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.
Many novelists will have had the experience of receiving glowing reviews — even a concatenation of them — only to find, months later, that the enthusiasm of reviewers has not been reflected in sales. They then, quite naturally, are likely to blame their publisher, asking why he hasn’t promoted the book vigorously on the strength of this chorus of praise. Brief reflection or self-examination on the part of the disgruntled author might be chastening. How often, he might ask himself, has he bought a book because of a review?
Still it is better to be reviewed than not to be reviewed, since at the very least a review offers publisher and author free publicity. A literary novel or biography that gets no reviews drops into a black hole, though these days the author may have recourse to the internet to try to call attention to his work.
Why do people read reviews if not to decide if they want to buy the book being reviewed? The short answer is that they do so for the same reasons that they read other parts of the newspaper or magazine: for information, for entertainment, and for enlightenment.
Information: people of a certain level of culture like to know what is being published, which authors are up and which down, what sort of questions are being addressed, and so on. The desire to be well-informed is natural to us, and people with an interest in literature read book reviews as those with an interest in cricket or football read the sports pages.
Entertainment: a good reviewer is a craftsman, each review a little essay intended to give pleasure by the manner in which it is written as well as by the interest in the book under review. The reviewer is a sort of columnist, and like the columnist must arrange his material in such a way as to please the reader. Otherwise he will not be read. Incidentally, it is much harder to write an entertaining review of a novel — unless it is a bad one — than of, say, a biography.
Enlightenment: this may seem to be claiming too much for mere book reviews. Yet, like many, I owe much of my early literary education to reviewers such as Cyril Connolly, John Davenport and Philip Toynbee. Reading them every week in the Sunday Times or the Observer contributed to the formation of taste and developed an understanding of how what was being written then related to what had been written in the past. V. S. Pritchett, Anthony Powell and Rebecca West were other reviewers whose articles were educational as well as enjoyable.
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