Who needs book launches? Or, to put it another way, who benefits from them? Generally not the author or publisher, according to bestselling crime writer P.D. James. "I doubt whether the majority of launches do much either to cheer the author or to gain publicity," she declared recently.
John Mortimer agrees, thinking book tours "more useful than launches. By the time the party happens, it's too late - the reviews have been written."
And 1987 Booker winner Penelope Lively hits out at lavish launches: "The more flamboyant the launch party, the less significant the book - the most distinguished books tend to emerge without fuss."
However, book launches continue apace, with four of them occurring in Waterstone's of Dawson Street in the coming week alone.
Today at 1pm, renowned Indian food writer Madhur Jaffrey will be demonstrating recipe techniques from her Complete Vegetarian Cookbook, while on Tuesday at 6pm Dervla Murphy will discuss her latest book, Visiting Rwanda.
On Thursday at 6.30pm Brian McIlroy will be talking about his book. Shooting to Kill: Filmmaking and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the following evening at 6pm Michael Longley will read from his New Selected Poems and Aidan Mathews from his new collection, According to the Small Hours.
Incidentally, while leafing through Waterstone's free student magazine, available at the shop, I got a few chuckles from John Feetenby's bluffer's guide to ten essential 20th-century literary texts.
The Waste Land, he says, was written while T.S. Eliot was recovering from nervous strain, though "to be honest, even if you didn't know that you could work it out pretty quickly". Ulysses is "one day in the life of the two central characters. Eventually Dedalus and Bloom meet, and that's pretty much it for your 930 pages."
Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra is subtitled "A Book for Everyone and For No One", "which is 50 per cent true"; the author of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis "also invented the Freudian Slip, an early twentieth-century undergarment"; while of The Bell Jar, we learn that Sylvia Plath "committed suicide shortly after its publication, making it a very difficult book to review harshly".
Schoolboy stuff, I know, but maybe I was in the mood for it.
Speaking of Sylvia Plath, I see that Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia and Ted Hughes, is following in the footsteps of her parents - this week her poetry features in a Faber anthology called First Pressings, while next February Bloodaxe publishes her first full collection, which is dedicated "to Daddy with love".
Frieda, now in her late thirties, is already an acclaimed painter and has written six books for children, but this is her first time to enter the literary territory in which her parents made themselves famous.
And she's appreciative of her father's reaction to her poems: "He's been wonderful. He would tell me when something was weak or something was strong, but he would not tell me what I should do. That would make it his, and that would be awful."
One striking poem, about the literary industry that has been dissecting her mother's life and work since her suicide, is called "Readers" and contains the lines "They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw, / And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls / To speak with her voice." And it ends: "When she came out of the oven / They had gutted, peeled / And garnished her. [I T]/ They called her theirs."
Obscenely Huge Advance to an Aspiring New Young Novelist, Instalment 76: Amy Jenkins, who created the very successful upmarket TV soap, This Life, has been offered £600,000 for the rights to publish her first two novels, neither of which has yet been written.
Both Heinemann and Hodder & Stoughton are engaged in what's being described as a "frenzied bidding war" to have Ms Jenkins on their books with her books - the first of which, to be called Honeymoon, will concern a young woman called Honey Moon, who goes on her honeymoon and falls in love with an old flame who's on his own honeymoon.
Ms Jenkins, in fact, has already penned 2,000 words of this promising scenario. Only another 78,000 to go before we all find out what happens. Can't wait.