A few weeks ago I was asked to judge a poetry competition in my home town. It’s harder than it sounds, especially when you are handed no less than four (count ‘em!) fat folders of entries. The winners, thankfully, stood out, injecting as they did a little honesty into the theme of Christmas – instead of the usual holly and ivy, I read of drunken relatives, 4am stocking runs, exasperated mothers and (this was the winner) the fervent prayer of an eight year old NOT TO BE GIVEN CLOTHES.

The awarding of the prizes was memorable for several things; for me not least because I managed to write off my car an hour beforehand, rolling it into a ditch at 50mph, and had to hand out the prizes with tiny shards of glass still sticking into my head, having been delivered there by police car. But also because the children were charming, and one, Rosa, asked if she could have one of my books. I took her address, promised to send one, and then promptly forgot.

Which brings me to Tony Hart. When I was eight the television programme Vision On was required viewing in our house. How desperate I was to have one of my paintings featured in the gallery. And how excited to hear Tony Hart was doing a demonstration nearby. At the end I queued for ages to get his autograph (it was probably only about 20 mins, but at that age it’s dog years) but when I reached the head of the queue, he said – grumpily – that he didn’t have time to sign my piece of paper, as I hadn’t bought his book.

Oh Tony. If you knew what childish tears you prompted that day. How I could never again look at Morph without wanting to crush his tiny little plasticine head. But thirty years on, with perhaps a little insight of what it means to be eight and easily disappointed, it meant that I did send a pristine copy of my new book to Rosa, with the instruction that her mother might read it first and decide when she was ready for it. And today I got a thank you card. Rosa was thrilled, told me her Mum thought it “exellent”, and that she had not stopped talking about it. There’s a moral in there, somewhere. (And a Morph, with a load of pins stuck in it…)

It only took me six years and five books, but here I am, finally reviewed in the books pages of the Times. And that’s a big, heartfelt finally. To save you going there, it’s a largely positive write-up, describing Silver Bay as “surprising and genuinely moving”. This has had the unexpected side effect of temporarily forcing me to give up one of my persistent weekend gripes: Why don’t the so-called qualities generally review commercial fiction? (unless, that is, the author is married/related to someone famous). Look on those pages, week after week, and you will find the same names, authors and critics, reviewing each other. But commercial fiction doesn’t have to mean poor quality, and I don’t believe mine, or that of many of my fellow writers, is. To equate it with the music pages, does Kylie’s latest not deserve to get reviewed, but the latest version of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 does? The music pages manage to embrace everything, yet the literary pages do not.

Bill Scott-Kerr, publisher at Transworld (and eighth most powerful person in British publishing), once offered me these words of consolation: “Look at any of the books featured on those pages,” he said, “and be comforted by the fact that 90 per cent of them will sell no more than 1500 copies.”

I understand what he was trying to do, but in fact that makes me feel worse. Why aren’t the readers of those of us who sell 75,000, 100,000 copies and above entitled to the same critical analysis? Sophie Kinsella, author of the Shopaholic series, is responsible for a staggering 2 per cent of the women’s fiction market, and beloved by millions of readers (she’s 29th on the Observer power list), and yet how often do you see her name on the qualities’ books pages?

Thank goodness for the glossies, who aren’t so restrictive; the Marie Claires, Eves, Vogues, Good Housekeepings and even Heat. They manage to feature a wide spread of titles, from deeply literary to froth, romance and thriller, under the working assumption that their readers might enjoy each or any, depending on their mood. So – lit eds of the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent (Times, you are happily excluded today), why not consider newspapers’ much-reported terminal decline, your recorded desire to encourage growth in your female readership, and assume that your readers might benefit from the same?