By Arifa Akbar, James Hanning and Andrew Johnson in The Independent, Saturday, 28 November 2009
Left - Katie Price: Standing Out is not quite an autobiography but her personal approach to fashion. It sits at No 50 on Neilson's BookScan. Getty Images
It is a literary genre about "how I became famous" that readers have found endlessly riveting and which has made a fortune for those celebrities who decide to tell all in return for a seven-figure advance.
But the love affair with the fame memoir could finally be coming to an end. After the phenomenal critical and commercial success of autobiographies by the likes of Michael Parkinson and Julie Walters, there are now signs that readers this Christmas would rather unwrap a copy of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight trilogy than Ant and Dec's saucily-titled Ooh! What a Lovely Pair.
Literary agents have branded it a "disastrous" autumn for the celebrity memoir genre and the book publisher Hachette UK has announced that it is trimming back its celebrity roster. The total value of hardback celebrity titles in the top 50 this year is, so far, £3.3m a significant decrease on 2008's figure of £4.6m.
Jonathan Lloyd, chief executive of Curtis Brown, suggested this season's memoirs – which include sequels by Peter Kay and Katie Price as well as autobiographies by Jo Brand, Chris Evans and Frankie Boyle – lacked the sensational factor and their comparatively unremarkable sales may impact on the advances that such celebrities received in the future.
"In the end, you can't fool the public. They expect to have the real book and the majority of offers this autumn are not real books, certainly not 'must-haves'," he said.
Others suggested that there was a saturation of "bottom-of-the-barrel" celebrities who were riding on the coat-tales of the genre's success, and that publishers were now returning to more traditional non-fiction books.
What is noticeable on the Neilson BookScan bestseller list this week is the prominence of fiction over memoirs – Dan Brown, Meyer and John Grisham's latest novels dominated the top 10, with Ant and Dec's book the first memoir on the chart at number seven. Last year, memoirs by far dominated the book charts
The full piece at The Independent.
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