You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Publishers have expressed fresh commitment to celebrity memoirs, despite agents describing it as a "disastrous" autumn for the genre.
This follows Hachette UK's announcement this week that it is trimming back its celebrity programme and making "a small number" of redundancies. This week saw a small bounce for non-fiction, with sales of the Top 50 celebrity hardback titles up 31% week on week, to a total value of £3.3m. However, this is still down signifi-cantly on last year when the comparative Top 50 took more than £4.6m.
While Hachette UK's chief executive Tim Hely Hutchinson stressed Headline's fresher focus on fiction was based on the imprint's reputation for fiction and its "entrepreneurial spirit", agents interpreted it as indicative of a wider trend.
Luigi Bonomi, m.d. of LBA, said: "I haven't seen others doing it yet, but I would think they will be looking carefully at their programmes for books not yet bought, because this autumn has been disastrous." He said that while there was still "huge" interest in celebrities, there was a saturation of "bottom of the barrel" celebrity memoirs.
Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown c.e.o., said: "In the end, you can't fool the public. They expect to have the real book and the majority of offers this autumn are not real books, certainly not must-haves." He suggested advances could fall for future celebrity titles.
Piers Blofeld, agent at Sheil Land Associates, said: "The celeb seam has been fairly well mined and publishers are finding they increasingly have to return to the more traditional non-fiction publishing model."
However, Hely Hutchinson said that there would be no scaling back of Hodder's non-fiction list next year. But he added: "We will be proceeding with caution. Every year you learn new lessons about what the market wants."
He argued that the "jury is still out" on Christmas, but suggested that non-fiction was not as strong this autumn than in 2008. He said: "The trouble with non-fiction is the publishers don't have the same track record to go on as they do with novelists. And if it doesn't sell as well, not only have you not had sales, but also a very large unearned advance."
Penguin UK deputy c.e.o. Tom Weldon said this year's offering was "a little tired". He said: "There were too many sequels and pale imitations." But he added celebrity memoirs were still an attractive area and was confident about 2010, with Penguin titles from Michael McIntyre, Stephen Fry and Jeremy Clarkson.