Big publishers are paying £1 million advances for celebrity memoirs. The author gets about 10 per cent of the cover price after the advance has been earned. So if a book is on sale for £20 they will have to sell 500,000 copies before the advance is paid off. Publishers will go into profit before this happens because they sell books for far more than they cost to produce.
The craze for celebrity autobiography began with Jordan. All the big publishers turned her down, thinking that the kind of people who liked her didn’t read. They were wrong. We paid her an advance of £10,000 and the book was a massive bestseller. I think the big publishers saw that and moved in. There was hysteria. They were paying £1 million for that type of book.
A couple of years ago everyone was signing up Premier League footballers, but they didn’t make any money out of them. These were deals worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. We offered one chap £20,000. Another publisher offered him £500,000, but the book failed. Maybe the publisher got £20,000 to £30,000.
The way the big publishers work is like spread-betting. About 80 per cent of books break even, 10 per cent lose a lot of money and 10 per cent make a lot of money. It doesn’t matter to them that some books don’t make money, because in the short term you have to keep the wheels turning and the staff employed until the next big thing comes along.
It is always a bit of a gamble. You want someone with international appeal. With someone like Eric Clapton you can sell books in Japan, in America, all over the world.
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Hodder is a hugely respected company but maybe it has decided that celebrity publishing is not for it. There is also still a degree of snobbery from the big publishers. We are in talks with a number of pretty big names that we would not usually get, but the big publishers are not doing it any more.
John Blake is the owner of John Blake Publishing