Written in the Stars

The job of being a writer is, these days, beset with other peripheral tasks which distract from the actual writing. Facebook, Twitter, blogging (whatever that is), emailing, doing invoices...

Then there is the generation of actual work, of something to earn a living above and beyond the paltry pittance which most of us scrape from writing. What's that?... You thought we were all millionaires - or, at the very least, leading lives of serene, effortless, upper-middle-class comfort? It said so in that article about J.K. Rowling which you read in the Daily Mail, and you know Dan Brown has a really nice house? Ah, well, most of us don't begrudge Miss Rowling or Mr Brown their success, but we feel the need to point out (not least on school visits) that comparing them with the average writer is like comparing Bill Gates to an I.T. consultant, or Richard Branson to any number of crazy, inspired, but less financially-secure entrepreneurs. Most writers make a living out of lots of other stuff, all packed together in a lovely 'portfolio' - that's perhaps one for a future blog post. But there's one activity which we find ourselves drawn to over and over again, even when we know it's very bad for us. I'm not talking about eating chocolate, or anything less salubrious. I'm talking about the fact that every writer I know has a hideous, agonised compulsion to check their star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads.

In primary school we had a 'star chart', where you could put a star-shaped sticker up next to your name you did something good or handed in a good piece of work. So I've been conditioned from childhood to see even one star as something good. Someone made the effort to give you something. It wasn't the gold medal, or the silver or the bronze, but it was one of the Highly Commended. Of course, life isn't primary school (really, it isn't - put down those Cuisenaire Rods) and book reviews don't work like that. It's more akin to a mark out of ten - with one star signifying 1 or 2. It's a sign not of affection but of scathing scorn. It's the lowest you can actually give. The single star, twinkling up there next to the book title is not so much like a diamond in the sky - more like a splat of manure beside your name.

But can you give a book a star rating or a mark out of ten? It's more difficult than it might at first seem - as I found when lecturing for Sheffield Hallam University's Creative Writing MA and having to decide on a percentage to award to people's novels, as if they were maths exams.

Back in the early days of my book career, I used to rant (to those who didn't edge away quickly enough) that other professions were not subject to this kind of random judging by the public, and how unfair it was that writers, artists, directors and actors could have their work reduced to simple, bland scores like this. I'd moan that I didn't go into supermarkets and rate their shelf-stacking techniques on a five-star system, or give my bus driver marks out of ten for his attitude.

These days, I don't really have a leg to stand on. Everything has a virtual Customer Complaints Desk or a 'How's My Driving?' phone line. There's TripAdvisor, all kinds of consumer comment sections on various money-saving forums, and of course if you work in the public sector you can expect to have your every move logged, registered, recorded and inspected. We turn into Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner, refusing to be 'pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered' - not that it does us any good. That still doesn't make it any easier, though, when you feel the sting of having a book which you spent two years labouring over (and six months arguing with an editor over) dismissed with a single star and a petty comment by some smart-arse which, you argue, shows that the reader in fact totally misunderstood the book.

Now, I've probably been luckier than most, having had comparatively few utterly excoriating reviews in my time - probably comes of keeping my head down. Other writers whose books have a higher media presence inevitably suffer the 'tall poppy' backlash and can end up with almost as many terrible reviews as excellent ones. At least the system on those two book-ranking sites doesn't yet allow disgruntled readers to accord hated books the ultimate scorn of a zero star review - unlike the New Musical Express, which recently conferred this honour on rising musician Tom Odell, provoking his father to ring them up and complain - and the Guardian, who made the fatal error of sending their usual music critic to the X-Factor Live tour and so must have known what they were letting themselves in for. That same newspaper even has a Zero Stars Hall Of Fame for West End turkeys.

Anyway, one reassuring factor is that there's always seemed little correlation - if any - between bad reviews and sales. In fact, what consumes most writers these days is not the fear of a terrible review - rather, it's the leaden, crushing inevitability that nobody, anywhere has even noticed your book being smuggled out under cover of darkness, sneaked on to the back shelves of the shop and placed upside-down alongside the two hundred Dan Browns and the fifty-six Martin Amises. Or, in this digital age, being sneaked on to Amazon alongside all the other e-books of varying quality. That's the true horror of being a writer. It's not the fear that we have created something so awful that people will talk about it endlessly - it's the brain-numbing terror that nobody will care.

So, zero stars? Young Mr Odell needn't worry. At least it means people aren't ignoring his BRIT Award Critics' Choice album - someone noticed it enough to spend a paragraph hating it. And as Oscar Wilde said, there's at least one thing worse than that.