Wayne Rooney’s fiancee is signing a five-book deal. Is this a new low in publishing, asks nicholas clee |
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Ladies and gentlemen: I give you Wayne Rooney of Manchester United and England, and his fiancee, Coleen McLoughlin, the HarperCollins novelist. It has an impressive ring in today's celebrity-obsessed publishing industry.
McLoughlin (right) is reportedly signing a megabucks five-novel deal, joining an HC fiction list that also boasts Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing. Over at Random House, publisher of J M Coetzee and Toni Morrison, the up-and-coming novelists include Katie Price, aka Jordan, and Kerry Katona.
McLoughlin will not actually have to write her novels, although no doubt her editor at HarperCollins will encourage her to read them. That may be challenge enough: when asked what his fiancee had on her bedside table, Rooney replied, "The phone."
Is this a new low in publishing? The eventual Man Booker Prize winner sells, |
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| Coleen McLoughlin joins a HarperCollins fiction list that also boasts Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing |
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before the announcement, only a few thousand copies, and cannot be found in many bookshops, while publishers throw millions of pounds at unlettered celebrities. A good many novelists, some with distinguished track records, cannot get deals at all; most earn less than £10,000 a year from writing.
Publishers cannot win. Either they are literary snobs, out of touch with the majority of the population, or they are vulgarians. If they have found a way to sell hundreds of thousands of books to people who would not be book-buyers otherwise, good luck to them. But one is less inclined to cheer them on if, by concentrating so many resources on the likes of McLoughlin and Katona, they ignore writing of literary worth, and fail to nurture the talent that will sustain the industry in the future.
Privately, editors at the publishing houses are gloomy. More books, and a greater variety of them, are being published - but there is less originality at the big publishers. And they are the ones with the money. For writers lacking McLoughlin's selling points, life is a struggle. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 23, 2007
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