Creative Scotland has announced it is to launch a review of the literature sector, and invites tenders from contractors wishing to undertake this process (closing date June 13).

This study, it states, "is intended to provide an overview of contemporary literature and publishing provision in Scotland; identify areas of strength and gaps in provision, and to make recommendations to help inform Creative Scotland's future funding policy and strategic approach to literature, languages and publishing".

It goes on to say that since the Scottish Arts Council's last review of the publishing sector in 2004, "the fragmentation of the market, the explosion of creative writing courses, the growth of literature as performance, and the digitisation of publishing have changed the environment for writers and their work enormously".

No-one could argue with that. Nor with the need to scrutinise the sector, with the aim of making life for writers and publishers better and more productive. Interestingly, though, the Literature Forum For Scotland told CS its members have felt "consultation fatigue", but are willing to take part in this exercise so long as it "should not go over old ground".

Some of the blame for this exhaustion can probably be traced to the Literature Working Group policy paper of 2010, of which I was chair. This independent group, set up by then culture minister Michael Russell, was charged with creating a literature policy for the nascent CS. A 10-strong panel of poets, novelists, publishers, journalists and academics, we had nine months in which to come up with proposals. This we did, for free. (The estimated cost of the new project is £25-35k.)

As I have often since bemoaned, only one of our recommendations was adopted, the rest barely considered. Instead, the report fell victim to vested interests within the literature sector, who persuaded the new culture minister, Fiona Hyslop, that the paper's ideas were impractical, partisan or unworkable.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the way this report was treated, our group was acutely aware that digital technology was moving faster than we ever could. Indeed, even had all our ideas been implemented, the online and e-revolution would by now have overtaken some of them. What remains less certain, though, is whether the fundamental requirements of writers and publishers have dramatically altered since then. I strongly suspect not.

This is not a plea to dust off the old report, nor intended to undermine the new one. Under the aegis of a steering group that includes such well- respected names as publicist Jan Rutherford, poet Robert Alan Jamieson, Robyn Marsack, head of the Scottish Poetry Library, and Jenny Niven, director of literature at CS, it has in this at least got off to a good start.

Stormy though the process was, the guiding principle for the literature working group was a desire to put the sector on a far stronger and more transparent footing, where it did not need to plead its case as hard and often as in the past. In those days - and still, it seems to me - literature was the poor cousin to other art forms, despite its importance to the nation. I revisit the 2010 report only in the hope that those charged with gathering views from the literary sector are as committed to this as we were, and even more imaginative. Being a little less abrasive might be helpful too.

Also, I'd suggest overseers of the new project do not dismiss out of hand ideas from those seen as mavericks. Sometimes they have the freshest thoughts, unpopular though they are to those of a more conventional or fearful mind.

One other thing: the new team should read our policy. In particular I direct them to the first page, which carried the epigraph from a poem by Frank Kuppner: "There are forty-three poets here travelling in a ferry/Designed to carry six passengers safely across the river;/One cannot help wondering whether this administration/Is as sympathetic to literature as it claims to be." As we were compiling our report, I found this verse rather helpful.