The stars are out in the window of Foyles flagship store on London's Charing Cross Road, with Joanna Lumley and Alan Partridge twinkling beneath the ribbons and wrapping paper in the Christmas display. Among the festive paper chains within, meanwhile, Miranda Hart, James Corden and Jane Lynch grin on the Film and Drama shelves, while Dannii Minogue and Sue Johnston lurk at the bottom of Actor Biography. But despite the unmistakable signs of Santa's coming on the shop floor, in his office behind the scenes at Foyles, Jonathan Ruppin can see the writing on the wall for celebrity autobiography.
"Celebrity memoir is a fad which is fading fast," he says. "In terms of raw sales, they still make up a huge proportion of what's sold at Christmas, but the significant celebrity book this year isn't a conventional autobiography at all. It's the Alan Partridge, which spoofs the whole of celebrity culture."
The imagined life story of Steve Coogan's most popular comic character is an unlikely harbinger of doom, but with Christmas under a month away, celebrity memoirs are selling 60% less than in 2010, with sales since the end of September in the arts autobiography sector – the category tracked by Nielsen BookScan which corresponds most closely to the celebrity memoir genre – down £11m compared with a similar period last year. Booksellers talk bravely of a late Christmas, but these dizzying falls come after three years of steady decline, with arts autobiography losing £8.2m – or 16% – in 2010 from its peak of £51.5m in 2008 and biography and autobiography as a whole slumping by £30m between 2006 and 2010 – a 20% fall. The books trade as a whole has been buffeted by recession, but celebrity memoir has fallen faster than the rest, its market share slipping from 2.25% to 1.99% since 2008.
This rapid contraction brings to a close a bold chapter in publishing history: years of prodigious growth saw sales treble in arts autobiography between 2001 and 2008. But the story is older than that. For Weidenfeld and Nicholson's Alan Samson, who has published memoirs from stars such as Julie Walters, Helen Mirren and Keith Richards, the phenomenon goes back to the breathless reporting from the trials of Highwaymen in the 18th century.
"We've always had celebrity biography," he says, "but what we haven't had is this deluge". He traces the modern rise of the genre back to 1999 and Geri Halliwell's "extremely well put together" memoir, If Only, and reckons the boom was fuelled by the sheer number of celebrities created since the launch of Channel 4 in 1982 and the proliferation of media outlets that followed. "When I was a young editor starting out, there weren't 50 celebrities in the country," he says.
Ruppin agrees, pinning the transformation of the celebrity memoir at the end of the 1990s to the dawn of reality TV. "The book trade hadn't really reacted to the world of celebrity like TV and the papers," he says. "Publishers were a bit late to the party." There had always been an ambition to produce books which would have an extended shelf-life, he continues, but now "there's an acceptance that there'll only be a brief window when the public will be interested in buying them".
The flip-side for Samson, is that this increase in quantity has come along with an increase in quality. "A really good celebrity book today is much better than it used to be – better written, better structured and much more honest," he says. "Showbiz memoirs used to be just a bunch of anecdotes strung together which gave nothing much away, but now they really tell the story of a life."
Along with the usual skills of any editor, the successful publisher must deal with "issues of tact and diplomacy", says Samson, but the crucial element in a successful memoir is timing. "Like every other publisher in town I have my wishlist of seven or eight stars who have not yet written their memoirs, but in my view it is as much about timing as it is about throwing money at their agents. They have to want to do it."
For Ruppin the fact that only a handful of genuine stars have yet to put pen to paper is only partly to blame for the recent decline in sales, with the genre's rise at the beginning of the century leading to "buyer fatigue".
"There's a limit to how many Christmases in a row you can buy someone a celebrity autobiography without looking like you're not really putting much effort into it," he says.
Despite the large numbers of copies shifted – though often at large discounts – Ruppin is not lamenting their decline, saying that he's "never seen any evidence they bring in new readers". He was working on the tills in 2004 when Foyles experimented with a half-price discount on Katie Price's autobiography Being Jordan. "I never saw a single customer who bought a copy of that book buy anything else," he says. "They'd come into the shop, pick it up, buy it and then leave without looking at any other book."
But Samson is dismissive of those who suggest that celebrity memoirs are books for people who don't read. "As long as people are talking about books, going to bookshops, ordering them online, does that matter?" he says. Books like Keith Richard's memoir, Life, written with James Fox, sometimes come together perfectly, he continues, and while "books like Keith's continue to be a sales phenomenon, publishers will continue to publish the much-maligned genre called celebrity books".
According to Samson, the future for celebrity memoir is to shift the focus back on to A-list stars – people like Richards, Judi Dench and Julie Walters – rather than people who appear fleetingly on reality shows.
"People want strong narratives - stories where it's someone who has lived a real life, someone who has overcome obstacles and found success. People will always want to read those."
