Late-night shows are touting publicity-starved novelists
Hosts such as Seth Meyers making conscious effort to feature, help struggling writers
The novelist Rebecca Makkai was preparing for the usual string of interviews with radio stations and podcasts this year for her latest book, The Great Believers.
But then she got a call from her publicist, who told her to get ready for a more prominent appearance: on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers. “The biggest thing I’d done before that in terms of TV was a local morning show in Dayton, Ohio,” Makkai said. Meyers has made it something of a habit to invite novelists onto his program, which averages 1.5 million viewers. In his nearly five years as host of Late Night, he has brought on a few dozen literary writers, many of them far from household names.
“As much as I love having Stephen King or Jonathan Franzen or George Saunders, we also saw it as an opportunity to have diverse writers and writers who are publishing their first or second novel, because this will probably mean more for them than people who are already established,” Meyers said.
In a television landscape, where literature has become largely overlooked, late-night hosts like Meyers and Trevor Noah have made it their mission to put a spotlight on writers — giving them an enormous amount of influence in the publishing world.
The morning shows, which once featured interviews with acclaimed novelists like E.L. Doctorow and William Styron, have largely tilted toward lifestyle and diet books and celebrity memoirs, with occasional appearances by bestselling authors or roundups of summer fiction.
Late night looked particularly barren after Jon Stewart, a champion of serious nonfiction, left The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert ended The Colbert Report, another reliable outlet for publishers.
Colbert, who now hosts the most-watched show in all of late night on CBS, has mostly left non-celebrity authors behind. And other author-friendly TV hosts — Charlie Rose and Tavis Smiley — were ousted in sexual-misconduct scandals.
Those departures — following the end of Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show and her original book club, which could turn an obscure novel into an overnight blockbuster — felt like a devastating loss for the literary world, as publishers fretted that books were being edged out of pop- ular culture.
The turbulent political climate has meant that the authors getting the most television coverage — and netting the highest sales — are the ones whose books feed into the news cycle.
The appetite for political books has exploded, with sales in that category reaching 11.7 million copies in 2018, up from 9.2 million in 2010, according to NPD BookScan.
These new spots for novelists on late-night television have offered publishers some relief.
The guest list for Meyers’ show in the last few years reads like a roll call of some of the most groundbreaking literary writers at work today: Tayari Jones, Marlon James, Celeste Ng, Sunil Yapa, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Jesmyn Ward.
“He’s willing to take a chance on an unknown author, and that’s been a fantastic boon for our books,” said Todd Doughty, vice-president and executive director of publicity at Doubleday. He noted that Meyers had helped drive exposure for Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, adding: “Who would have guessed that a 700-page novel would be on national TV these days?”
Noah, who succeeded Stewart as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central three years ago, has been intent on booking writers who have rarely been given the chance to address a mainstream television audience before.
“I’ve tried to build upon the legacy I’ve inherited from Jon by trying to find more diverse voices, and trying to find more writers who may not be the bestselling writers who we were already interviewing,” he said.
Noah’s guests have included Yaa Gyasi, whose debut novel, Homegoing, traced the impact of slavery across 300 years; the Indigenous writer Terese Marie Mailhot; the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and the poet Kevin Young. For some writers, a nod from Noah can alter the trajectory of a book, leading to other media appearances, more reviews and speaking gigs, all of which generate sales.
“It still has a residual impact,” Jason Reynolds, a young-adult novelist, said of his appearance on The Daily Show in January. “He’s trying to give you the opportunity to sell the thing that you make, and really double down on why the thing you make is a necessity for the country right now.”
After Young appeared on Noah’s show in April, his poetry collection, Brown, went from an Amazon ranking of 2,712 to 335.