The National Endowment for the Humanities Helped Save Literature in Tennessee

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From Nashville Scene:

In 2009, on New Year’s Day, I got fired from my job as the book-page editor of the Nashville Scene. I was standing in line at Target when the paper’s editor-in-chief called my cell and got right to the point: “We’re canceling the book section,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I have to let you go.”

“OK,” I said.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

In the face of disappointment I’m normally a full-throated keener, so if I took this bad news better than I typically accept setbacks, it’s only because this bit of bad news didn’t come out of the blue. In fact, I’d been expecting the call for more than two years, ever since the Scene’s parent company at the time was bought by a rival syndicate — a company that had never covered books. When your job is to edit book reviews at a newspaper owned by a chain that doesn’t cover books, you don’t need to be John Grisham to know how the plot ends.

This is the tale of how Tennessee literature was saved from a fate closely resembling oblivion by an unlikely hero: the United States government. Specifically, it was saved by the tiny portion of the U.S. federal budget allocated to the National Endowment for the Humanities. More specifically, by the even tinier part of the federal budget that the NEH budget disburses to Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the national agency. The knight in shining armor who swooped in to save literature was Uncle Sam.

. . . .

But in Tennessee we can offer one perfectly transparent story of how writers are profoundly affected by federal funds disbursed through the NEH. It starts not with the cancellation of the Nashville Scene’s book page, but with the Great Recession. If you’re the editor of a newspaper whose advertising sales have dried up, you have no choice but to downsize and hope you can survive long enough with a skeletal staff for the economy to rebound.

I can guess what you’re thinking: It’s not like the book section of one newspaper in one town in one state of this vast country makes much of a difference in whether literature survives. This is the 21st century. If you’re looking for a new book to read, you go to Amazon, or Goodreads, or social media. Newspapers are so 20th century.

 Well, yes and no.

People outside the publishing world tend to assume that a book’s failure or success depends entirely on whether that book is any good. But people inside publishing understand that the very best book will sink like a stone to the bottom of the sea if readers don’t know it exists. And if you’re a debut author starting from zero — zero marketing budget, zero name recognition, zero famous writer friends — an online bookseller will not save you. Go ahead and upload your novel to Amazon, and let’s see how long it takes your friends to find it on their own. Don’t expect your mother to find it at all.

If you’re a debut author starting from zero, one thing you can do is give readings in 10 or 12 independent bookstores around the country and hope those readings inspire the local newspapers to give your book some ink. Especially for authors who are just starting out — or whose work is difficult or challenging or written for a niche audience — local bookstores and local newspapers can mean the difference between respectable sales and failure. An enthusiastic bookseller will push a good book into the hands of readers long after the author’s appearance is over, and a good newspaper review makes for a link even your mother can find.

But that do-it-yourself marketing strategy wasn’t an option in January 2009. By the time the Nashville Scene shut down its book page, the city’s daily paper, The Tennessean, had already stopped running book reviews. Across Tennessee, newspapers had fired their literary editors and shuttered their book pages. If a newspaper continued to cover books at all, it relied on short pieces taken from a wire service — reviews of books by established authors who had nothing to do with Tennessee.

. . . .

 With bookstores closing and newspapers killing their book pages, the staff at Humanities Tennessee had a brainstorm. What about starting a daily online publication to highlight new books by Tennessee authors in the same way bookstore shelves and local newspapers once had? A Tennessee-based New York Times Book Review for books that The New York Times Book Review wouldn’t touch?

. . . .

The publication Humanities Tennessee dreamed up is called Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. (The name is a reference to Tennessee’s history as the 16th state to join the union.) They built the site in-house by reading a book called Drupal for Dummies, and they hired me to run it. The reviewers who’d lost their gigs when newspapers killed their book pages got back to reading and writing, and in October 2009, on the first day of the Southern Festival of Books — in what later turned out to be the very worst quarter of the Great Recession — Chapter 16 went live for the first time.

The site offers book reviews and author interviews; excerpts from forthcoming books; original poems and essays; features on literary events around the state; and news about Tennessee writers. And this content is paid for out of a significant freelance budget — at Chapter 16 we hire professional writers, and we pay them for their work. 

Link to the rest at Nashville Scene and thanks to Dave for the tip.