a certain degree of investment to review a book, but that sort of investment is not required to shelve a book.
- [38:29]
A
Got it. Okay. So they're interested in, like, is there a shelf that's like my favorite mysteries? Or is the shelf like feminist revenge thrillers?
- [38:39]
C
They're really interested in what these shelves are named generally and are using them to kind of crowdsource the genre categories that are most salient. So, Jeff, you know, your question up top was, well, what are we calling genres? What are we thinking about when we think about genre? Porter and English found eight real categories that kind of rise to the top. We can talk methods later, but this is using network analysis and community detection, blah, blah, blah. The point is there are eight main genre clusters that emerge, and these are like, this is so basically common to you that it will not be even surprising. But it is really useful and helpful to see that readers are basically affirming these categories. So we've got children's, fantasy, sci fi, graphic novels, historical, literary, mystery, thriller, nonfiction, and romance. 8. And that's basically how readers are classifying their books. That's how the kind of genre map of Goodreads looks. But what's tricky gets back to this question that we came earlier to, which is that it is so hard to classify a book as being any particular genre era. Right. So I am teaching tomorrow, my class and I are going to finish Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which is fantasy, historical, and literary. Exactly. Obviously, in this class, is this historical fiction? Well, Underground Railroad was not a physically real place. That was an actual railroad under underground. Like, that's not real. So it's speculative fiction. But wait, all of these other instances are real. The horrors of slavery are being presented here in ways that are historical, in ways that are drawing on the meta slave narrative and on the slave narrative as a genre. So what are we going to do with Underground Railroad? To classify it as one thing is to cut out at least 50% of what this book is doing. And really, I think, blunts the force of what Whitehead is trying to do in this novel. So what's really useful about this method is that it helps us classify any particular book based on how users classify it. So hypothetically, and this is just what I'm making up, we might say that Underground Railroad is 70% historical fiction.
- [40:43]
B
It's like a genre cloud rather than shelf. It's like. It's like a Heisenberg uncertainty, like electron cloud of possibility. Interesting.
- [40:49]
C
Yes, exactly. So not only can we see how readers are gravitating toward individual genres, but we can see how any particular book relates to these larger genre categories based on how readers are shelving them.
- [41:02]
A
Oh, my God, this is so great.
- [41:04]
C
It's so nerdy. I love it, and it's wonderful. So based on how I might think of underground railroad as 70% historical and 30% speculative, that's not about the internal generic forms or tropes that we see. That's saying, well, 70% of users are calling this historical fiction, and 30% of users are calling this speculative fiction. Here we go. This is our total map of how people are relating to and understanding Underground Railroad, say. So the example. An example that they use that I think is also really illustrative is Gone Girl, which is, you know, the genre score would depend on how many people are calling this book a thriller, which is 83%. And. And what percentage of people are calling this a romance, which is 17. And I simply do not understand those people.
- [41:47]
D
What?
- [41:48]
C
Yeah, but this is giving us a pretty, you know, a map of.
- [41:53]
B
Well, we do. We've talked about this, Rebecca. We have romance, but we don't have a word for relationship stories. Right. And I think people, like, that's a relationship story, you know, a bad romance. I guess if Gaga is involved in genrefying it. But like, if you think it is mostly about a relationship, then your only available heuristic for genre is romance. You don't have another place to put that? It makes sense. I don't agree with it, but it makes sense to me, I guess.
- [42:15]
A
I mean, I agree with you conceptually, but not about Gone Girl specifically. Carry on, Laura, get us out of this.
- [42:21]
C
Well, I mean, Gone Girl is also a book that is really cleverly playing with genre tropes.
- [42:26]
D
Right, Right.
- [42:27]
C
Amy's diary that she writes is partly her own mockery of the genre of the romance. It's got the meet cute. It's got. Got the first kiss in Manhattan. It's got all of these cute little things that come straight from a romance novel that she's making a mockery of. And that's part of what's really clever about this book. So I can see it. It's not, it's not completely unreasonable. Anyway, all that to say with all of this data, English and Porter give each super user essentially an eclecticism score. So how eclectic is their reading? How are readers approaching genre? Are they, according to the narratives that we have about romance bookstores, about the internal division of bookstores, about how the publishing industry works and presumes that their readers existing in the world, Are we looking at readers who are die hard in one particular area, or are we looking at readers who have tastes that are broad? And to do that we need to think not only about the shelves that they're making what they're reading in, but where each particular book book fits. So this is getting to be a little bit more challenging to think about. But basically what they do is they plot the distance between each book. So imagine for a moment eight dimensional space. It's impossible, but this world exists mathematically where they can calculate the distance between each given book. I will not describe this in detail. I'm watching Jeff's eyes glaze over.
- [43:51]
B
No, no, no. I think I'm with you. You. I'm with you.
- [43:54]
C
You look like you're suppressing a yawn, but thanks. So the results basically is looking at the readers who are most and least eclectic and what they're reading, but then also what eclecticism happens to mean within these different reading communities. So the results are unfortunately, in some ways a little bit stereotypical. But I think this gets complicated in really important ways. So. So bear with me through the stereotypes for a moment or at least the reinforcement of our stereotypes. So those readers who are the least eclectic are reading primarily romance novels. So there does seem to Be a deep connection between romance and deep whatever the opposite of not omnivorous is. I think the author said univore. I would have thought monovore. Like really deep, univorous, monovor, maneuverous.
- [44:47]
B
They're like koalas. They only eat eucalyptus. Like they literally only eat eucalyptus.
- [44:52]
A
It feels true to me.
- [44:54]
B
I mean this has been true for a long, long time. This is not a new story about like if you're going to imagine for yourself the hardest core genre reader, there is a reason why there were Harlequin romance novels in drugstores. Right. That's not a mistake.
- [45:10]
C
Yes, there are really important gendered histories that are worth thinking about there. And the way that those readers castigated, the way that those readers get vilified and the way that we are still doing that actively. Like there's a reason why the is reading, making a stupid conversation, is turning on romanticy and self publishing. Right. But yeah, I mean that is true. We'll complicate that in a moment.
- [45:35]
B
Do you have the next mo. Can I guess, do you have the next most eucalyptus y genre?
- [45:41]
C
I can look it up for you. I did not write that on my talking.
- [45:46]
B
Tell me if this makes sense to you, Rebecca, if you were to guess the second most eucalyptus y genre, I think I'm guessing mysteries.
- [45:53]
A
Me too.
- [45:54]
B
I don't know if that's right, but. But I would guess if our spidey sense about romance continues to be correct, that would be my next.
- [46:02]
A
In our eight dimensional space, I would put mysteries like closest to romance but still pretty far away in terms of that like univers, whatever vocabulary word we're going with reading a whole lot of one thing. Literary koalas.
- [46:19]
B
Literary koalas.
- [46:21]
C
So I can't find that for you quickly. What I can say is then on the flip side of this is that the readers who are most eclectic are also the readers who are reading the most literary fiction.
- [46:32]
B
That makes so much sense because it's sort of the non genre that is.
- [46:35]
C
A genre we are seeing the high low divide. Right. That's being reinforced even in the way that Goodreads readers are approaching their own eclecticism. I mean there are some really. I mean that said, there's a lot more romance readers than there are literary fiction readers. Like, it's not as though this is an equally divided sample, but generally speaking, the literary readers are showing not only that they read across most genres that they're more eclectic in that way, but they're also showing greater complexity in what it is that they're interested in reading.
- [47:08]
A
That resonates with what you were saying earlier about one of the theories of being omnivorous in that there is. There's cultural capital to be gained from being able to explain both Bach and why Taylor Swift is so great. I think I see that in literary fiction communities of like and like. Jeff and I are doing it on zero to well read of like here we are to talk about a Nobel prize winning novel and we want to talk about Twilight and take them both seriously and understand them. We might have different levels of affection for them, but there is something like some level of serious engagement with the thing itself. And being a person who engages seriously with the thing carries a level of cultural capital that you might be trying to cultivate for yourself.
- [47:53]
C
Well, and I suspect and here I'm moving beyond their paper. So apologies if I'm putting words in your mouth, my friends. But you know, I would not call myself. I think I'm an eclectic reader. I read primarily in literary. But literary fiction is a sort of non genre genre. Like that is not a thing I would describe when I'm reading for work or I'm reading for fun. But I say I'm an eclectic reader because I tend to read the best of everything in my right. Like I joined for research, I joined a romance book club at one of my local bookstores this summer. And I thought, oh, I will have so much fun. I did have so much fun. But I thought I would really enjoy the books that we were reading because I like Emily Henry or you know, I like a couple romance novelists. Like this is fine. I found out very quickly I am not a romance reader.
- [48:40]
A
I do not Never let other people pick your books. It's the worst plan.
- [48:44]
C
Yeah. I'm also just not a romance reader. I like a writer who writes romance. Right. I am not a crime novelist reader. You know, like I really like Tana French, I really like essay Cosby. But generally speaking I'm not reading crime. It's not. It's not what I'm doing. Right. So I think what we probably see is people who are approaching literature not necessarily via genre but via some other sort of quality markers that. That speaks to the kind of omnivorous quality of like literary fiction is kind.
- [49:15]
A
Of the alternative radio station in this.
- [49:17]
B
Model where it's the all we need is Oishi Rebecca. Psychological richness. That's all we need. I mean that's like we're seeking, we're exploring. Right. Like that there's something about finding something new is what we're looking for.
- [49:29]
A
But it is, I think it makes sense. Like this like alternative radio station analogy is working for me here because where else like Toni Morrison is doing something totally different in the Bluest Eye than like Ishiguro is doing in Clara in the sun, then Colson Whitehead is doing in Underground Railroad? They all have elements of genre to them as well, but it's like highbrow writing. That's the unifying thing, is the highbrow writing. But very different flavors, very different tones, very different subject matter. But we call it all literary fiction in the same way that everybody got lumped into that alternative pop or alternative rock model where I think what you're going for, I mean I agree with like, I agree with this research that has confirmed it. Laura, this makes sense to me. I think that people are looking for some underlying like connective tissue rather than some quality, rather than like a plot point or a particular subject or just a different experience.
- [50:31]
B
I mean, maybe it's as simple as if you sort of evacuated from any value judgment. They're looking for a different kind of experience. And if you're looking for a different kind of experience, you have different kind of reading patterns. Like that sort of just makes logical sense.
- [50:45]
A
Colleen Hoover fans, get ready. Her best selling novel Regretting youg is coming to the big screen from director Josh Boone, who brought us the Fault in Our stars. This powerful story follows Morgan, played by Allison Williams and her daughter Clara, played by McKenna Grace, as they navigate love, loss and the secrets that can tear a family apart. With an all star cast including Dave Franco, Mason tames Scott Eastwood and Willa Fitzgerald, Regretting you brings to life everything readers loved about the first love, second chances, heartbreak and the complicated, beautiful bond between mothers and daughters. It's the kind of film you want to see with your mom, your best friend, your book club, anyone who loves to laugh, cry and gasp together in a theater. Don't miss Regretting you. Only in theaters October 24th.
- [51:33]
D
Today's episode is brought to you by Grove Atlantic Publishers of the Unveiling by Quan Berry, people's number one must read book of the Fall. The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide, even from ourselves. Stryker, a black film scout on a mission to find a location for a big budget movie about Ernest Shackleton, finds herself on a luxury cruise in Antarctica surrounded by wealthy, mostly white tourists when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong. Stryker must survive a hostile environment, inner demons and deadly secrets. Exploring abandonment, guilt and the limits of human connection. Barry affirms there's no such thing as haunted places, only haunted people. So this is a hotly anticipated new title from the author of We Ride Upon Sticks. The Unveiling is again people's number one must read book of the Fall, A Town and Country Best Book of the Fall and named a most anticipated book A fall from literary hub your girls and boys and non binaries at Book Riots and Time Magazine. So make sure to pick up the Unveiling by Quan Berry. And thanks again to Grove Atlantic for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Harlequin, a leading publisher of romantic fiction delivering feel good high stakes and heart pounding stories across every kind of love. No matter what kind of romance you love to read, Harlequin has a it for you. And in one of their latest books, Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor, we've got some snowed in goodness. We've got some small towns and some unusual residents. So when a snowstorm hits during her travels, Luna Stack finds herself stranded in Claw Haven, Alaska, a cozy small town with more than a few unusual residents. Well, things go from bad to complicated when Luna accidentally drinks a potion that tethers her to Oliver Musgrove, the local grumpy innkeeper who also happens to be a werewolf. Now these two opposites are stuck spending the winter together while they wait for the antidote. And although they might not want anything to do with each other, the bond says otherwise. Make sure to pick up Accidentally Wedded to a Werewolf by Isabel Taylor. And thanks again to Harlequin for sponsoring this episode.
- [53:57]
C
What's really interesting about some of these findings though is that even though romance represents presents the largest genre of these super users of the things that they've rated, and in many ways the least eclectic, what English and Porter have found in other research that I talked about in that 5 mind blowing stats episode is that romance is really a world in and of itself. So unlike with other genres. You could be primarily a romance reader and also be a very eclectic reader.
- [54:25]
D
Right?
- [54:25]
C
Because you could be invested in cozies and also in hockey romances and also in like MFM romances. Like there are so many different worlds, sub worlds within romance that is really not comparable to any other genre.
- [54:38]
A
Yeah, it does seem like that's one of the ways that we've done romance readers dirty and we've done them dirty in a lot of ways. But by assuming that or kind of treating all romance readers as being monolithic, as if reading one romance is similar.
- [54:50]
B
To reading romance like Madagascar. Like you know, it's spent 70 million years off the coast of Africa. So it has like its own ecosystem that's just sort of evolved. Evolved differently because it was separate. Like, I think something similar has happened in Rome.
- [55:02]
A
They're not all koalas.
- [55:03]
B
You're just like, we have lemurs. No one else has lemurs. But we were, you know, we were put on this island. We left, we escaped to this island. Whatever you want to put. I've used this metaphor in marketing and publicity meetings too. It's that romance, and I'll throw romantasy in for the time being, provisionally, are sort of a snow globe universe. Like it has homologous structures to the larger reading world, but there's less. There's less penetration between the two worlds than you might think given the narratives around either and both of them.
- [55:30]
C
But I think what's happened in publishing, if I may editorialize, I think the genre narrative has struck hold so entirely that we miss sight of the literary omnivorousness. Now, even in this research, Porter and English acknowledged that the literary omnivorous reader is a much smaller set. Right like this. This is a numerically smaller representation. But genre is still. It just does not seem to be the thing that is really drawing readers to particular books. I don't see here that's not the clear and easy division. You simply don't see readers, with the exception of romance, who read only one thing and only one thing forever. There is a really broad, I think, inner penetration that readers who call themselves eclectic statistically really are. And I think that we are doing that reader a disservice when we approach the situation through matters of genre.
- [56:26]
B
This is so interesting to take the other. So it sounds like from. I'm now being practical here. If I'm trying to get my book in the hands of the right reader, I may be correct. I may have the highest marginal use case of every additional marketing or publicity dollar if I have a romance book leaning into genre. Marketing marketing. But maybe for anything that's not that that's not as useful seems possible. And that just bears out kind of what we've seen experientially. Right, Rebecca? Like that's an articulation of something that's felt, if not exactly put in a.
- [56:58]
A
Spreadsheet for us to just about the ways that people talk about books, the way we talk about books and we describe them, the way that civilian readers in my life talk about books. And most of the time that a book comes up, they don't lead with. With the genre.
- [57:12]
B
I was going to ask about that.
- [57:13]
A
If you say, what's it about? And you're. And you're doing, say, gone Girl, you get this woman disappears. And like, you think that one thing has happened for most of the book and then there's this big twist about the disappearance. And so, like, there's kind of a mystery, but it's doing all of these other things and it's working on these other levels. Or if you ask about Underground Railroad, you get, well, it explored. It's about slavery, but also this alternate version of the past where the underground railroad is a physical thing. There's some Magic realism is probably the first genre word that would come up in someone's definition of underground railroad. But that's. I think you're right.
- [57:50]
B
I think it's much more experiential.
- [57:52]
A
Experiential people are talking about. This is the thing that makes booksellers and librarians better at matching readers to books than publishers are. Is that the booksellers and librarians, or hopefully us, when people write in with here's what I'm looking for, like, folks are telling them what they liked about a novel or what they liked about that memoir that they just read, and the librarian or the bookseller is doing matchmaking about how it feels. Something that they know about how it feels to read that book. The experience that the reader is getting, not the ingredients that go into the book.
- [58:29]
B
Laura, can I ask you about methodology quickly, about using this half percent? Because one thing I know about Goodreads users, or I used to know it may no longer be true, is that they are more intense of a book consumer than other people that aren't on Goodreads.
- [58:45]
D
Right.
- [58:45]
B
Like they. And then if you take a subset of a subset, which is the. The most active Goodreads user who are already more active in logging and interacting with their books, I wonder, does that make this subset representative? More representative? Less representative? I don't, I don't know if there's. We don't have a control group for, like, how these people compare against something else. What are your thoughts about that?
- [59:08]
C
Yeah, it's also very, very Anglophone. This is really, really skewed toward the United States. It's really skewed toward Anglophone readers. There is not a lot here that's comparable to literature in other languages. I mean, I think that there is problems with how representative it is. But we also don't have any data about what the population might be.
- [59:33]
B
No, we don't have a media. That's what I'm saying. We don't have a median control group to, like, say, how, you know, how many standard deviations away is from my dad, who I think of as a very eclectic, generally interested reader who will never rate something on Goodreads in his life, but he's influential in his, like, retiree group about what books are good. Like, is he more representative than his 0.5%? I could believe, yes and no. No, I just, I don't. I can't keep my bearings there. I mean, I think, like we said at the outset, it's the worst data set for. Except for everything else, because you cannot get this kind of robust data that you can do analysis on because you don't see people's bookshelves. Like, you can't go in enough people's bookshelves to, like, see what's on their shelf at their cabin or their study or whatever.
- [60:12]
A
It's that distinction between book buying and book readership that really matters. Like, the things that people buy might look. I'm just guessing, but like, might look more, you know, narrow than what actually gets read. Especially when you factor in, like, gift giving and how, like, the dad book gets talked about as if it's one thing, but also that's its own whole unit. The dad book is a vibe. It's a universe of a variety of genres. This is so juicy, Laura.
- [60:43]
C
I know. And there's so many. They do such. They go into such great examples. There are so many different heuristics that people use when they're selecting books.
- [60:49]
B
Books.
- [60:50]
C
So one of the really great case studies that they looked at was the romance issue, for one. But they looked at one user who, for instance, has been very committed to reading books by African American writers. So you might take the African American History Month to say, this is a month where I'm reading only books by African American writers. Or Latinx writers during Latinx History Month. Or women writers. We have all of these different programs at libraries, for instance, or one book programs to encourage that particular sort of reading. Reading. Based on this particular user's profile, reading books only by African American writers also meant that their list skewed. Extraordinarily prestigious.
- [61:31]
B
Yes.
- [61:32]
C
Even though African American writers and writers of color have long been marginalized, those who have been allowed in have been outsized in terms of their representation and rewards by prize committees, by one book committees, by. By syllabi. Like, there is a greater value placed on those very, very few writers who are allowed entrance to the field. So approaching this question not via genre, but by some other metric then kind of makes all of these problems of inequality and prestige and class can compound on each other in ways that I find so fascinating that again, we just totally miss in the genre conversation.
- [62:11]
A
So does this research make its way to the publishing industry?
- [62:16]
C
I don't know, but I think, I mean I don't know how it would other than this podcast and a middle substack that someone tries to run every now and again.
- [62:26]
B
I hear you. I wonder who writes that one.
- [62:28]
C
I don't know. But I mean one of the findings that I found to be most depressing to me as an English professor who is trying to reach the same exact people that publishers are, which is young readers trying to make sure that they, they are lifelong committed readers after they come through my class is that one of the other ways that English importer looked at this data was they wondered about how taste changes over time. So none of this data is timestamped, but what they are able to do is look at the lifespan of a user's account. So what are things that people are putting on shelves early in their lifespan as a Goodreads user? And what they found is that often when people are signing up for Goodreads, they tend to shelve things that they've already read. And that's where you see things like classics, that's where you see things like labeled literary fiction. That's where you see your zero to well read syllabi. Really getting shelved is when people are building their profiles really, really early and then as time goes on they have their more natural reading selections. Right. These are the things that I'm reading on a day to day basis as opposed to making sure that my shelf is represented digitally. And what they found is that literature, literary fiction does not seem to be a sticky category, which is to say it's something that gets added early, but then it doesn't necessarily persist at the same level throughout. As an English professor, this destroys me a little bit.
- [63:49]
A
Yep, it feels true in my social life certainly.
- [63:53]
C
But these, the things that I spend my time and my efforts and energies teaching that I think like this is what makes a good life. This is what it means to be an engaged citizen, a literary citizen, but also just citizen of the world. Those are not necessarily the things that people are going to continue reading. They're not going to necessarily continue reading in that vein though they are more likely to put those things on their favorite books shelves.
- [64:15]
A
There's that cultural capital again.
- [64:17]
C
Yes. The genre that is however, very sticky that seems to be consistent across. You can Guess that seems to be consistent across people's reading lives is.
- [64:30]
D
You.
- [64:30]
C
Can guess now if you want romance.
- [64:33]
A
No, no.
- [64:36]
B
I think it's fantasy.
- [64:39]
C
It is mysteries and thrillers.
- [64:44]
B
Romance is a. Romance is a one of one. But then the sorting mechanism, I have mystery thrillers as being the stickiest from there, I guess. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a ton of. I look at my kids reading who are middle grade into high school now, they would read a middle grade mystery tree. Right. They're available to them earlier than say, yeah, I guess there's fantasy available early. I wonder if fantasy has a similar vector, a similar shape to literary fiction where you read a lot of it younger and then as you get older. I thought about, I thought about this the other day. If I weren't doing this job right now and I was just doing some other, you know, media and Jeff job, I wonder how the gravitational pull of dad books for some of my demographics would be pretty strong.
- [65:25]
A
Like you wouldn't have spent the weekend reading Sophocles like we just did.
- [65:28]
B
I don't know. I think it's usually because my dad, when he was about my age not to make this whole podcast about my dad. He had a. Not a. He had a reading midlife crisis where he sort of came back to the classics and like literary fiction. Like I remember him distinctly reading Plutarch in his like armchair when I was like 16. So I think I maybe have a little bit of. I could have done a little bit of that of its own kind.
- [65:49]
A
I think it makes. I understand why literature and literary fiction don't stick. And I wonder how much of it too is that it's. It's prescribed reading. Like the first time that we encounter literature is in school. And a lot of people have really negative experiences with that and have just a negative valence around reading something serious, reading something that feels like work. And then it's hard to market literary fiction. Those are books that are often hard to talk about in elevator pitch sorts of ways that would be sticky and compelling to. I don't think it's complicated.
- [66:25]
B
I mean, tell me what you think about this guys. Like, I think people mostly in their lives are pain avoidant. And if you pick up literary fiction or the classic, some of those are spiky. They just, they're just going to be more spiky than what's on the bestseller. I mean, I think it's as. I honestly think it's as simple as that is like some of those you read the first couple of pages, the bluest eye or the first couple page Ulysses or something you've heard about or remembrance of things past and you're like what the shit is this? I, I, my life is too short. I'm a working stiff. I've got, you know, things to worry about, about. I'd rather pick up something that's more pleasurable, that's more conventionally interesting or at the very least takes less friction to get into. And I think the variance is going to be high. The things you find in Laura's class, you're going to love. Some of those people are going to love and some they fucking hate. Like some of the stuff, I mean I'll speak myself that I was required to read that are classics I really didn't care for. I cared for a lot less than my median Reese Witherspoon Book Club but also the things I loved, I loved a lot more than anything. I'm going to find some there. I just think the variance is so high for most people.
- [67:27]
C
But, but can you hear how it's so impossible to get outside of class even in this discussion? Right? Like it's so impossible to move outside of social class and economic class. As we think about taste hierarchies, I think one, you know, to the question of does this get to the publishing industry? I mean I think one real problem is that book sales data means that we are immediately and always looking at moneyed individuals, right? People who are buying books, books that that requires a degree of money. I think library data would probably show us something a lot different if that was a primary metric, a primary way of looking at how books are being read and consumed.
- [68:03]
B
And whenever we see the most checked out stories at the end of the year from like the nypl, the bpl, those are always interesting because they don't neatly align with the best selling books of the year.
- [68:12]
A
I think that's an argument for using this Goodreads data instead of something else is that you don't have to to have purchased the book in order to have read it and put it on a Goodreads shelf. You do still need a certain level of socioeconomic access to the Internet and time and awareness to be using something like Goodreads. But it's not gated as much as book sales data would be.
- [68:32]
B
Rebecca and I sometimes use this question Lauren, I'm curious to see what your answer would be. And I'm sure that you have a million of them. But looking at this data that you're looking at today and talking with us about, about if you could if you could get the true answer to one question. Forget about whether you get to go from the fount of truth, wherever that may be, and you get to dip your cup once. Like, what, what is the. What is the thing that you find yourself most wanting to know about this data, American reading habits or like, something related to genre? Forget about whether it's what could be possible to understand. Like, what is the, you know, the, the secret within the secret that you'd like to, to know?
- [69:10]
C
I guess I want to know what, what makes people read literary fiction that is not required. Like what, what makes them pick up Toni Morrison some random day when they're, you know, waiting in the carpool line when they're 39 years old, which is my life. Like, I, I want to know what makes people read literature.
- [69:29]
B
I was in life I when I met my local palace. They have a coffee shop, next store, and it's a great spot for seeing what people are reading because they just bought it. They're readers. They have their book and their coffee, and I'm always interested to see. But there was a guy yesterday reading the World According to Garp by John Irving, and I was like, interesting. Why today? Why in the world? Why. Why did. I mean, there's no bad answer to that. It's not. It's like, that could be anything. Did you, you, you saw it at a little free library. You just decided 1. How in the world today did that particular person decide World According to Garp? I think, I think you hit on, I think you hit on something there, Laura. It's like, and this is what the publishing industry like to know, and it's kind of unanswerable for reasons we can't, because they want to put their messaging wherever those rivers are, and they just don't know. And they, and they're, they're maybe outside of the ability of us to understand, understand where they are.
- [70:29]
C
And I, you know, I want to know that for the sake of publishing. I want to know that so that way good books can continue to be in the world because those good books are managing to find their readers most effectively. But I also want to know that for the classroom, right? I mean, I teach classes on the bestseller. I'm teaching a book on young adult literature in the spring. I have kind of shifted my overton window to I want students to be reading and I want them to be thinking critically and talking about books, whatever it is that they're reading. And so if getting them excited about reading now makes them more likely to keep on reading I do not care. I mean, I do care, but I would rather get them things that are going to fuel that excitement and hope that that can continue when they're outside of my class instead of, instead of asking them to read the books that I think that they should read that I think make my world better. Make the world better.
- [71:18]
A
Maybe my dream. Follow on to your dream question then is like, what books make the best gateway drugs? This is, I think we want to be mindful of our time here with Professor McGowan, season two of Zero to well, Radar.
- [71:35]
B
Anything else you were going to throw at us, Laura, before we let you go?
- [71:39]
C
No, this was, it was so wonderful to talk to you and so fun to talk about fun data and fun research. And I think that's all I got for us today.
- [71:49]
B
Laura, remind me the name of your substack. I knew it's a good title, but I can't remember what it is.
- [71:54]
C
It's called Text Crunch.
- [71:55]
B
There it is.
- [71:56]
C
Yep. Text Crunch.
- [71:58]
B
Put a link in the show notes book riot.com listen. You can choose an email podcast@bookright.com we be especially interested in little birdies in the industry that listen today. Are these conversations you've had? Is this a surprise to you? Is this. Are you a 26 year old junior marketer who's been trying to shake the cage and you're like, people will read anything. It doesn't just have to be X or Y or you. Was your hair really blown back by what Laura brought us today? A pleasure, Dr. Laura McGrath of Temple. Rebecca, thank you. We'll talk to y' all later. Limu and I always tell you to.
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A
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C
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B
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A
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B
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