Paul Thomas: Celebrity tell-alls and tricks put fiction on bottom shelf

This is a tale of two book launches.

Last week 170 people gathered at the Christchurch Casino. The $100 cover charge entitled them to a few drinks, an Indian buffet, a speech from the man of the moment and a copy of John Wright's Indian Summers, an account of the former New Zealand cricket captain's eventful tenure as coach of India.

This week a somewhat smaller group (let's say 40-odd) squeezed into an intimate bar on Ponsonby Rd for a few drinks and a tapas selection laid on by the publisher Random House and the author, and a somewhat shorter speech by the man of the moment.

If they wished, they could purchase the book it was all in aid of, a novel called Work In Progress.

Let me declare a dual interest. I assisted Wright with his memoirs and was excused the cover charge, which was just as well since I don't care for Indian food and can recite whole chunks of the book backwards in my sleep. I also happen to be the author of Work In Progress.

These contrasting events provide a snapshot of the publishing industry, an economic micro-system in which celebrity has become the gold standard while fiction (with some notable exceptions) is the softest of currencies, hardly worth the paper it's printed on.

It should be noted that this is a global trend which we've resisted more stoutly than some but, as in so many fields of endeavour, our numbers don't stack up.

A decade ago Martin Amis, one of the most talented and influential of contemporary writers, scored a million dollar-plus advance for his novel The Information on which he'd worked for the best part of five years.

There was an outcry among the London literary set, much of it fuelled by envy unconvincingly disguised as concern that Amis and his American agent had introduced ruthless, Hollywood-style acquisitiveness into the high-minded world of English letters.

Others protested that Amis, who was already quite well off thank you, was pocketing funds that would otherwise have gone towards nurturing and launching Generation Next.

In fact, publishers are always on the lookout for the next big thing.

If that money hadn't gone to Amis, it probably would have been splurged on yet another typing-by-numbers airport novel or perhaps a page three girl's inventory and report card of the famous people she's slept with.

This year the same publisher - HarperCollins - paid the yobbish 20-year-old footballer Wayne Rooney $15 million to produce five books (about himself, what else?) over the next decade.

No one batted an eyelid.

The bottom line is that fiction is a hard sell while celebrity sells itself.

The 170 punters at the Christchurch Casino needed no introduction to the subject/author or his work: Wright's a sporting hero, a local lad made good (although one wonders how many of those red and black-blooded Cantabrians can or care to remember he had to leave home and head north to get his career under way), whose achievements with India have been well-documented.

The market is thus familiar with and primed for the product. But how do you sell a novel whose author isn't a brand name like Tom Clancy or Bryce Courtenay, especially if it can't be categorised as crime or romance or exotic or erotic or literary fiction, whatever that might be?

There's a Hollywood rule of thumb that if you can't sum up a film project in one sentence, it will never get off the ground. Perhaps that's why there are so many sequels: "So what's it about?"

"Well, it's just like the last one only with more hobbits/sword fights/toilet humour/car chases/sex/serial killings."

I could say Work In Progress is a coming of age novel - with the age in question being middle age as opposed to early adulthood - but that still leaves potential readers in semi-darkness, with little information on which to base a leap of faith.

The next best thing to an author who's already famous is one with a chequered or tragic past.

A recent example of a novelist profitably mining his own dark background is the American crime writer James Ellroy who happily encourages the perception that his blood-drenched epics have their genesis in his mother's unsolved murder. (He was 10 at the time and never a serious suspect).

Since theirs is a solitary occupation, many writers are uncomfortable in a public setting.

Ellroy, though, backs up this gruesome history with a persona that's a combination of steak knives salesman and freak show impresario.

At a book awards function in Sydney he introduced himself to his stunned audience by accusing them of copulating with kangaroos.

Another option is to create a main character who bears more than a passing resemblance to yourself, embroil him or her in one lurid or traumatic episode after another, then coyly equivocate when asked whether the story is autobiographical.

This is a technique much favoured by women authors operating in the Confessions of a Nymphomaniac sub-genre.

Work In Progress' main character is a middle-aged writer recently returned to New Zealand after 20-odd years in Europe and Australia but I don't need to tell you that any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental.