Sir, – Oddly, given the predominance of marketing values throughout the publishing industry, nobody mentioned the "F" word – finance – in Martin Doyle's online piece ("Reviewing Irish books", July 16th) on critics and writers in Irish literature.
Irish and UK publishing turnover is £4.6 billion, up from £3 billion in 2013. Writers' annual earnings are typically £4,000 and declining yearly. Books released per year? A total of 184,000 in the UK and Ireland and rising. Percentage of royalties a writer can expect per book? About 2.8 per cent – that's 28 cent on a €10 book. Average sales for a new novelist are 79 copies. (John Banville's The Sea sold 3,000 copies worldwide in the year before he won the Booker for it.) How many books should a novelist publish before a return of any kind can be expected? Three.
Now consider the critic – many of whom are also waging the good fight in the assault on the bookshelves – for them too marketing and marketability are as important, if not more important, than writing values. And in a crowded market brands stand out. Salt Publishing’s recent advice to struggling writers is “your face is your brand”, so writers/critics are obliged to get themselves seen and seen positively.
The reality of these imperatives makes reviewing implausible. More than that, given the grip of marketing values over all else in publishing, it may be more on the mark to suggest that if a book is published in the mainstream, then it is unlikely to be much good, qua literature. Because it is actually a marketing commodity, and the whole critical industry is simply a category mistake. – Yours, etc,
FIONA O’CONNOR
University of Westminster,
Regent Street,
London.
Sir, – As a critic who has written short book reviews for The Irish Times, including a small number of scathing ones, I found Martin Doyle's article intriguing. As some of the contributors noted, vicious reviews tend to be more entertaining. For that reason the critic must make doubly sure that any negative review that he she feels compelled to write is fair, well-argued, and insightful, lest it descend into cheap entertainment that is more about the critic's vanity than the author's merits. The reviewer should also remember that along with the authority that your column inches confer on your words, there is a responsibility not to cause undue harm, and that, while a review should always be subjective, it should never be personal.
Critics should write negative reviews, and they should be printed, as long as they are honest, fair and to the point. – Yours, etc,
COLM FARREN,
Stoneybatter,
Dublin 7.