In 2002, Jonathan Cape published Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Star of the Sea.
It was highly regarded, and by January 2004 had sold 14,000 copies in
paperback. Then it became one of the 10 books on the Richard & Judy Book
Club’s first list. It sold out. Unsure of the demand, Cape printed another
15,000. It then found it had back orders for 75,000. The book finally sold
600,000 copies. “It was,” says Dan Franklin, head of the publisher, “a
revelation.”
Franklin admits that, like many other “literary snobs”, he had regarded the
start of a book club by daytime television’s supernormal couple with mild
derision and not-so-mild scepticism. The audience didn’t read and, if they
did, they restricted themselves to Jeffrey Archer and ghosted packs of lies
by barely human celebrities. O’Connor’s, however, was a real book, as were
others on that list - William Dalrymple, Alice Sebold - and R&J were
shifting them like Tesco burgers. In fact, they were shifting them on a
scale unprecedented in the long and undistinguished history of
book-promotion scams. They were changing the entire market.
Four years and many real books later, the R&J Book Club accounts for 26%
of the sales of the top 100 books in the UK, and Amanda Ross, the club’s
creator and book selector, is the most powerful player in British
publishing. Now, though, the club faces a crisis. Richard & Judy are
ending their early-evening run on Channel 4 and moving to a new UKTV
channel. Can the club survive the shift from a terrestrial to a cable
channel?
Richard Madeley thinks so: “We are taking the whole book-club shebang with us.
I do think it’s taken on a life of its own. If we’d decided to take a step
back from television and put the club online, I have a feeling it would do
pretty well. I haven’t seen Loyd Grossman on television for years, but his
sauces are bestsellers. He has established his own brand. The book club is
similar to that.”
More tentatively, Ross agrees: “If the move had happened earlier, it would
have affected the book club. But this is a new channel on UKTV, and it will
be on the first page of the electronic programme guide. After 10 years, I
think the club has a life of its own. What we need is the support of the
retailers. If they keep faith and the books are still in the shops, then
people will still buy them because they have Richard & Judy stickers.”
Now is the time to ask: is the club a good thing?
Publishers are too discreetly self-interested to say that it isn’t, but there
are problems. Franklin points out that it does not generate loyalty to an
author. Readers buy the list, but don’t continue to buy the authors. Agents
and authors expecting a huge advance for the book after an R&J listing
may be disappointed. Furthermore, it narrows the market. The list is so
potent that it downgrades other titles to also-rans and reduces the
possibility of the serendipitous discovery. It is one more way in which
marketing is dominating literature. In this climate, would an unknown from
nowhere, such as Joseph Conrad, stand a chance?
The big achievement of the club was to provide trusted guidance through the
jungle of hyped books. Such guidance was not provided by the likes of Book
Club Associates, which advertise in magazines. They offer broad selections
to their members. As a result, their businesses are in decline. They lack
anything like the firm imprimatur of a Richard & Judy. Book promotions
didn’t really work, either. Prizes, in particular, suffered from an inherent
bias towards the nebulous concept of the literary.
“I don’t know what ‘literary’ means,” Ross says. “I got really slagged off for
that. But you shouldn’t be made to feel you have to be a certain type of
person, with a certain level of education, to read a certain type of book.
We have inspired people to read different kinds of books, and the sole
criterion is that they are enjoyable.”
The use of the word “literary” to define a book indicates a deep chasm between
popular storytelling and high culture, a chasm unknown to Dickens and
Shakespeare. Books shortlisted for the Man Booker or the Costa may do well,
but they stand little chance of breaking through into the mass market.
Furthermore, the British book business is, to a rough approximation,
incompetent. Since the abolition of retail price maintenance, power has
shifted from the publishers to the bookshops, and they, in turn, have
aggregated into a few big chains, primarily the near monopoly of
Waterstone’s. This has made publishers absurdly timid in their approach to
marketing.
“They have such a primitive idea about marketing,” Ross says. “I knew nothing
about publishing. It is an incredible industry, full of really nice people,
much nicer than television. But the thing that surprised me is that they all
want their products to be exactly the same. I don’t know about you, but I
never want to read the same book twice. Their covers were really similar. If
there was a successful book, they put the same cover on other books so
people would think they were buying the same book twice.” She was also
shocked to discover that publishers were made to pay for display slots in
shops. If you see top picks in a bookshop, don’t be fooled: the only picking
process is money.
The bookshops have also been apeing the record industry by pulling titles the
minute they don’t sell. “A few years ago, they stopped giving books enough
time in shops,” Ross says. “Books tend to be word-of-mouth. It’s not like
buying an album, going home and listening to it in an hour. By the time you
found a book you liked and recommended it to your friends, it had been
removed from the shops.”
This business needed Ross. She runs her production company, Cactus TV, with
her husband, Simon, Jonathan Ross’s brother, and masterminded the brilliant
recreation of Richard & Judy on Channel 4. She is - some would say this
is an oxymoron - a well-read Essex girl. The reading she reels off to me -
Austen, Black Beauty, Hardy, Armistead Maupin - is solid and unpretentious.
She admits she doesn’t really get on with poetry; language for the sake of
it is not to her taste. Above all, she likes stories.
The club chooses its Best Reads and the somewhat lighter Summer Reads. Ross
receives about 1,000 titles for the first and 700-800 for the second. From
this pile, 18 books have to be selected for the two lists. Each imprint is
allowed to submit six books. Richard & Judy read only the final
selection. This phase induces serious head-clutching among the publishers.
“In your bones, you know what they will take and what they won’t,” Franklin
says. “Putting the wrong book in for the book club is a nightmare - that way
madness lies.”
The format of the club was carefully balanced by Ross. “We knew it wouldn’t
work in the same way as Oprah’s - we needed more criticism. Oprah is too
sugary. She has the author in the studio and is never critical about the
books.” With a small team, Ross reads at least a couple of chapters and the
synopsis of every book to get down to a shortlist. There is then an
intensive phase of reading, with some sleepless nights.
Ross gets anxious about choosing the wrong book, knowing disappointed readers
would turn away from the club: “I hope they never think it’s a waste of time
when they finish it.” And it is all down to her. She makes the final choice;
neither her team nor Richard and Judy are involved.
Her confidence in her instincts has grown with the success of the club. At
first, this was lacking. She regrets putting Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in the
first list. It was a book she didn’t like, but felt had to be included. In
the event, Richard and Judy didn’t like it either. She can also be
blindsided by the process itself. On the show, celebrities review the books
she has chosen. Tony Robinson was one of the celebs chosen to review Martin
Davies’s The Conjuror’s Bird, a book she loved. So, apparently, did Robinson
when talking to the researcher. On screen, though, he trashed it. His
negativity took Richard and Judy aback, and it seriously damaged sales. Most
of her choices, however, are guaranteed blockbusters.
Keeping herself pure is Ross’s trick. She has turned down offers from
publishers to start her own imprint, and can’t see herself leaving
television. She doesn’t make money out of the club - she is not allowed to
by Channel 4 rules - and she doesn’t let herself get too close to the hype
machine. One overexcited publicist delivered a book to Cactus dressed as the
book: “It took us ages to get them to understand we didn’t go for that kind
of thing.”
Richard and Judy, meanwhile, are more than happy with their role as front men
for the Amanda lists. Madeley, in particular, regards the whole thing as
sweet revenge on the journalist Polly Toynbee.“Although it hasn’t quite
strangled that ghastly snobbish dragon that’s been breathing fire on us
since we started, it has pretty much laid it to rest,” he says. “It used to
be that Judy and I were tarnished by the lie that daytime television was for
stupid people. Polly Toynbee wrote a huge article about it 15 years ago, and
we were very much at the heart of the attack. I won’t say what my own IQ is,
but Judy is extremely bright, able to hold her own in any environment
intellectually, and I’m not that much of a slouch. And there we were, being
painted as thick, candyfloss-brained twits who dribbled for a couple of
hours each day on television to people more stupid than we were. The club
has nailed the lie that it was stupid television for stupid, workshy people
with slipped discs.”
The point is irrefutable. Their club has shifted books by William Boyd, David
Mitchell, Julian Barnes and many others. The lists can officially be used by
teachers to select A-level reading. Above all, the sales of these proper
books suggest their viewers are not the knuckle-dragging proletarians so
despised by left-wing commentators.
The team of Ross, Finnegan and Madeley has conquered an industry. Nobody is
complaining. The mystery of how to sell decent books consistently has eluded
publishers and booksellers. The R&J Book Club has cracked it, for now.
The move to UKTV may reduce their power; it may leave room for another,
similar operation (a good thing if it widens the market), but, for the
moment, daytime television, in the form of motherly Judy and wild-eyed
Richard, has saved the book from the qualms and snobbery of the bien-pensants.
It is hard not to laugh and obligatory to applaud.
www.bryanappleyard.com
Richard and Judy’s hot summer reads
The Outcast by Sadie Jones (Chatto & Windus). Set in the south of
England in the 1950s, this tells the story of a boy who becomes estranged
from his family and environment after witnessing a terrible, tragic
accident.
No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay (Orion). A page-turning
thriller in which a teenage girl wakes up one morning to discover her family
has vanished without trace. Twenty-five years later, she begins to learn the
truth behind their sudden disappearance.
East of the Sun by Julia Gregson (Orion). A sweeping epic set in 1928.
Three women are travelling to India: Rose is to going marry a man she barely
knows, Tor is in search of a husband and Viva, their chaperone, is
travelling back to the country where she was born and where she lost her
parents.
Down River by John Hart (John Murray). A Chandleresque thriller about
Adam Chase, who has spent the past five years in New York trying to wipe out
the memory of his family’s rejection after he was accused and acquitted of
murder. He returns home after a call from an old friend to find more murders
have begun.
The Pirate’s Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson (Headline
Review). A multi-generational story based on the extraordinary true story of
Errol Flynn‘s arrival in 1940s Jamaica. The Pirate’s Daughter follows Ida, a
girl who falls for Flynn’s charms. Through the eyes of Ida and her daughter,
May, it also tells the story of their home, Jamaica, before and after
independence.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller (Canongate). Married
to an older man, and living in a retirement village in her fifties, Pippa
Lee appears to be the perfect wife to her overbearing literary-agent
husband, but behind this front lies a troubled and varied past.
Addition by Toni Jordan (Sceptre). Grace Lisa Vandenburg counts: the
letters in her name (19); the steps she takes each morning to the local cafe
(920); the number of poppy seeds on her orange cake. Her orderly world is
thrown into confusion when she meets a charming man in a supermarket.
The Resurrectionist by James Bradley (Faber & Faber). A dark and
compelling gothic thriller set in 1826, when Gabriel Swift arrives in London
to study with Edwin Poll, the greatest anatomist in the city. He soon finds
himself drawn to his master’s nemesis, Lucan, the most powerful
resurrectionist in London and governor of its trade in stolen bodies.
Read "Ordinary Wolves" and "Shopping for Porcupine" both by Seth Kantner who grew up in the wilds of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. The first is a coming of age story of a caucasian boy raised in the traditional Eskimo way in the l980's and 90's. The second is a memoir.
Annalee Gray, Minneapolis, MN, USA
Call me a snob, but I can't be the only person who's put an interesting-looking book back on the shelf because of the prominent 'Punch and Judy recommended' label. If it was a sticker, fine, I could peel it off, but if it's actually printed on the front cover there's no way I'll buy it- what a shame
Davidsbundler, Coventry, UK
I'm delighted to see you've put some historical novels on your "hot reads" list. People who enjoy these and are looking for more like them can find over 3000 historical novels listed on my new website, <a href="http://www.HistoricalNovels.info">www.HistoricalNovels.info</a>.
Margaret, Portland, Oregon, USA