Better get out your calculator for this one: Publishers say 3 million books are published each year in the U.S. The Minnesota Star Tribune has space to cover maybe 300 or 400 of them. So there are way more books the paper can’t cover — 2,999,600 of them to be semi-exact.
That means some decisions must be made. This is the story of how they’re made.
Take the month of June. We received 179 books for adult readers (some of which I requested, some of which were simply mailed to us in the hope that we’d write about them; I’d estimate that I open about 60-70 books each week).
Because we ran a summer preview that zipped through 24 titles earlier this month, we were able to include more books than usual, but it was still just a fraction of those 179 books and an even smaller fraction of the June books for which I received e-mailed pitches from publishers. I get at least 50 of those per day, so that would be around 2,500 per month, which works out to more than 3,000 actual books annually and 30,000 pitches. Which makes my head hurt a little.
One way for writers who’d like to be in the paper to get a leg up is to be from Minnesota, but it’s not a guarantee. The Twin Cities, and greater Minnesota, have an incredibly vibrant literary scene, with several important publishers, dozens of independent bookstores, the epicenter of the Little Free Library movement in St. Paul, punching-above-our-weight book sales (both St. Paul and Minneapolis are in the U.S. top 10) and more book clubs than you can shake a library card at.
The Star Tribune obviously wants to stay on top of that. And covering Minnesota writers, either in the form of reviews or writer interviews, is a big part of that, not just big names such as Louise Erdrich, William Kent Krueger, Kate DiCamillo and Star Tribune Artist of the Year Kao Kalia Yang but also vibrant newer talents such as Mounds View’s Mubanga Kalimamukwento and fantasy/horror writer Emma Törzs.
Many Minnesota books won’t get reviewed in national publications, so the Star Tribune does what it can to make sure they get attention here. The flipside of that, and easily the worst part of my job, is that I have to say “no” a lot. At least once a day, I get an email that begins “I’m a Minnesota writer who has a new book” and, although I do get to cover some of them, many more aren’t of broad enough interest, duplicate other books we’ve covered or are self-published (we review many books from smaller presses such as Graywolf or Coffee House but our books policy dictates that we don’t review self-published titles).
Obviously, I don’t read all the books we get. There are many that I can tell right off the bat we’re not going to cover (sorry, “Ergonomics in the Age of AI”). Some titles I instantly know we’re going to want to write about — when Pulitzer Prize winner Erdrich publishes another book, we’ll be there — but most require what I think of as the 50-page test.
