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. But what difference does it make? More than 20 years ago, when Auberon Waugh wrote a full-page weekly review in the Evening Standard, he modestly suggested to me that his recommendation might be worth at most 200 additional sales. Given that the paper must then have had more than a million readers, this is not an impressive figure; but I doubt if any other reviewer could honestly have claimed to have had even that much influence. I have reviewed new novels in the Scotsman for 30 years now, and in that time not more than a dozen readers have ever thanked me for introducing them to the work of a particular writer.