First of all, an apology to our much-missed blogger emeritus Sharon Wheeler, for nicking the name of her review website as a header for this post. Sorry, Shaz, but it fitted so perfectly I couldn’t resist. Cos my reading of this blog thing is that you write about whatever’s on your mind, and what’s on my mind this week is… reviews; what evidence is there that they affect book sales?
Needless to say, it’s on my mind because we’ve had a small glut of them in the past few days; and I’m delighted to say that if the enthusiasm of reviewers did relate directly to number of books sold, we’d have three top ten hits on our hands. But as the song goes, it ain’t necessarily so; that has been proved over and over again in the past six years. I love it thatHistorical Novels Review thinks Roz Southey portrays 18th century Newcastle vividly and creates quirky, charming characters and satisfyingly perplexing plots. I’m delighted Eurocrime thinks Chris Nickson’s debut novel has a satisfying richness to the background detail that makes it an engrossing read. And if Shaz didn’t feel that Maureen Carter’s latest tangle with Detective Sergeant Bev Morriss was flinty, no-nonsense, populated by real, vivid people and had a stonking ending, I’d worry that Maureen was slipping – which she certainly isn’t.
Someone with a lot more experience than I have in the book trade told me the other day that in the USA, if a book doesn’t get reviewed in at least one of the trade journals – the ones booksellers, not readers and book buyers, look at – it’s liable to sink without trace. I’m sure he’s right; I wouldn’t dream of disputing the word of a publisher who was in the business when I was wearing mini-skirts the year Mary Quant invented them. And if I try to think like a marketing person, it makes a kind of sense. Marketing is all about keeping your product in the sightlines of potential customers, and making it stand out from the crowd. The book trade is more crowded than most: well over 100,000 new books are published every year, and any given bookshop can only stock a small proportion of them; so one that’s reviewed in a journal read by booksellers (I’m talking about real booksellers here – not the kind who sit in office towers and make buying decisions based on how famous the author is and how much money the publisher is contributing to promotional hype) is more likely to stay in their minds than one that isn’t.
I don’t know if the same is the case here in the UK, though I suspect that the same marketing principle may apply.
What I do know is that what really gets a book to the top of the bestsellers is word of mouth; no matter where – or if – it’s shelved in the shop, if enough people like it, and tell their friends, a book will sell. Chocolat; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin; even, may the gods defend us, The da Vinci Code: all word-of-mouth bestsellers. The big challenge for a publisher is how to get that word of mouth going. And reviews are going to play a large part in that.
