How do you follow an author? 

Book Community, Bookish People, and Bland Invectives 

If Ian McEwan, an author I enjoy, publishes something new, I will likely hear about it. I will see it on display in the window of Foyles as I pass, and it may even get coverage in the trade papers I read in my professional duty as a librarian. They only really log bestsellers of various stripes. McEwan is a big enough figure, and one local enough to me, that whatever small book tour he chooses to do will become headline news for Hay Festival or be featured in the Royal Festival Hall’s emailing list. If Clara Dupont-Monod publishes another book, though, I fear I won’t hear about it. Dupont-Monod writes in a different language to me, so there’s a chance that even if I did hear about her work as it was new, the translation (which takes time!) would not break into the news cycle, even within the specialist materials I consume for work and pleasure. I ask, then, how am I supposed to follow an author? 

Many authors are on social media. Brandon Taylor and Francesca Lia Block are two authors I’ve followed over multiple platforms [1] for many years, and their content is engaging enough even when they don’t trumpet contractually-obliged alerts about forthcoming projects you can PREORDER NOW! Many authors extremely local to me [1.5] get put on the ‘new in’ shelf at my library, which I regularly peruse whilst waiting for the lift and generally find one or two books that make it onto my (extensive) TBR. Many authors have publishers that use Goodreads or mailing lists or trade publications or social media on their behalf. Many bookshops push things they don’t expect you to have heard of rather than things you’re likely to go in and ask for [2] and the good ones will prioritise queer, Black, translated, or otherwise marginalised authors when recommending, and people who work with books are generally happy to put quite a lot of effort into sharing work they think you should have the opportunity to love. I appreciate discovering new authors, but I don’t often see the same hype for continuing careers. 

Most authors sit in a ‘betwixt’ level of fame: Sally Rooney and Sarah Waters are two examples of writers whose next work will make a splash, but will try to avoid engaging with the public or, worse, journalists to promote their work. This is both admirable, by keeping them out of an ivory-tower thought-bubble which may seep into their writing or personal lives, and deeply irritating, as book tours and interviews do, indeed, serve the purpose of spreading the word that your book is out. I’ve bought many a not-for-me DNF because I went to see the author speak, but also been introduced to writers like Eliza Clark and Manu Chander because their presence presented their work in such a way I was compelled to look more into them. Some authors’ tours are a big deal – Brandon Taylor or Annie Ernaux coming to the UK both sent the bookish class (myself included) into conniptions trying for tickets, and sometimes you take a chance on your local Waterstone’s being a good time even if it’s not for you.  

What I’d like to see is a bookish equivalent to one of my favourite things about Spotify: ‘new music Friday’. I look through the lists of both artists I follow, missing nothing, and hyped artists I don’t, even if they’re outside my usual field of vision. I can judge those books by their covers (or band names) and use cultural signifiers to decide if I should give something I don’t know a shot [2.5]. If authors had a social media presence like Spotify and publishers acted like management teams, I could follow Polly Barton’s translation work as well as seeing her fiction in the wild. If publishing had an organ like this I could get updates from scholars whose work I like, whether papers or books, and even find a ‘playlist’ or folder of recommendations akin to what Caroline Polachek has given her followers. For somebody who works in books twice over (as a librarian and a PhD candidate) I am great in my own field, and willing to share that expertise, but as far as reading for pleasure goes it’s a total crapshoot unless I stick to classics I know I’ll love. 

Back in the day we might have simply read the paper – once a week there’d be a book section, and professional reviewers would lay out the sum total of what I might like to know, but in a world where microgenres like ‘weird girl lit’ pop up organically and more books are published than ever before, it’s simply not possible for the mainstream media to understand or cover what I’m interested in without missing something. Book publications are only creating a new generation of my Ian McEwans and Kazuo Ishiguros, which doesn’t fix the problem in the slightest. For a while I was using Reddit extensively to get my music news, and the idea of a community who like the same thing you is powerful. We all know what BookTok is into, and if you like the same things as other users of that platform then you’re in luck. A friend of mine has a library of hundreds of ebooks she gets for incredibly cheap and loves almost every one of them, safe in the knowledge that the recommenders and writers of romantasy will find something she’s in the mood for. Reddit can be like this – the book community there has a fantastic initiative where every month a new country is selected and together people choose to become education on the literary culture of an often overlooked country, and the ‘book that feels like…’ method of using an image to solicit a similar book is charming and fun. This, still, though, is ‘new content’. It’s not ‘I wonder if their non-fiction resonates with me as much as their fiction’ or ‘I love their poetry and I know I’ll love their prose’. I don’t necessarily want something shiny or the best ever – I want to see how a perspective can change and the craft of writing can develop.  

Perhaps the problem is the idea that I need to keep up with an author’s work at all? I have 192 unread ebooks on hand at any point, not to mention however many on my shelf and three in the post [4] – I have enough reading material to last me, at current rate, at least four-and-a-half years without even digging into my own archives or reading a library book. I am literally in a library right now, and I work in a library choosing which books we get… surely I could get by, or even live happily, without an awareness of what’s going on in one or more ‘literary scene’? Well, firstly, I’d be worse at my job if that were the case. My proclivity to hang around book spaces has protected my library from the preponderance of smut in cartoonish covers, makes me a fount of knowledge about book preservation and exhibitions and stationery trends, and kept my patrons in the newest or most talked-about books, from White Nights to You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah. Beyond that, I have no wish to stagnate: in a world of infinite information, infinite content, one could easily read only Dickens and forget Otessa Moshfegh. One must remember that Otessa Moshfegh is so 2022 and that there are new writers, inspired by her or the same things she was inspired by or who haven’t read her at all. We read to process the world around us, and the world around us is a complicated place which I need both Bleak House and My Year of Rest and Relaxation to interrogate. We read for enjoyment, and I enjoy both Angela Carter and Akwaeke Emezi. We read to learn new things or experience places we’ll never go, and I need both Ford Madox Ford and Colson Whitehead to take me there. One can love reading and never touch a modern book, want to expand and decolonise their mind and never read anything written in the last decade, but I am not that kind of reader. I love to follow the craft of my favourite writers and see how their preoccupations mirror mine – or not. I want to support young or living writers to earn a living by their pen and help to create the literary world I’d like to live in, read about, or reflect upon, knowing that discourse among writers makes them stronger. I want to read a 3/5 book and let it drip thoughts into the percolator of my mind. 

It’s possible that my attachment to reading in this way comes from a youth spent reading poetry. The ‘scene’ for poetry is very much engaged in modern works and trends, very buzzy and fun. It can be an intimidating world, but everywhere you turn there are new riches to be discovered. Because poetry is so unpopular among the wider public it requires patronage, connection, and passion from its readership [5] and people who enjoy poetry will happily attend readings, buy the most home-made chapbooks for high prices, listen to podcasts, and get excited when somebody they appreciate is published in a magazine. It’s a very in-group orientated hobby, and perhaps not the best or healthiest model for a literary world, but this social, active fandom aspect has perhaps informed why I expect more from my books than a half-hearted tour of three cities and a German translation in 4 years’ time. When The Poetry Book Society manage to create an engaging weekly newsletter which never fails to educate me, and there is SO much out there I could be educated on, I want that from my bread-and-butter reading: that is, fiction. 

I regret to inform you that in some ways the platform I’m seeking is Amazon. Their ownership of Goodreads coupled with their in possibly all ways superior algorithm is a powerful asset in the search for knowledge, but I want no part of the great Bezos empire [3] and will find a way to proceed without it. Is Substack the place to build a book community? No, this is twitter with a blog attached. It’s fun, but you can’t expect every author to be sharing their updates to a social media platform. Perhaps a Web 2.0 solution is possible? Could we link up RSS readers to our favourite authors’ websites and get email updates along with our discarded Shopify baskets and our dispatch notifications and our ex-boyfriend’s-former-housemate’s-new-album update? Is that a community, or is it an indictment of our consumption habits? 

You cannot force something to be what it is not. You cannot create interest where there is none or ceremony from thin air. The ‘book community’ is fractured into many scenes and, like most, I sit in between several, hoping that the things I’m interested in becomes ‘the’ community. I wrote this looking for an answer and, as is always the case, the only answer is within myself. 

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[1] RIP Twitter. You were the best of times, you were the worst of times. 

[1.5] usually these are members of the same library, so really very local 

[2] obligatory ‘trust me customers will ask you stupid questions’ reference. At least mine are children, so forgivable. 

[2.5] this is why I hate CMAT’s album art so vehemently – I am terrible at decoding Gen Z aesthetics so I need her to do a Beabadoobee and step into a more timeless style 

[3] I do purchase, still, on Abebooks. Secondhand scholarly and out-of-print works must be procured; additionally, antiquarian booksellers tend not to have the best websites. I do not have an account on Amazon, though, for either streaming or being delivered of products, and am an evangelist for Storygraph above Goodreads. 

[4] reading for pleasure books only. I’m supposed to be on a no-buy but I snuck this year’s Christmas book because it had to come from Germany and a couple of newly published gems onto a big order for my PhD texts because I am a bad person who will end up homeless, living in an igloo made of books in Hyde Park, a London institution tourists gawk at like the people you see dry-skiing around the city or taking their exotic bird out for a walk. 

[5] I daren’t so much as buy a copy of a review because I simply do not have time to fall into the rabbit hole of what’s changed in the poetry world since I last took it seriously. See also: bridge playing. 

On This Topic:

• Some of my favourite poets that I used to follow: Momtaza Mehri
• Niall Campbell
• and my own friend Julie Irigaray

To-Do:

• Clear space on the shelves for my incoming deluge of academic books (PhD chapter 3 ahoy!)
• WRITE DICKENS DAY PAPER
• Deal with Scholastic Book Fair (my least favourite week of the year)

Today’s Culture:

• Accidentally bought a dress on ebay. I only ever under-offer and continue to be surprised (and mildly apologetic) when I win anything.
• Buying a lot of foreign language books for work
• Accepting that I’m an M&S person and I would get all my groceries from there if I could.