When it comes to the Mother Shelf, it’s tempting to shrug our collective shoulders and say, Well, that’s just how book marketing works. But the uncomfortable truth is that publishers, like all commercial enterprises, take their cues from the culture in which they operate. People hardly bat an eye anymore when a woman pursues “male” interests, but for a man to do the opposite remains suspect, opening him to ridicule and worse. One of my favorite recent books was Lucas Mann’s riveting collection Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances (University of Iowa Press, 2024). Did I worry this book might be unsuitable for me because I’m not a man or father? Not for a second. A woman who reads about fatherhood is simply a reader, but a man who reads about motherhood is…what? I shudder to think of the choice words that might go here.
I asked Kathleen Schmidt to imagine she’d been hired to expand a publisher’s readership of its “women’s” titles: What strategies would she suggest? She mentioned what she called micro-targeting—picturing, in detail, the categories of readers who might connect with a book and meeting them where they are. “If the desired customer is male,” she said, “what brands do they like? Where are they shopping? What podcasts are they listening to?” She believes the best way to reach secondary readers is to emphasize aspects of a book that overlap with their existing interests: “It’s very hard to reverse the marketing and say that a woman’s memoir should appeal to men. You can’t change the psyche of the consumer. You have to work with what’s already there.”
Practically speaking, this approach makes perfect sense and reminds me a little of when I hide my dog’s heartworm pill in a scoop of peanut butter. It doesn’t matter why he eats it—just that he eats it. And yet the idealist in me can’t help but believe that, over time, with small shifts in the way we talk about, write about, and recommend the “mother book,” it is in fact possible for its stigma to fall away. A magazine roundup of books by mothers for Father’s Day? Yes, please. Elif Shafak’s Black Milk: On the Conflicting Demands of Writing, Creativity, and Motherhood (Penguin, 2012) on the first-year syllabus? Why not? A company-wide read of Lessons for Survival? Bring it on.
For all of the term’s anonymity, what is any one “consumer,” after all, but a human, as capable of expanding and evolving as any other member of our species? The consumer could very well be your brother, your parent, your child, the love of your life.
The consumer could even be you—in which case, I say, Welcome. Thank you for reading this far. And now, if you’ll come with me: There’s a shelf I need to show you at the back of the store. {read}