Paperback advance reader copies were once sent to critics and booksellers to secure review attention and favorable retail placement. More recently, they have been showing up in the hands of actors and influencers, tucked into designer totes, perched on beach chairs, or featured on Instagram Stories shot in Montauk, resting on linen-covered laps beside sweating glasses of wine. What used to be industry ephemera has become the status galley, a new form of cultural currency.
“I think that the human condition is to show that you have something before someone else, especially if it’s desirable,” says Chris Black, the co-host of the popular podcast How Long Gone. “But I also think, with books, it makes you seemingly smart or at least look smart. And that’s in addition to being ahead of the curve, which I think is always something we’re striving for.”
“Everything in life is a flex,” he adds. “This is just a literate person’s version of a Kelly bag: I got the new whatever. And I’m guilty of it just like everyone else.”
In May, Lingua Franca founder Rachelle Hruska MacPherson wrote in a newsletter, “SEND ME YOUR GALLEYS PEOPLE! I feel sufficiently sophisticated and special when I read one. What can I say? I’ll take a galley over a Birken [sic] bag every day of the week. A true snob.”
At Molly Jong-Fast’s June book party, the day before the release of her memoir, How to Lose Your Mother, speechwriter and Broadway producer Alex Levy made a joke about the exclusivity of galleys in a speech to the media-heavy crowd: “For those of you who don’t have a sufficiently large social-media following to have merited an advance copy, allow me to summarize the book.” Long before it reached the New York Times best-seller list, galleys of the memoir had already made the rounds on Instagram, shared by Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Schumer, and Lauren Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo also posted a galley of Hal Abbot’s Among Friends in June.
“When you’re a celebrity, you can get anything you want for free, no matter what,” says Karah Preiss, co-founder of Belletrist, the book club and platform she launched with Emma Roberts in 2017. “But unless you are really plugged into publishing, the galley itself is more a kind of mysterious object than a Prada bag or a Valentino bag. As a celebrity, you know how to get those things.”
“I would say that Emma and I started Belletrist for galleys,” Preiss says, half joking.
Preiss views status galleys as part of a broader cultural shift. “I think a harbinger of what we’re seeing now is this idea that it’s not enough to just be famous anymore. It’s not enough to be a model. It’s not enough to be an actor. It’s not enough to be a singer. You need this more holistic image, because if you’re not an influencer, you’re not famous anymore.”
For Preiss, galleys have taken their place alongside limited-edition sneakers. “There’s a kind of ‘hypebeast’ mentality around galleys that I think is happening because the people who want them are used to a kind of hypebeast culture,” she says.
While 2025 has brought about a slew of sought-after galleys—including The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin: It Girl, by Marisa Meltzer, which has already appeared on the feeds of Alison Roman and The Love List’s Jessica Graves months ahead of its October release—two titles from 2024 made a lasting impression on Preiss.
“The two status galleys of last year, if you ask me, and I think everyone would agree, were Intermezzo and Didion & Babitz,” she says, referring to Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, released last summer, and Lili Anolik’s gossipy dual biography, released in the fall and endorsed by Lena Dunham and Nicole Richie.
“Galleys have always been important to raising awareness for books and writers,” says Sheila O’Shea, senior vice president of publicity and marketing at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (F.S.G.). But the publisher upped the ante with the rollout of Intermezzo, printing 2,500 copies, and approached the campaign with the precision of a fashion launch.
The galleys were numbered to deter resale and sent directly from the F.S.G. office to booksellers, media, influencers, and devoted Rooney readers. It was less about scarcity in this case and more about targeted saturation. The result was a social-media cascade of eager, early impressions that elevated the galley itself into a collectible object, signaling a new era in literary marketing. (“I have two of them,” Preiss says proudly.)
The phenomenon has prompted some eye rolls. Critics, many of whom are on Substack, argue that flaunting advance copies on social media shifts attention from the substance of the book to the optics of exclusivity. Some publicists and authors have voiced frustration that galleys now risk becoming props rather than tools for thoughtful engagement. Why, they ask, should they go to the same cluster of media personalities and influencers, regardless of whether they promote the book meaningfully, or even read it at all?
“I personally think it’s more interesting to send a bunch of galleys to, say, the younger staffers at Balenciaga and get the word of mouth started,” says Kaitlin Phillips, a publicist and consultant who worked with Anolik as well as with James Frey on his most recent novel, Next to Heaven. “I literally did that this year, and I stand by it as a better strategy than adding to the piles and piles of books on the desks of [critic] Maris Kreizman and [Elle editor] Lauren Puckett-Pope.”
For Phillips, even the typical advance copy pales in comparison to a rarer tier of access. The true distinction, she believes, belongs to those granted an early glimpse—before the galleys are even printed. “The No. 1 status galley is when the publisher prints it for you before galleys,” she says. “You have to be one of the first 10 people in the world to read the book.”
Carson Griffith is a New York–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal
