Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Blog Bookslut will close after 14 years

"Well, the only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it. It used to be you could get an advertiser for a month; now it’s all directly linked to how many pageviews you get. So you can’t write about obscure literature that only ten people care about and make eight cents. You have to write about the books that all the people already know about. And then it just orients you toward clickbait, and you have to come up with stunts and your design has to be beautiful. The only program that actually gives you money is Amazon. We used them back when we were profitable — we paid some writers back when we were profitable — and then, at some point, I realized they were fucking trashing the industry. Then we switched to Powell's, which gave us absolutely no money."