Readers don’t need more half-baked books shoved into an already crowded marketplace. They need more masterpieces — or at least more substantial, thoughtfully written works that speak to real contemporary concerns. And for readers to know these books exist, they need to be promoted properly. That’s what will get intelligent people excited about reading.

And for everyone else, there are always ghostwritten paranormal children’s books.

When I think of my favourite authors. Well, there’s a new Umberto Eco novel out in six weeks, and if past form is anything to go by, it’s going to feel like it took all five years since the last one to write. Iain Banks puts out a book a year, and some of them have felt a little undercooked in places … but there will be another one along pretty soon so I can forgive that, and an undercooked Banks book is still better than just about anything else.

It’s what I’d call the Philip K Dick dilemma. He was writing pulp paperbacks and not getting much money for them. So he wrote three or four a year, and dozens of short stories. The result is that, wonderful though he is, classics though some are, most of his books feel a little rushed, they can get repetitive. And it’s a function of money, not art. When he got a bit more money for each book, later in life, the books came out less frequently. So … in an ideal world, would there be half as many PKD books that he’d done another draft of? If he’d poured all that energy into, say, ten books (a highly respectable size of canon) instead of fifty five, or whatever it is, would they all be flawless? My instinct is no. I don’t think there’s much correlation between the *brilliant* books he did and the time he had to write them. I think it’s more that the sheer mass of work means that he had plenty more shots at the target.

And this is a short term thing: before long, books are sat on the shelves like all the others, no one remembers how long it took for them to get there.