Perhaps authors have lost their guts, or their creativity, in recent years. Upon finding out that the publishers Maunsel and Company and the printer John Falconer had rejected – and burnt – sheets from his short-story collection Dubliners, James Joyce got his own back via verse. Responding to his culturally constipated critics who had labelled his work “anti-Irish”, Joyce circulated the poem Gas from a Burner, which satirised Falconer with the famous line “s—e and onions”. Mimicking the printer, Joyce declared: “I’ll burn that book so help me devil / I’ll sing a psalm as I watch it burn / And the ashes I’ll keep in a one-handled urn”. So crude are Joyce’s censors that he has them store their charred ire in the chamber-pot.

Shouldn’t today’s authors be equally ready for a bad reception? Twitter merely democratises criticism: every Tom, Dick or Harriet can now have an opinion on your work. Nor is this specific to creative writers: critics can get it in the neck, too. After writing a particularly sharp review of a terrible book, I once was accosted not only by the aggrieved author but her daughter as well. The pair cornered me at an event and let me know how horrible I was to dare to reveal the deficiency of contemporary professional feminism within her lengthy work. Perhaps her social-media strategist had advised them to “crisis-manage” offline, where no one would see the interaction.

What many publishers seem unwilling to realise is that Twitter cannot be satisfied. It exists as a kind of 21st-century mirror of the censorious philistines to whom Joyce stood up. Unlike him, however, many writers now seem unwilling to rebuke the cries of caution from their publishers. Oscar Wilde described the latter as “a useful middle-man” who should “never express an opinion on the value of what he publishes”: I wonder what he would have made of a contracted social-media expert. 

One company quoted by The Bookseller is “social media agency” Truffle Social, which boasts among its clients Rolls-Royce, H&M and Superdrug. And while its “client services director” has (she says) been approached by publishers for help with “community management and crisis support”, it’s not clear why a writer, involved in a form of complex artistry that revolves around skill with words, would want the involvement of a company that helps to write social-media-friendly adverts for tampons and flashy booze.