A top London publisher today declared that the era of the celebrity memoir, a Christmas present favourite, has peaked.
Charlie Redmayne, UK chief executive of HarperCollins, has dramatically cut back on the number of expensive stars he is buying up.
He said such non-fiction celebrity titles had proved “risky” because publishers have to pay a big advance and yet many of the titles turned out to be “unprofitable” and had a short shelf life.
“We’re moving away from big celebrity hit-and-miss stuff,” he said. His comments were backed up by a report in The Bookseller magazine which said sales of biographies and autobiographies have fallen nearly four per cent this year, according to Nielsen BookScan data.
Mr Redmayne, the older half-brother of actor Eddie Redmayne, declined to identify any celebrity authors that have been a disappointment. But memoirs by US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and comic John Bishop are among those that have notched up lacklustre sales. Pippa Middleton’s party-planning book was also a notable flop.
Mr Redmayne — who took charge of Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins last year — was speaking as annual accounts showed revenues fell nearly six per cent to £180 million in the year to June.
He said part of the reason for the fall in revenue was his “strategic decision” to pull back from some “unprofitable” non-fiction publishing and he pointed out that operating profits rose 80 per cent to £5 million.
“I felt the company had embraced some quite risky celebrity non-fiction. A lot of these books were hugely expensive and they were not necessarily going to back-list well,” he said, referring to sales after the initial launch.
“You’d have three weeks of sales and then it would be gone. I’m looking to publish books that have longevity that will sell in the front list but will also form a back list.”
He stressed there was still a market for celebrity memoirs, pointing to Sir Alex Ferguson’s autobiography, which sold nearly 700,000 copies.
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But Patrick Neale, owner of Jaffe and Neale’s bookshop in Oxfordshire, told the Bookseller: “I have always asked when the bubble is going to burst on celebrity titles and to date I have been proved wrong, but actually this might be the year it has finally happened. Sales of Stephen Fry and Michael Palin books have been low, which is surprising.”
This year’s surprise Christmas hit has been Girl Online, a novel by Zoella video blogger Zoe Sugg, who has admitted she had “help” writing the book.
