Book reviews. They certainly don’t make them like they used to.

Today’s “Banning the Negative Book Review” in The New York Times, about BuzzFeed’s decision not to run negative reviews, is a vivid reminder of how book reviews have changed over a few decades.  Today’s self-published authors wait for new user reviews on Amazon with virtually the same anticipation that we back-in-the-day authors waited for major newspaper reviews.

In the eighties and nineties, every author I knew wanted two reviews more than any other: the Sunday and daily New York Times.  The Sunday reviews could be long or ‘in brief,’ but since the book supplement was mailed to subscribers days the paper hit the stands, we knew before most ordinary NYT readers if the review was thumbs up or down.  

The tougher review to nab was the daily.  There were only 313 daily reviews a year (none on Sundays). 

If you took away those writers who were publishing that year and guaranteed to get a review (the Norman Mailers, Philip Roths, Thomas Pynchons, etc), there were at most 100 days left for mi…