IF I WASN’T so busy writing this, I’d be on a publicity tour plugging my book, published in time for Christmas. Except I was so busy writing some other assignment that I haven’t had time to cobble together my book yet, so the question is academic.
Unlike the celebrity autobiographies, which are so light-weight that they could float away on one blast of air out of the Mersey Tunnel.
Not long ago, anybody who appeared on the telly was deemed worthy of publishing an autobiography. Lack of life achievement or literary ability was no barrier to producing a book. After all, there were plenty of people on the pay-roll who could take on that inconvenient and time-consuming ghost-writing work.
The trouble is that we now confuse fame with familiarity. The twittering weather girl is regarded as being more of a celebrity than the truly talented novelist or gifted musician, simply because the former is a familiar face beamed into the living room.
With publishers’ marketing machines so geared up to every opportunity, even the most incomprehensible lout from Big Brother was grist to the mill and the prime point of sale was Christmas. Clearly, publishers thought it was worth a punt on somebody being sufficiently interested in these chasers of their 15 minutes of fame. It is also debatable as to whether these books are written to be read, or to be given as token appreciations of the recipients’ interests or hobbies. So, concerning the question about who reads these books, the answer is nobody.
But now this steadfast market is crumbling under pressure from the universal belt-tightening. Unsurprisingly, as the public head for Aldi and Lidl, they don’t want to read about so-called celebrities’ lifestyles, which is often no more than chavvy taste taken to excess.
Far from escaping our troubles by reading this drivel, we want to know that people empathise with our plight. This is why, in the crucial run-up to the commercial Christmas that we all know and love, bookshops are drastically cutting the prices of celebrity autobiographies.
This was one genre that was regarded as the sure-fire winner, given the right subject and timing, but is now deemed to be the poorest- selling section of the market. Not long ago, these books accounted for 20 to 25 % of the sales for most of the year, but shot up to 50-55% during the pre-Christmas season.
The leading high street bookseller, Waterstone’s, says that sales of these books are down just over 5% during the last five to six weeks. Along with other leading retailers, they have already halved the price of books by Michael Parkinson, Nigella Lawson and Stephen Fry.
The size of advances to prospective authors has always been a mystery to those of us outside publishing. For example, £400,000 to Big Brother star Chantelle Houghton, who sold less than 5,000 books. Now it seems the list of misfires is increasing.
The Christmas 2006 best-seller was comedian Peter Kay’s autobiography. This stood out for several reasons: he actually wrote it himself, he is genuinely talented, and he has a bit of a story to tell. Kay sold 600,000 copies in the first two months of publication, way ahead of other successes such as Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Express cookbook, which shifted 80,000 copies.
The trouble is that these books are so remorselessly plugged in interviews and serialisations that we feel like we’ve read them already, and can guess anything we’re not told. The bright side of the credit crunch is that publishers could be forced to produce better books.
