Skip to Content

'A good book is a good book'

16 July 2007

'I have a problem with the implication that all bestsellers are, by definition, not as worthy as more "serious" books. The only attribute you can truthfully apply to all bestsellers is that they are popular.

And is that such a bad thing? Does a great novel turn bad the moment it passes a certain sales threshold? Does a fine novelist become a sell-out once their books appear on the shelves of Tesco? Of course not...

A good book is a good book no matter what the genre or how many copies it sells. And a bad book remains bad, whatever the pedigree of the author or how many critics fall over each other to praise it. Quality is not always in inverse proportion to the number of copies sold.'

Scott Pack of the Friday Project in The Times