The publishing industry is now tougher to take a bite into than leftover turkey on New Year’s Day. Though fiction is not itself quite in recession, any publisher will tell you that people want ‘feel good’ books in tough times. This of course makes sense, like the surge of superhero and fantasy films immediately after September 11th. Publishers are the recruiters sourcing material to provide what is wanted, like any other company struggling to in difficult times. But the problem with recruitment has always been its inflexibility.

Hallo? Lewis who?

I learnt this professionally in my last job, and I’m learning this now personally as a perpetually overlooked jobseeker in a pool of perpetually overlooked jobseekers. Recruitment, despite its fondness for the phrase, does not “think outside the box.” For example, recruiters will want graduates of a particular discipline because of its assumed skills, but very rarely consider a graduate with exactly the same skills acquired in another subject. Alternatively, in the USA a graduate means someone with a degree, while in the UK it means someone straight out of university. Monkey see, monkey do, and publishing is no different. Despite their pool being now totally flooded, publishers still feel they no longer have the luxury of taking a chance on anything that isn’t a guaranteed seller, and are sticking with the tried and true all-year stocking filler to stay float.

Enter the celebrity: the quick and easy cookbook or the cash cow latest autobiography, surely worth a read by the voracious speed the person who’s name and picture on the front had it compiled and usually only months after their indiscretion/accident/affair/appearance on Big Brother. It’s uncomplicated, familiar and demands little. And it sells.

But why do they sell so well? Celebrity autobiographies in particular are designed to be an easy read, but they’re certainly not cheap (the hardbacks sold before Christmas all retailed at just under £20). It’s largely because they’re marketed well, and marketing isn’t about finding out what the public want. It’s about telling them what to buy. People will want asbestos sandwiches if they’re told they’re cheap and good for you.

Though it is questionable what Jordan’s third ghost written autobiography’s contribution to the ultimate sum of human knowledge will be, I’m sure it has its place in the world, even if nothing more than a demonstration of personal choice. The problem is that the people who produce such material are not motivated by such paraphernalia as art or literature, or even clumsy irritants like good writing or the ability to tell a decent story. We all know what the motivation is, and its this and this alone behind the new bestsellers.

There was surely a time when books were just books. I’m certain there was even a time when autobiographies came in one book and not three staggered releases. But now it’s all just another part of a larger brand to make money. Literature is now slowly becoming more and more of a slave to that ultimate human false god of everything whimsical and fatuous: fashion, and there’s no better example of fashion than The Emperor’s New Clothes. People glibly chatter about the latest celebrity to flash their tits on Big Brother or get sacked from ITV for saying “fuck” at a flower show, and marketers hear this and hurry out a book to make a quick taking out of it. Suddenly a dozen clones appear on the shelves telling similar stories. The bookshops at Christmas are saturated with these autobiographies just as the charts are stuffed with winners of talent contests – singers so talented they seem as capable of writing a song as most new celebrities do their own life story.

This is all of course surely nothing new. T’was ever thus and there is nothing different about what is happening here. The difference now is that publishing houses are taking huge losses in profits as a result of the looming recession, and are propped up more and more by their celebrity titles, increasingly to the detriment of their shrinking literary fiction readership.

Again, one might argue that even this has happened before, back in the eighties where such titles first exploded onto the book market, reinflating a very nervous industry with new life. But the difference between now and the last recession is the presence of the internet. Today’s writers can, and indeed do, turn to the internet or its self-publishing opportunities as an immediate medium (Hi there!) for their scribbles, abandoning the traditional and increasingly frustrating approach.

Publishers could therefore be shooting themselves in the foot by clinging to this ‘let them eat pulp’ strategy. As more first time writers get increasingly frustrated with publishers’ narrow remit in a market that’s all but closed its doors to new material (as well as having to keep one eye on Richard and Judy to know what people want to read rather than think about what they want to write), they’ll start to look for new ways to reach their readership, and online or self-publishing are both natural and less stressful reflexes. Those who have the luxury of now writing whatever they wish without any desire to make money from it are either already a well-established literary heavyweight, or already publishing online. One way or another, and for the time being at least, anything that isn’t part of a genre or a brand is slowly becoming an endangered species as more and more specialised publishing houses struggle to stay alive.

I wasn’t born a literary snob. It took many years of hard work reading and thinking without being told to. And reading a lot, not just what I think I’d like. The latest autobiography has its place along with anything else that isn’t written by William Shatner, but not at the expense of names fast-vanishing from the public’s consciousness because there hasn’t been a film made about them yet. It would be a very tiresome world if all we had to choose from were Woolf, Tolstoy or Hemmingway (and the less said about Dickens or Austen the better). But in a few decades it’s not hard to imagine bookshops, if they indeed still exist, that feature one shelf of “classics” and aisles and aisles of the latest shocking secrets of a probably perfectly nice individual painted up by money-makers into a z-list festive flash in the pan; a forced marriage of Shakespeare and Jade Goody, bashing her husband on Jeremy Kyle for not keeping it ‘real’.

And if you think I’m overreacting, or possibly sounding like any other unpublished writer, you might want to read this:

“In the future it is possible that a new kind of literature, not involving individual feeling or truthful observation, may arise[...] Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyer-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.”

That was written over 60 years ago, as a slightly tongue in cheek conception of a future where art is nothing more than an idle distraction for the workers of industry. His name was George Orwell; a man who’ll probably be forgotten in less than a century by the majority of the population because he didn’t write Hamlet but some autobiography or sumfink about Big Bruvva rather than get his tits out on it.

For more on this, there’s an excellent article recently published in The Independent. It’s very frustrating to sit down one night to draft your first blog post in a month, only to wake up the next morning and find someone had already written it the day before.

• This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 7:13 pm and is filed under words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.