Are the dreaded celebrity memoirs actually good for publishing?

7 comments on “Are the dreaded celebrity memoirs actually good for publishing?”

1. Andrew S says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 8:22 am

   That would be all very nice, if the profits from said books actually did go to fund literary fiction, poetry, and so on.

2. Frankie the C says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 10:23 am

   Memoir is the fiction that dare not speak its name.

3. strunk&white says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 12:11 pm

   Here’s a random sampling of bestselling books last century, according to Publishers’ Weekly. Clearly, some years are better than others, but I think the bottom line is that genre fiction drives the bus, and if two books of real significance find an audience in a given year, that’s a pretty good year.

   BTW, if anyone is selling their Booth Tarkington collection, I’m looking. First editions only, please:

   1902
   1. The Virginian, Owen Wister
   2. Mrs. Wiggs of Cabbage Patch, Alice Caldwell Hegan (Alice Hegan Rice)
   3. Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall, Charles Major
   4. The Mississippi Bubble, Emerson Hough
   5. Audrey, Mary Johnston
   6. The Right of Way, Gilbert Parker
   7. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
   8. The Two Vanrevels, Booth Tarkington
   9. The Blue Forever, Henry van Dyke
   10. Sir Richard Calmady, Lucas Malet

   1961
   The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone
   Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger
   To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
   Mila 18, by Leon Uris
   The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins
   Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
   Winnie Ille Pu, by Alexander Lenard (translation of Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne)
   Daughter of Silence, by Morris West
   The Edge of Sadness, by Edwin O’Connor
   The Winter of Our Discontent, by John Steinbeck

4. John McFetridge says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

   Go genre! Drive that bus!

   (okay, that may be too self-serving ;)

5. cfg says:
   October 29th, 2009 at 8:25 am

   This echoes a sentiment I heard a few years ago from Denise Bukowski, who was addressing a session at the Humber Fiction School. A certain NY publisher told her that while he “wasn’t proud” to be publishing blockbuster pulp fiction (names may have been mentioned), doing so allowed him to roll the dice on talented young writers, as he’d done years earlier with a little-known British writer–Ian McEwan.

6. strunk&white says:
   October 29th, 2009 at 8:59 am

   Geez, yeah sorry Mr. McFetridge. The expression “books of real significance” was kind of obnoxious. Sometimes my inner literature professor can be a real pain. How about “less entertaining books that make you contemplate your own mortality”?

   Some of my best friends are genre fiction characters.

7. John McFetridge says:
   October 29th, 2009 at 12:00 pm

   Hey, don’t worry about it, I didn’t even know I was writing genre until the publisher put, “a mystery” on the covers. It’s a little weird as there are no mysteries in the books, but there you go.

   And besides, the literature department can’t tell what’s genre and what’s literature until the books have been out for a long, long time. Elmore Leonard is literature now that Martin Amis says he is, isn’t he? ;)

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