MARKET OVERVIEW
As Richard & Judy move across to digital channel UKTV, Jonathan Ruppin examines the Book Club’s
success and takes a closer look at the lists and strategies of different publishers
Richard & Judy and beyond
It is with trepidation that the publishing
industry awaits the fall-out of the
move of “The Richard & Judy Book
Club” to digital broadcaster UKTV.
With Book Club titles accounting for
1.4% of total UK book sales by value
last year and 22% of the top 100, it
will be very interesting to see how
the move affects viewing figures and,
ultimately, sales.
The Book Club has been an easy
target for critics and I must confess
to some cynicism, probably derived
from snobbery, when it started out.
Amanda Ross has had to endure
extraordinary vitriol but, as she
rightly pointed out in an interview
with the Sunday Telegraph last year,
she is not a publisher. Neither does
she deserve to be attacked by an
industry resentful of the power she
wields for having done more for the
profile of books than any initiative
the industry has devised itself.
The rise of the Book Club has been
a blessing for an industry that has an
intrinsic difficulty with getting people
to experiment. We don’t have singles
the way the music industry does and
trailers are always going to work better
for films than for books. There’s
little question that Richard & Judy
has introduced thousands of people
to books they would almost certainly
never have tried, such as Cloud Atlas,
Empress Orchid or Then We Came To
The End—challenging but rewarding
books. And whether or not we rate
Jodi Picoult, Michael Connelly or P J
Tracy, we should celebrate the number
of people who no longer automatically
pass by bookshops or the
book section and embrace what is in
effect a national reading group, giving
books the chance to take centre
stage and to show people the power
and beauty of the printed word.
Ups and downs
There are criticisms one can make
of the Book Club too, of course. It’s
disappointing that the success of
The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz
Zafón), for example, hasn’t led to the
selection of any other titles in translation.
It’s a pity that there aren’t more
books from independent publishers
and the selection of one non-fiction
title each time is an odd sort of compromise.
But we shouldn’t make the mistake
of expecting the selection
to provide a complete picture of
“There’s
little
question
that the
Book
Club has
introduced
thousands
of people
to books
they would
almost
certainly
never have
tried”
what bookshops have to offer. No
bookshop could pick just 10 titles
and expect them to illustrate the
complete range of books that their
various different types of customer
might be interested in. At least each
series of the Book Club has tried
to pick a range of books as different
from previous selections as the
books are different from each other.
I’m told the greatest misapprehension
by publishers in making their
submissions to the Richard & Judy
panel is to compare them with books
that have featured before. Popular
4 The Bookseller Autumn Paperback Preview | 6 June 2008 www.thebookseller.com
AUTUMN PAPERPACK PREVIEW
though Labyrinth and The Interpretation
of Murder may have been, the
panel is not interested in the same
again—that would go against the
guiding principle of showing viewers
something new.
It may be that the 18 or so books
a year highlighted by the Book Club
are more than enough for the average
reader and so we fear that too
many will allow their choices to be
determined by titles in the Book
Club selection alone. But I think we
know better than that and the diverse
range of publishers and retail out-
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