On Book Reviewing

For twenty years, I've been reviewing books for the papers. I do keep a list, which I began  in 2008, but I expect that the number of tomes I've written about extends into the high hundreds. I have reviewed books of every ilk: from the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (and yes, I read every single entry, at least once), ed. Daniel Hahn, which was a surprisingly joyful commission, through history books, biographies, travel writing, a book about measurements, fiction and, of course, children's books.

Being at the forefront of the literary world is an exciting thing: I was one of the very first people in the world, for example, to read Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, which I reviewed for the Financial Times. Recently, a copy of Salman Rushdie's Knife, his harrowing memoir about the violent attack he endured at a literary festival in the US, was biked to me on the day its embargo lifted: the sense of excitement as I waited for the courier to arrive was palpable. It can, of course, be depressing: there's many an overlong middle-ranking fourth novel that I would rather not have had to wade through. But overall, it's a task which requires skill and care, and it's also immensely enjoyable.

What's striking is how many names have endured over the past couple of decades: there is a huge amount of literary talent around, and there are many novelists and writers who continue to produce excellent, demanding and thoughtful work. What's also striking is how difficult it is for new names to make a splash: declining book sales and a "winner takes all" model in the publishing industry mean it's ever harder for writers to sustain an economic model, and I have seen talent vanish.

Which brings me to my point: the wages for book reviewing. When I began, in those early 2000s, to receive payment for reviewing, you generally received somewhere between £40 and £300 for a review (dependent on length and publication, of course: your small literary magazine is not going to be able to fork out in the way that a broadsheet is.) 

There were more newspapers, and more literary pages: The Independent on Sunday, for example, had an excellent literary section, as did the Sunday Telegraph. There were opportunities for younger writers to take on the duties of reviewing paperbacks, at, say, £80 a pop. Of course, this activity could never be a main source of income (unless you were lead reviewer for the Sunday Times); you would need to be reviewing about four books a month for the broadsheets to get anything approaching a reasonable salary. But £300 felt like a decent amount for what is usually a week or more's work (and it is work, and it is often demanding and painstaking. Many times I've stayed up till the early hours to finish a volume for a deadline). For comparison: my monthly rent in 2004, for a room in a nice house share in Brixton, was £450.

So what has changed? Well, the number of outlets have reduced. The Independent on Sunday is no more; the Sunday Telegraph lost its culture section. The books pages in most of the broadsheets have shrunk in size, and the commissioning editors look first towards their own staff before they go to freelancers. What hasn't happened is a concomitant rise in online opportunities for paid work: and this is quite simply because people don't click on book reviews online, and the general mass of readers tend to go for peer-review websites like Goodreads, where the reviews are free. This is generally fine, if all you want is a recommendation, but it does have its problems: I remember when the Game of Thrones finale was advertised with a "quote" from a Twitter user, which simply read: "I was like..." followed by three monkey faces, the first with its hands over its eyes, the second with its hands raised, and the third with its hands over its eyes once more. Aristotle, Longinus, Coleridge, Eagleton it was not.

These days, you are still likely to get something between £40 and, at the top end, £350 for a book review, and there are fewer opportunities to do so. The inflation calculator tells me that £300 in 2004 is now worth £577. And yet fees have not kept up with inflation; they have, in some cases, even stayed the same, which means that twenty years later, you're being paid less for doing the same job. A similar room in Brixton will now set you back upwards of £650.

Some might say: what does it matter? Book reviewing is a niche gig in any case, and those who do it are lucky to have their voices heard. (And I have lost count of the amount of times someone has said to me: "but you get to keep the book!" Which is all well and good, when it's one you want. When it isn't, it just goes on the charity pile. In any case, these days, you're more often than not given a pdf.) But in order to get as many voices heard as possible, it should be the case that reviewers are paid more for their time, their expertise and their experience. Newspapers are still making profits, and their reach is ever larger: the internet means that articles can be shared around the world in a way that they never could before. If we want a thriving public sphere, in which critical voices of all stripes are heard, then we need to look at how it can be made economically sustainable by the newspapers.

Otherwise, I wonder what the future of critical writing will look like. Monkey face with hands over eyes, monkey face with hands raised off eyes, monkey face with hands back over eyes.