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I don't think I'd entirely agree with Paz, as criticism is a conduit, and certainly may and can create choices for a general readership, but readership is best understood in terms of discrete audiences. I suspect that critics react to readership and the expectations of a market and indeed a milieu. On the whole, I'd say that criticism doesn't affect sales. I'd qualify this with two contrasting anecdotes. We've had a few double page reviews in broadsheets which generated less than 20 copies of sales. Reviews in poetry magazines seem to generate single copy sales or no sales. However, one review in The Guardian generated about 300 sales. I suspect most reviews are unread, as one poet remarked to me, "We all desperately want reviews, more than we want sales." In contrast, blogging is a far more important tool for building word of mouth. It's much more difficult to analyse the impact of blogs on sales, but I'd say that where a blog has taken up a book, we've seen a substantial increase in sales. I'll think about this more, but I'm stuck in some business stuff at Salt for the rest of this week. So more later. Love to al C