The art of the irrelevant

Asked whether a good review would sell a book, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davies replied, ‘No, but a concatenation of good ones may do so.’ One would like to think this true, even while observing that the bestseller lists regularly feature novels which are either not reviewed at all, or have been given brief and sometimes scornful notices. No doubt this was always the case, sales of the likes of Edgar Wallace and Dennis Wheatley not depending on reviews. The means by which a book becomes a bestseller have always been mysterious, though nowadays the level of the promotion budget and the willingness of publishers to pay for lavish displays in bookshops seem also essential to the creation of a bestseller.

Few literary novels come into that category. Therefore one might expect reviews to play a bigger part in determining their sales. Certainly publishers remain eager to secure reviews, though not, I suspect, half as anxious as the author, for whom a review may be the only evidence that anyone has actually read his book.