Pamela Paul is the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a position she’s held since 2013, when she was promoted after two years as the children’s book editor. The influential publication, which reaches as many as 1.7 million readers each week, is the last of the stand-alone book review sections.

Paul grew up in New York, studied history at Brown University, and lived in Paris, London, and Chiang Mai, Thailand, during her twenties. She has worked at Scholastic, Time Inc., and Turner Broadcasting, written columns for the Economist, Worth, and the New York Times, and contributed to Time, the Atlantic, Vogue, and the Washington Post. During her thirties she had three children and wrote three books—The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony (Villard, 2002); Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (Times Books, 2005); Parenting, Inc.: How the Billion-Dollar Baby Business Has Changed the Way We Raise Our Children (Times Books, 2008)—and then edited another one, By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life From the New York Times Book Review (Henry Holt, 2014). She is currently working on a memoir, My Life With Bob, forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2017.

As the author of three nonfiction books and the editor of one, I’m sure you’re familiar with the writer’s spectrum of hopes and fears. How does it feel to be on the other side, especially at such a storied institution?
I feel like a total traitor, but one very sympathetic to the victims. I do think it’s helpful to have been on the other side, in this job. It’s important to always bear in mind the hard work, hopes, and heartache that go into writing a book, and to take the responsibility of reviewing the fruits of those labors with good intention and respect. For many people, writing a book is a life’s ambition, and it’s a significant accomplishment to have one published. We—as readers, editors, and critics—shouldn’t take that lightly.

You began your career as a correspondent for The Economist, where you contributed book, film, and theater reviews. Did you have any preparation for reviewing these three separate art forms? How did reviewing film and theater inform your book reviewing and vice versa?
My preparation was as a besotted consumer of all three. Other people growing up had hobbies; they liked to run outside or were extremely social. I liked to sit alone in darkened theaters or by the side of a very bright reading lamp. And whatever I couldn’t consume myself, I liked to read about other people consuming. Growing up, I knew all the critics at the Times, Time, and New York magazine by name and eagerly awaited their opinions.

I often read criticism of other art forms for inspiration. It’s easy to fall into cliché within a given medium. In books alone, for example, we all recognize the familiar “tropes”—there’s one already: lyrical, propulsive, muscular, at its/her/his best, etcetera. Reviewing across genres keeps your perspective and voice fresh in the same way experiencing those different art forms as a reader, viewer, and listener does.

How did you prepare for your role as the children’s book editor at the New York Times Book Review? Did it feel natural switching from reviewing adult books to reviewing books for toddlers, middle-graders, and young adults?
I have always been a fan of children’s literature. I held on to treasured books from my childhood and started buying books for my children before they were even born. I would scour children’s illustration auctions and galleries, used children’s bookstores, and children’s literature blogs. And then, of course, I had a house full of three avid children’s book readers.

But I didn’t write my first children’s book review until a few months before I joined the Times. The book was Mo Willems’s brilliant Knuffle Bunny Free and it wasn’t easy. In many ways, children’s book reviews are tougher to write than adult reviews. You are writing the review with a very specific audience in mind, and have to take into account the age and maturity of young readers, as well as the priorities of parents, teachers, and librarians.

Illustration is a huge part of so many kids’ books; it’s useful to have a background in art history and a love of illustration. Picture-book reviewing is at least as much about the art as it is about the text. Children’s books are the ones that create readers; they’re tremendously important for everyone who cares about books, and I still find it difficult to understand how anyone wouldn’t take them seriously.

How many dedicated employees do you have on staff at the New York Times Book Review?
We’re small. We have about sixteen people. We work hard reading lots of books, so it’s a good thing we like the work.

On average, how many books do you get per week? And how many of those are you able to assign for review?
We’ve never counted—it would be too time consuming. But the estimate my predecessor used, which I will repeat here, is that we review about 1 percent of the books published in any given year. And that does not include self-published books or books published in e-format only.

What sorts of things influence you when assigning a book for review—an author’s name, the size of the advance, prepub reviews, blurbs? What about your relationships with editors and publicists—do those ever help a book get reviewed?
We consider everything, but it really comes down to the book. Even books that come in with tons of hype from the publisher, juicy blurbs from all the right people, and bouquets of flowers get passed over. That said, we still pay attention to it all, and it helps give us a sense of the book. The truth is blurbs can hinder us as much as they can help because often the writers we most want to ask to review a book have already blurbed it. I can’t tell you how frequently we ask someone to review a book who turns out to have given it a blurb. It’s the kind of “I have a great idea!” that winds up feeling terrible.

The New York Times Book Review has been particularly good about reviewing books from small presses. Does this come from the staff’s own organic interests, or a sense of wanting to level the playing field—or a bit of both?
Quality books come out of all kinds of publishing houses, and often, new voices and quirky but interesting topics emerge from the smaller presses. So we don’t feel like we have to game anything—good books just keep coming from all corners. It’s exciting to see new small presses starting up all the time, and the more established ones thriving.

Do you keep diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on—in mind when assigning reviews?
We want the pages of the Book Review to represent both our readership and the wide range of voices of people out there publishing good work. Neither is a homogenous group. I’ve said before that I don’t think it requires an enormous amount of effort to find smart women authors and reviewers. I do think it takes a little more effort to track down new voices across races and ethnicities, and not to pigeonhole writers according to color or gender. We don’t ask Czech reviewers to stick to their own nationality, or women to only review other women, so I also do try not to have all our black writers reviewing other black writers. The most important thing is that reviewers engage with a book in some way, and I think most good writers like to read and respond to books that not only reflect their own experiences but also transport them into the worlds of others.

A frequent complaint in literary circles is that negative reviews take up space that could otherwise be used reviewing better books. Where do you stand on the value of publishing negative reviews? Is it a necessary evil?
I don’t think it’s a necessary evil. I think we’re providing a service to readers. People are making decisions about spending time and often money on a book. We are providing information about whether it’s worth their while.

But it’s not as if we actively seek negative reviews. Nor do I think a “set-up” review is helpful—in which you recruit someone you know is going to hate a book to write about it. Generally speaking, our editors send out books because we think they are worthy of review and we look for writers we think will appreciate them. It does, however, happen that our reviewers don’t always agree with our assessment, and not infrequently, reviewers will turn in negative reviews of books we very much liked. But we can’t alter their judgment or kill those reviews: That would be journalistically unethical—unfair to our critics, who have been hired to assess the books in their own way; and unfair to our readers, who expect an independent assessment.

Lastly and importantly: I don’t think negative reviews always kill a book. I will sometimes read a very negative review and end up disagreeing with the reviewer; I’ve definitely bought books after reading negative reviews.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier?
No regrets. As a freelancer I had the luxury of taking a lot of time with each review I wrote. And as an author who has been on the receiving end of careless reviews, I took those assignments seriously. That doesn’t mean I haven’t written negative reviews—I have. But I like to think I did so thoughtfully. And I always take care to point out what an author does well. All writers know that criticism goes down much easier with a dollop of praise.

How many freelancers do you work with? Are there certain things you look for in a reviewer?
The New York Times Book Review relies almost entirely on freelance reviewers. The daily reviews at the Times come from the three Times book critics. They are the critical voices of the paper, whereas at the Book Review we strive to have a constantly rotating cast of reviewers from the world outside the Times. We want variety. That means professional literary critics, novelists, academics, artists who work in other media or genres. I do not look for any “type” of reviewer, because again, I think the beauty of the Book Review is its element of surprise: voices from all corners of the world, young novelists and established critics, a range of political perspectives, unexpected matches between author and reviewer, and above all, writers who actively engage with the material.

What was the motivation behind the Book Review’s proliferation of various bestseller lists? I find them really fascinating, but I also sympathize a bit with those who bemoan that it takes up space that could otherwise be used to review more books.
We’ve actually reduced the number of pages of bestsellers in the weekly Book Review by three pages since 2011. There are more lists, but they rotate in print (and exist in their full bounty online).

Did you come up with the idea for the By the Book series? Out of all the star-studded personalities who’ve been featured thus far, do any stand out as favorites?
I did, though the desire for some kind of “profile” had been brewing at the Book Review for years.

There are so many people I admire who’ve done a By the Book, it’s impossible to name a favorite, but I will anyway: David Sedaris, because he was the first, and because he said yes. And then he was, of course, brilliant.

How do you think the field of book criticism has changed over the past couple of decades?
The world of newspaper criticism has changed dramatically because so many newspapers killed their stand-alone sections, folded their books coverage into other sections, reduced or eliminated their ranks of house critics, shortened their reviews in favor of features, etcetera. That’s the depressing part.

The good news is that the Internet has brought an explosion of new and exciting voices, and criticism that is free to range in format and length. I think that’s tremendously invigorating.

What are your thoughts on social media? Has it helped you in your current role?
I was dragged reluctantly into social media and now I love it. I find it exciting and helpful to be part of the literary conversation online or to observe it from the sidelines. I am constantly discovering new voices—novelists to keep an eye on, critics to offer an assignment to, opinions to pay attention to—via social media and on literary websites. At the same time, I am wary of “customer” or “user” or “reader” reviews on sites like Goodreads and Amazon, where so much is suspect. 

What sorts of exclusive content is the New York Times Book Review offering readers?
The kinds of book reviews and literary criticism—the quality, the depth, the journalistic integrity—that the Times offers its readers is unfortunately increasingly hard to find. Fewer outlets are devoting the time, the space, the staff, the painstaking vetting and fact checking, the critical judgment to do this well.

We may be the only newspaper review that doesn’t cherry-pick the books we want to assign, but instead assesses the entire landscape (with the exception of a few categories like textbooks and westerns). Our standards for conflicts of interest are far more stringent than those of our competitors. We do not allow our contributors to review an author twice in our pages, for example. We work very hard to weed out conflicts of interest that wouldn’t bother many other outlets. We will often say no to a pairing, and then find that that reviewer has taken the book elsewhere.

Where do you see the future of book coverage in ten years?
I think our coverage is going to become increasingly international in scope. I would like to believe that American readers are becoming more open to hearing voices from other corners of the planet, and that readers abroad are interested in learning about the books we publish here.

I also think that just as the e-books trend slowed down and normalized, with the balance tipping far in favor of print books, so too will the drive towards quicky, bloggy online content tilt in favor of longer, more considered takes. There’s lots of quantity out there; not a lot of quality. And I think readers will increasingly seek to curate their own media consumption. There are so many books, and people have only so much time.

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
I always go back to the classics, and I love to reread. I very much want to reread both Anna Karenina and War and Peace, because I think those are two novels that really evolve along with the reader. Anna Karenina read at age twenty is very different from Anna Karenina read at age forty. I also tend to read books that are massively popular about ten years past their pop culture moment. I just read David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and was blown away by everything that blew away readers years ago. Next up is Consider the Lobster.

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com [3]).