HOW TO (NOT) DRIVE A REVIEWER CRAZY

It goes without saying that it helps to be crazy if you’re a critic. Who but a blockhead would write for so little money? You can’t live off cheques for £25, or even £100. Unless you’ve got your eye on a literary editor’s seat or are deluded into thinking that reviewing gives you power, you do it out of love, and nuttiness. There are, however, any number of things publishers do that actually drive you crazy.

I receive about five parcels a day, and almost as many special deliveries. Over a hundred books a week flood into my house. Lucky me. Poor postman. This is bad enough during a week-day, when rushing to get kids to school. On Saturday morning, being woken at 8am puts me in a foul mood. Second post, anyone?

Then there’s trying to fight your way into the box or packet. This may sound petty, but as it happens, I suffer from RSI. So do many authors and journalists. Taping a flap with super-strong brown tape several times is great for my biceps, helpful to the environment but murder on my tendons. By the time I’ve found my stanley-knife, hacked through and opened a big brown envelope from, say, OUP, I’m not happy. That’s before I get a shower of scratchy grey fluff all over me. Please, use the self-sealing bubble-pack sort. Even these are better than the box I regularly get from Penguin, which tends to consist of huge chunks of polystyrene, with one terrified paperback lurking in its depths. The post-man won’t deliver it, so I then have to ring and arrange another delivery. Result: it goes straight to my local school library. The reason why so many books from Faber and Picador get good notices is not just due to their list. It is that they send out bound proofs in small jiffy bags that you can open painlessly.

Which brings me onto the books themselves. Dear publishers, I can do absolutely nothing for a paperback. Send them to literary editors, not regular reviewers. What on the other hand I absolutely love getting are bound proofs. Yes, I know they’re expensive, and often riddled with errors. But bound proofs weigh nothing. I can take them on holiday. I can read them in the bath. I can slip them in a handbag. If you send a bound proof it’s almost bound to get read. Sample chapters, of course, I just bin, like everyone else.

On the other hand, the finished copy, sent the week of publication drives me nuts. Am I going to read it? Of course not, because by then it will have been sent elsewhere. A critic can ask to review a book: it’s obviously far better if you can get a copy to us before it gets sent to a literary editor. Yes, this risks breaking the embargo and killing a book dead before it’s in the shops, but you’re far more likely to annoy if, like Madonna, you insist on reviewers signing ridiculous confidentiality clauses. The one publisher that unfailingly gets it right on timing is Doubleday – which may be why authors and critics alike tend to be happy with them. They send proofs not once, but twice – and often a finished copy too. You can’t miss a Doubleday superlead. Picador are also good, and so are Little, Brown. Good publicists, such as Rosalie McFarlane at Time Warner, have huge experience and know what is likely to interest whom. It isn’t rocket science – we actually fill in forms for the PPC, and a good publicist should be scanning the review pages to build up an impression of each critic’s taste. Why, why then, was I sent Jane Dunne’s Elizabeth & Mary by HarperCollins? My field is fiction, adult and children’s, which I review for a number of national papers including The Times. There are a few other books, including biographies, with news value that might work (I also write features for The Sunday Times News Review section) but this was one of many that made me scream. I’m sure it’s an excellent book – but wasted. I haven’t even opened it. Yet even novels short-listed for the Booker don’t get automatically sent out to the 100 or so critics who might excite more interest in their contents. For instance, I was asked to write a leader for the Times about this year’s Booker short-list. I had to refuse because I’d only been sent two of them – Monica Ali and Zoe Heller. Well done Doubleday and Viking. I had to ask Bloomsbury for the Attwood, despite having reviewed her last in several places.

Of course, it must be hell trying to customise a mailing list, and sometimes one appreciates being asked first by a publicist. However, a telephone call is the least attractive way of doing this, because like all reviewers I’m insanely busy writing my own novels and doing the kind of journalism that, unlike reviewing, pays some bills. Email exists as an alternative. Thank-you, thank-you publicists like Adele Minchin at Puffin or Rosalie McFarlane at Time Warner who use it, and who attach press releases with them. This, too, can be abused. It doesn’t help to get a round robin from, say, Philip at Flamingo saying how excited he is over one of his books. It does help, if you’re a publisher, and want to draw attention to a new author, to send a letter through the post.

It doesn’t help to have pressing invitations to this lunch or that launch. I don’t have time, and I’d rather see the money spent on getting the book advertised in the press – because the more you spend on advertising in literary pages, the more reviewers may find themselves getting paid. It doesn’t help being sent a mug or a desk diary or a mini bottle of champagne. It doesn’t help being sent a Christmas card signed by the entire publicity department, presumably dragooned at gun-point into this annual torment. What I want are the books – the right books, sent on time, in bound proofs and with a useful press release.

Oh, the press release! That drives me mad faster than anything. Don’t just repeat the information about the book or the author that’s on the dust-jacket. Help reviewers by saying something new. This concept seems to have passed Faber, and much of Random Century, by completely. Look at what American publishers ask authors to fill in concerning the inspiration for their book. What has just been sent me by Sceptre on Jill Dawson’s Wild Boy is a model of helpfulness, because the author explains the ideas and inspiration behind her novel. A conscientious critic tries to read as a reader does, but under severe pressure of time, and with far more responsibility. Even the best can miss things. Give an accurate precis of the plot, not a folly of exuberant adjectives on glossy paper, and also, please, post it up on amazon. Every literary editor I know uses amazon as a reference source. Good publishers seem to expend huge energies selling books in to amazon, then leave them to flounder. Post up the reviews, make the author do a foreword, and get a web-site as good as Random Century’s.

Does this sound like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs? I wish it were the case. Some critics are determined to hate everything they review, or see it as a blood sport. But the rest of us tend to do it because, like you, we have a consuming passion for good books; and like you, want to find the ones that could bring pleasure to readers and book-buyers. But we just don’t want to be driven any crazier than we are already.

The Bookseller, October 2003