It’s easy to look at a successful author and think that he always had it made. But they, too, started in obscurity and had to deal with negative or hostile book reviewers, marketing, publicity, and everything else that takes them away from their desk.
P.G. Wodehouse focused in one letter on this subject, in connection with a visit he had with Hugh Walpole (who Wodehouse didn’t like):
We [Hugh Walpole and PGW] went for a long walk in the afternoon, and he told me that when somebody wrote a stinker about some book of his, he cried for hours. Can you imagine getting all worked up about a bad notice? I always feel about the critics that there are bound to be quite a number of them who don’t like one’s stuff and one just has to accept it. They don’t get a sob out of me.
And in talking to his writer friend, he explains how people like Walpole get their over-inflated reputation.
I’ll tell you what’s the whole trouble with you, Bill, and that is that you have never done anything except write the stuff and are competing with all these birds who hang around authors’ lunches and go about lecturing and presenting prizes at girls’ schools. I don’t think it matters in the long run, but there’s no doubt that all these other fellows who shove themselves forward and suck up to the critics do get a lot of publicity, and it helps them for a while. I always think Hugh Walpole’s reputation was two-thirds publicity. He was always endorsing books and speaking at lunches and so on.
I found the below to be true in my reading. If I find a really good author, I’ll keep track of when their next book comes out. The internet makes that so much easier:
Back to the subject of reviews. I believe the only thing that matters to an author is word-of-mouth advertising. My experience has been that the ordinary member of the public, like myself when I am not a writer but a reader, is always on the look-out for authors that he can read but is very wary about taking on new ones. Quite by accident, generally, he dips into a book by someone who has been writing for years, likes it and says to himself: “Here’s a chap to keep an eye on. I’ll read the rest of his stuff.” When a sufficient number of people have done that, the author has a public.
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