Weekend paper review

There was plenty of book coverage in the nationals at the weekend and rather than do several different posts I’ll put them all in together.

One article, which you can’t help at chuckle a bit at, was in The Independent on Sunday, which reported that celebrity biographies are not selling well and publishers were starting to regret signing up so many football players and reality TV stars. With some books only managing to sell 4,000 copies in the last month – Ashley Cole’s book for instance – maybe there will be fewer of these types of titles next year.

One alternative approach might be to follow the US example and aim specialist titles in a specialist environment. A piece in The Guardian on Saturday reported that books about wine and home maintenance were being sold in the equivalent of off licences and DIY shops as well as on home shopping channels. To help solve the Caleb problem perhaps those books should be sold in stores that sell televisions and at football grounds?

Finally Amazon is looking for growth by offering its supply and logistics expertise to other companies. The Independent on Sunday runs a Business Week piece that quotes Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of Amazon, as saying it will start to increase activities like renting out its warehouse space to other companies. Apparently Wall Street is twitchy because the scheme might not work as well as he is painting it out to be.

That’s what I got from my weekend reading and it makes you wonder if the Caleb books are doing so badly now and publishers have to resort to creative product placement how will things fare this Christmas when a ton more Caleb books are coming out?