BookBrunch

Lies, damn lies and Christmas book sales. Having counted them out, publishers will spend the next few weeks counting their books back in, many of them celebrity biographies. Trevor Dolby points out that popularity doesn't always translate into sales, and wonders whether the celeb genre has gone with the Noughties

As a young thing I worked for Paul Hamlyn – more precisely for his company. I was natural history editor working for Andrew Branson, who went on to a proper job founding, and still publishing, British Wildlife Magazine. We had just moved into Bridge House in Twickenham, and Mr Hamlyn was chipper that he had bought his eponymous company back from Reed. He, and a number of his top people, was to do a walk-through, so we were briefed to have clean desks with a conversation piece visible if royalty stopped for a chat.

I had just published Jeremy Thomas’ Guide to Butterflies of Britain and Ireland – still in print – so I popped a copy on the side of my desk nearest the aisle. In due course Mr Hamlyn passed by with Charles Fowkes, the then MD, at his side. A few paces behind came the great publisher’s pocket battleship of a bagman, Ian Irvine. Just my luck he stopped. He picked up Jeremy’s book and said nothing. He opened it and said nothing. He flicked through it and said nothing. He looked up and fixed me with his gimlet eyes:
“What do you do?”
“I’m an editor… I work with the author to create the book.”
“Did this book make money?”  I was stumped.
“What did it cost to produce?” I hadn’t the slightest idea.
“How many copies has it sold?” Blank. He realised he was talking to an idiot.
“Your job, like everyone else’s, is to make money for this company,” he said, and strolled off.

Among the top questions for the big five will be ,"Can we make money out of celeb biogs anymore?”, and on a more controversial note, "Should we even be bothering to try?". I chuckled reading Christmas 2009 contender Frankie "Ratner" Boyle, in the Guardian on 19 December:

Right now if you read the Bookseller there are publishers moaning about how terrible celebrity biographies now are. How they're all badly written and say nothing. It's a fair point, but don't they realise that they're responsible for creating this toxic gene? They're the ones who have been putting out any old crap – and now they're complaining?

Maybe if they came up with better ideas for books or they told some celebrities who want to write their memoirs to fuck off now and again, I might have more respect for their argument.

He also mentions that the best biography he’s ever read was Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs and that he is a devotee of Noam Chomsky’s politics. Well that’s all right then. Something to spend the advance cheque on.

Analysis at the end of the year suggested that the decline in Christmas non-fiction – the bulk of which is made up of celeb memoirs – was down around 30%. Can this 30% be accounted for by a simple down-turn in the economy? Probably some, but by no means all. The Office for National Statistics showed a 0.3 percent month-on-month fall in retail sales in November and a rise of 0.6 percent in October. Quite obviously there’s an amalgam of reasons for the success or failure of a celeb memoir. That said, a solid foundation such as having a real story to tell, like Andre Agassi, is a positive start.

Celeb books sell as self-purchases to fans, but the majority sell as gifts to people who heard their husbands/wives/boyfriends/girlfriends say they quite liked them. It’s a mistake to think automatically that "popularity figures" are a reliable measure of a celeb’s currency in selling books. There has to be a core of dedicated fans that not only love the celeb but want to proselytize as well. When I published the three Little Britain books at HarperCollins they sold hundreds of thousands of copies because they were a new way of presenting scripts, engineered to be gift books and, importantly, they were bought by and for kids who were chanting the catch phrases in the playground. Ebury’s Feel: Robbie Williams by Chris Heath was another case in point. It was bought by and for fans, but sales went through the roof because it was a great read with real insight into celebrity. It captured that penumbra market which can turn a big seller into a massive seller.

On the stand-up front, books are in direct competition with gig sales and most importantly DVD sales. In the year to November, 2.26m live comedy DVDs were sold, a jump of 38% from 2008. Here’s another quote from those nice people at the Guardian:

[the BVA British Video Association said] “Stand-up comedy is a particularly popular gift, with more than half (53%) of the comedy DVDs sold being used as gifts, compared with just 28% of all DVDs. As a result, they are far more likely to be a planned purchase, with 62% of purchases having been decided on before the customer gets to the store, compared with just 42% for all DVDs.

“The planned and gifted nature of the purchase means that customers are less concerned by offers – 70% are bought at what consumers perceive to be full price compared to just half for all DVDs,” says a BVA spokeswoman. “The gifted nature also means that these DVDs are more likely to be bought by women.”

Waterstone’s and WHS please take note of the line “less concerned by offers”. As an aside, Michael McIntyre sold 1,090,143 copies of his live DVD Hello Wembley before Christmas. And if we are looking for general competition, how about the DVD of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince racking up 840,000 copies on the 18 September launch day? Then there’s the huge rise in gig sales over the last couple of years. In December, Peter Kay sold out 400,000 tickets in three hours, making him the biggest and fastest-selling stand-up of all time. I wonder how many of those tickets were popped into an envelope with Happy Christmas written on it? To reiterate, I’m not suggesting that these are the sole reasons for the decline in celeb book sales, but these factors simply must be part of it. If money is tight, and the DVD or gig ticket is the gift of first choice you may not go buy the book as well.

The good news is that book sales overall have increased 41% in the last 10 years. “Proper books” are selling better than ever, backlists are racing away, and fiction is in good health. Publishing has survived many fads, which have at the time seemed like a never-ending bonanza. Maybe it’s just the natural end of the line for celeb biogs?  Maybe they were a Noughties thing, like Big Brother, Gordon Ramsay and (sadly) the Labour Party? Maybe the big advance celeb biogs have simply come to the end of their natural life? One thing is for sure, we have been paying too much for them up front. These celebs have agents who are simply not interested in the concept of royalties.

For my money, it’s the books that are bought for little and proportionately sell lots that make life exciting. Publishing, like all business, is pretty simple: buy cheap, sell many. I get much joy from the success of books like Am I Alone in Thinking...? Unpublished Letters to the Editor (Daily Telegraph) by Iain Hollingshead and Matt (Aurum Press) or Preface’s very own Tommy Cooper Joke Book by John Fisher, which sold nearly 10,000 copies through TCM the week of 19 December and which was bought for a four-figure advance. OK, it’s not Clive James, but it would have made Ian Irvine very happy.

Trevor Dolby is Publisher of Preface

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