Last week's paper from the Harvard Business School asking "What makes a critic tick?" put me in mind of teachers and bombs. Literary critics can be either, but are they any longer central to the chances of a novelist's success?
The Harvard report compared "professional" reviewers (ie those working for newspapers and magazines) with their new competition: the folk who leave reviews on Amazon. Though they limited themselves to Amazon reviewers, they could have cast their net much wider; these days the ivory towers of book reviewing are under attack by a ragtag, undisciplined army of humanity, dispensing their reviews and their ratings across Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the whole glittering panoply of the social web.
The conclusion of the Harvard academics was broadly this: that professionals are slightly more likely to review and approve of books written by writers who worked for the same titles as they, or books that had won prizes. Amazon reviewers, on the other hand, were rather more eclectic, and in particular seemed to be more supportive of debut authors.
I find the first part of this analysis less surprising than the second part. I think it's almost axiomatic that reviewers for the Guardian will look more favourably on books written by Guardian writers. I don't think that's especially sinister, either. As the paper's authors say, what is actually going on here is a secondhand audience bias: writers who write for the Guardian are more likely to write books that people who read the Guardian will like. Similarly, a book that has won a prize has a badge of assumed quality; someone else has already done the filtering.
But this bias also sparks the immemorial cry of the debut author who doesn't know anyone on the books desk: how on earth am I to get noticed?
My first book, The English Monster, came out in March. I now know that the thing first-time authors crave above all else – above food, water and love – is attention. And you're more likely to get that from Amazon reviewers than from newspaper critics, for the simple reason that more books are published now than at any other time in history, and there's only so much room for them in the pages (actual and virtual) of the press.
Which is not at all to say that a review in a newspaper is worthless. Quite the opposite; it is a particularly rarefied form of attention, and can in itself seed even more coverage on the social web. It is attention – to your book, and to you – that makes the difference. Another recent academic paper, called "Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales" (Berger, Sorensen, Rasmussen) looked at reviews in the New York Times and estimated their impact on hardback fiction titles. What they found was that a negative review had a negative impact on the sales of books by established writers, but that a negative review of a debut title actually increased sales.
The reason is pretty obvious: if nobody knows who you are, and the New York Times reviews your book, more people are going to be aware of you, and that's much more important than the content of the review. But if you're Stephen King and the Gray Lady gives you a hiding – well, you can only lose.
Being reviewed is a bizarre experience, wherever the review appears. Positive reviews are blissful but strangely transitory, forgotten within hours. Negative reviews are crunchingly terrible things which can haunt sleepless nights. Worst of all are thoughtless reviews: those that reveal the plot, or take quotes out of context and pillory you for them, or compare you with heartless indifference to a great author against whom you would never choose to be measured. One reviewer said my book recalled the work of Peter Ackroyd, only to follow this up with the kicker "Shepherd is no Ackroyd". Well, of course he isn't, but did you really have to say so?
This kind of thing would be perfectly recognisable to any author from the past 200 years. A review is a review, wherever it appears. What would be completely unrecognisable would be the avalanche of feedback which, within days of publication, starts to come through to you from the web. It used to be said that there were two types of author: those who read their reviews, and liars. Now, there are two types of author: those who have a Google alert set up for the title of their book, and those who don't know how to.
This feedback can send you a bit mad. It can spark agonies and ecstasies, and the fact that most authors work on their own, often at home, doesn't help matters. One's partner can come home from their proper job and find you pulling wallpaper down because someone you've never met in Albuquerque didn't understand the clever Adam Smith joke you made on page 342.
But it brings its own joys too. One Saturday night my search alert on Twitter lit up, and I found a male nurse from Bury raving about my book. I started chatting to him, and he showered me with praise and said he was going tell everyone he knew to read my book. That's the kind of positive review which stays with you.
What shall we call this? Crowd criticism? Community reviewing? Mob feedback? Whatever we call it, it seems unruly and uncontrollable – but also a fair bit more accessible to the author than traditional reviews in the book pages. You won't get much mileage complaining to the books editor about the mugging you received in his pages. But you might be able to have a conversation with someone who wrote that they didn't like your book on their blog.
It's a strange world we find ourselves in. I recently heard about an author who self-publishes her books on Kindle. She had someone write some code for her which correlated her sales with her reviews. She found that a negative review led to an immediate drop in sales of up to 70%. So now, as soon as her software alerts her to a drop in sales, she contacts a friend and asks them to write a positive review. As soon as this goes live on Amazon, her sales pick up.
Such gaming is inevitable. In a world where so many of us like to broadcast what book we're reading, what film we've just seen, what music we're loving – indeed, when the social media we use tells everyone what we're listening to, reading or watching without us ever asking it to – authors will try every trick to get attention for what they do. As one writer who fully understood the value of attention and celebrity once said: there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
• Lloyd Shepherd's novel The English Monster is published by Simon and Schuster.
