Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

Published in The Independent:

The king and queen of telly books are dead; long live the (identical) king and queen.

When their talk show ends on Channel 4 next year, Richard and Judy – regally, they require no family names – promise that the book club element will survive in specials and spin-off shows. Cue sighs of back-from-the-brink relief among the fiction publishers who have put all their promotional eggs into one cosy teatime basket. The duo and their Cactus TV power-behind-the-throne, Amanda Ross, had suffered from this year's voting scandal over the "You Say, We Pay" quiz, which led to a £150,000 fine for contractor Eckoh UK, although no fault was found with the presenters. As, over the past three years, publishers saw R&J's sofa salon all-but-guarantee six-figure sales for the lucky selections, they had no similar qualms about the pair's close bond with their book-consuming viewers. That was more a matter of "we say, you pay".

R&Js' literary choices started out fairly humdrum, built up to a stimulating peak in the era of Cloud Atlas and Shadow of the Wind, then settled back into a comfort-zone of so-so MOR fiction before perking up again with the likes of AM Homes and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. But it's not their fault that British publishers, so routinely incapable of long-term vision when it comes to extending the general market for fiction beyond the formulas, should have hailed them as the trade's sole saviours. As the premium-rate regulator Sir Alistair Graham didn't quite say: they're not the messiah, they're a rather naughty (girl and) boy.

Traditionally, publishers and agents aim to sell their books rather than books as such. Even when they tiptoe into the new-fangled world of social- network sites, they do so with old-fashioned commercial ends. Penguin's newly-launched site for teenage readers, Spinebreakers, sounds like an excellent idea. But one visit will show you its chief drawback: it exists primarily to promote Penguin books. Nothing else is featured. Likewise, HarperCollins's Authonomy network for aspiring authors (due to go live next spring) looks suspiciously like a bid to outsource the onerous donkey-work of sifting the slush-pile – at zero cost to the firm.

So it comes as no surprise that the Department for Children's national "Year of Reading" in 2008, aimed at young readers and managed by the Reading Agency and the National Literacy Trust, has run into some complaints from publishers. (Others, including – to be fair – Penguin itself, are lending strong support.) The sceptics fret that too many such ventures clog the calendar, while NYR will deliver little to their short-term bottom line.

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