It was PD James and Deborah Moggach who started it but Lynda La Plante who really put the boot in. Authors were queuing up last week to rubbish what La Plante called "the biggest publishing catastrophe of all time – the constant supply of crap by individuals who have been famous for 15 minutes on television".
It's true that the hundreds of thousands of copies sold of Katie Price's novels (Angel: "When Angel is discovered by a modelling agent, her life changes for ever"; Crystal: "After years of trying to break into the music industry her chance finally comes when her girl band enters a TV reality show contest") means that publishers have been jumping through hoops to find other celebrities on which to pin the name of novelist. (Before Price – BP, perhaps? – they had stayed away, after the dismal failure of Naomi Campbell's 1995 attempt Swan – "Swan is a leading supermodel but is aware that she doesn't want this life forever" – to capture the public's interest.)
Most recently, there has been Martine McCutcheon's debut novel, described by La Plante as a "load of c***" (stars courtesy of the Mail – what could she mean?), and gloriously analysed by Marina Hyde. But Kerry Katona has also dabbled (Tough Love: "Leanne Crompton had it all – beauty, fame, money"), Sharon Osbourne is set to launch her first next March (Fabulous!: "Amber and Chelsea Stone are sisters who share the same dream – huge, global fame"), and Ulrika Jonsson, Fern Britton and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson have all recently struck book deals for fiction. James, La Plante and Moggach aren't the first writers to complain about the trend – chick-lit novelist Freya North was on the case back in February over reports that Cheryl Cole had struck a £5m fiction deal – and they won't be the last.
I can't help but think, though, that safe in their positions with long-standing publishers and at the top of bestseller charts, these aren't the authors whom celebrity novelists are really affecting. It's the unpublished writers who are missing out on book deals because the money is being spent elsewhere, or the midlist authors who aren't getting the publicity or marketing spend because it's all going on the glamorous names, who'll really be hit.
La Plante and North do acknowledge this. "I've seen great young writers struggle to get a deal," La Plante told the Mail. "I don't know how much Martine got for that book, but I do know a new young writer will get about £5,000. That's hardly enough to live on." And North wrote: "Tell me that her fine UK publisher won't now reject and forfeit fine unpublished novelists because they'd prefer to spend a vulgar amount on Ms Cole's advance?"
But, as I've said before, there's another side to all this. The more these celebrity novels sell, the more money publishers will have to fund debut literary fiction writers, poets, biographers; the kinds of books that might not sell hundreds of thousands of copies, which in fact might barely sell 1,000 copies, but which make it all worthwhile. Our own Stuart Evers says a similar thing here, in an insightful view into the realities of commercial fiction. "Celebrity sells, and that's something we're all just going to have to deal with," he writes. What do you think?
