Bestsellers (Routledge Revivals)

Popular Fiction of the 1970s

John Sutherland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136830624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

First published in 1981, this book offers a study of British and American popular fiction in the 1970s, a decade in which the quest for the superseller came to dominate the lives of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. Illustrated by examples of the lurid incidents that catapult so many books into the bestseller charts, this comprehensive study covers the work of Robbins, Hailey and Maclean, the 'bodice rippers', the disaster craze, horror, war stories and media tie-ins such as The Godfather, Jaws and Star Wars.

Chapter One
An American kind of book?

To begin with the most obvious and important point: America is, in my experience, the only country in the world which is, for better and for worse, squarely, uncompromisingly in the twentieth century.

(A.Alvarez)

I

A vast number of new novels are published every year. Probably no ordinary reader gets through more than 1 per cent of the 2,000 or so new titles which are put out annually in the British and American markets. Even extraordinary readers—regular reviewers, for example—are unlikely to take in as much as 10 per cent of the whole. One year’s wave washes over the last, and in a decade hosts of literary aspirations, small achievements and potboilers are irretrievably gone. Few categories of book can be less disturbed in the six copyright libraries than the unmemorable bulk of this century’s 100,000 novels.

In the flux of new products which the book trade churns out, a minority of works achieve some more or less permanent existence and stay in view for longer than the moment granted to most novels. A very few—certainly less than one a year—enter the canon of literature, the hoped-for destiny of any self-respecting work. These touchstones will eventually be studied in schools and universities. Their author’s working materials and literary remains will be sought out and carefully archived; for in all probability there will follow a biography, critical monographs, theses, scholarly editions and exegesis in learned journals. Lay readers will deferentially buy or borrow the endorsed ‘classic’, whose worth they largely take on trust. There are, in fact, few better preservatives of a novel and its author’s fame than to be set for examination, to be judged as suitable research material by the committees which approve PhD topics, or to be approached by an American university offering the curatorship of manuscript materials.

Permanence of a less absolute kind is achieved by bestsellers. For a season, extending usually from a few weeks to a year, these novels withstand the forces which push most fiction into speedy oblivion. But even supersellers cannot reckon on staying in the lists for much more than a year, and most will do well to last a couple of months. And to gain this moderate lease of life a novel will have to sell enormously: between 100,000 and 800,000 in hardback, and between one and six millions in paperback (these American figures can be scaled down to about a fifth for the UK market).

Unlike the candidates for literary canonization, the number of bestsellers is quite predictable. From week to week there will be ten in the two main book forms. By the end of the year some forty new novels, and newly paperbacked novels, will have made the lists. Given this even-paced turnover, the superlative ‘bestseller’ is something of a confidence trick. It should correctly be ‘better-than-average seller’ or ‘top-bracket seller’. But it is, of course, unthinkable that the book trade in the interest of semantic precision should ever sacrifice the salesworthy implication that the bestseller is the book of books. ‘Hype’ (trade lies) is the first language of bestsellerdom.

One of the most striking features of the bestseller, compared to the ‘literary’ novel, is the all-or-nothing nature of its achievement. It is commonly the book that everyone is reading now, or that no one is reading anymore. Once a bestseller is spent, or its formula is spent, no residue is left. This partly explains why popular fiction has no generic sense of sustained progress or tradition. It is always ‘new’ but never an advance; Airport ’75 is ahead of Airport, Airport ’79 ahead of Airport ’77, only in date. Jaws 2 is a sequel, but in no sense an advance on Jaws. And no more than popular fiction is the bestselling author registered in the public mind as developing from novel to novel. He has no oeuvre, merely a rate of production and a brand-named, standardized product. The ‘latest Harold Robbins’ is a very different formulation from ‘Lawrence’s later novels’.

It is also, one might argue, a fundamentally un-English formulation, alien to cisatlantic cultural traditions and book trade customs. The OED gives an American origin for the term bestseller, an etymology which one instinctively feels to be right. The word still sounds American, like ‘movie star’, ‘hit parade’, or baseball’s ‘hall of fame’. It is, however, earlier in origin than these three coinages. The first recorded use of the term ‘bestseller’ is in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and we can trace the system (‘bestsellerism’) to preverbal origins in the practice of American publishing and bookselling before the Act of 1891 which enforced the observance of international copyright. As a business in the nineteenth century largely dependent on systematic piracy, the American book trade had much more interest in the sale of books than their origination. Until 1891 the raw material was always readily available to be stolen from (notably) British sources—how to merchandise it was the problem. Competitive price cutting, mail order, paperbound editions, high-pressure publicity, gimmickry, mass production economies of scale, sales in nonbookstore outlets were all force grown in the hot-house atmosphere of American book retailing. And so too was bestsellerism.

Historically, bestseller lists have been a part of American literary life since February 1895, when the Bookman began recording titles of novels ‘in the order of demand’ (piratical habits died hard; eight out of the ten novels listed were British). In 1897 this information was digested as ‘Best Selling Books’ and has been available to the American public ever since. (In 1912 Publishers Weekly extended coverage to non-fiction—but, true to its first formulation, the term bestseller still largely evokes the novel.) Various American journals and trade journals now not only list over-all country-wide successes from week to week, but also provide specialist lists for cities, regions, various categories of book and groups of readers. Thus, for example, it could be verified that the 1975 bestseller Looking for Mr Goodbar (the tragic story of a school teacher given to pick-ups in singles’ bars) headed lists in northern and southern California, New York and Boston— that is to say, areas where mores were relaxed and women’s liberation well organized. The feedback from bestseller lists concentrated publicity for the follow-up paperback where it would do most good. Campus bestseller lists inform the book trade how the student body, with its 20 per cent or so of the American book market, is behaving. Children’s books, religious books, cookery books, DIY books, all have their sales charted and provide simultaneous publicity and market research. Every year since 1911, Publishers Weekly has had a special issue analyzing the leading sales of the past twelve months based on publishers’ figures. And over the decades this information has been gathered by Alice P.Hackett into a series of regularly updated reports, of which the latest is entitled 80 Years of Bestsellers: 1895–1975.

Anyone attempting Miss Hackett’s comprehensive and numerically informative account for British bestsellers would face a Herculean task. There were no widely publicized or systematic lists in Britain until the Sunday Times began its weekly survey amid some controversy in the 1970s, decades after the New York Times. The Bookseller is similarly over half a century behind its opposite book trade organ in America, having begun its bestseller list only with the last change of editorship in the mid-1970s. The Evening Standard runs a modest paragraph at the foot of its Tuesday review page, indicating a few books doing well in London that week. It is based on telephone reports from six metropolitan bookshops. The recently introduced, and conservatively sub-titled, Sunday Telegraph ‘Bestsellers in demand this month’ is also based on information from six outlets, all older-fashioned, stockholding bookshops. The half-hearted conviction behind the Sunday Telegraph exercise is witnessed by the compromise of monthly rather than weekly reports and the fact that it gives five or six titles (not, apparently, in order) rather than the conventional ‘top ten’. All of which seems very amateurish when the New York Times informs us that its hardback listings ‘are based on computer-processed sales figures from 1,400 bookstores in every region of the US’ and its mass-market paperback listings ‘on computer processed reports from bookstores and representative wholesalers with more than 40,000 outlets across the US’. This extraordinarily conscientious census is clearly trusted by the American book trade and its public. Escalator clauses can be built into contracts with additional payments for every week a novel features in the NYT or other lists. And the NYT #1 symbol is a supreme award, and when earned is flaunted and prominently advertised. (It is, incidentally, quite meaningless to the British public, for whom it has to be glossed as ‘number one international bestseller’ — never, of course, ‘number one bestseller in America’, which would inflame a national inferiority complex.) As well as promoting individual titles for publishers, the bestsellers lists in America add sparkle to the bookclubs, which have in the past been much less reprint affairs than in the UK. The Literary Guild, for example, advertises itself as ‘the Bestseller Bookclub’ with huge double centre spreads in the New York Times Book Review, usually featuring the same titles that appear creditably in the journal’s back-end bestseller lists.

The British book trade issues formidably precise statistical material when it wants to (witness the quarterly gross figures published in the Bookseller). British amateurishness, when it comes to recording what books are currently doing well, and just how well, goes with what seems to be a general lukewarmness about the value or decency of such exercises. (It is well known, for example, that the West End, unlike Broadway, does not publish box-office takings.) The British are not really sure they want that kind of thing—though American success with it constantly tempts them into thinking that it might be worth trying. The result is something that looks rather like timidity; a series of half-hearted and often abortive experiments. When the Observer began a list to rival the Sunday Times it was dropped after a short time. Paperback and Popular Hardback Buyer, which was launched in 1977 as a new-style trade journal (i.e. modelled on Publishers Weekly rather than the Bookseller) dropped its domestic bestseller charts in June 1979 (according to its editor, Brian Levy, he ‘had not been happy for some time with them’). The decision, declared in a high-sounding editorial, was publicized, and given sympathetic comment in another new trade organ, Publishing News. The Bookseller somewhat stuffily stuck to its recently acquired list, but was noticeably shaken under the fire directed at the practice. Similar shakiness was evident elsewhere. When in 1979 it returned after a year’s stoppage, the Sunday Times enlarged its survey of bestsellers to include records, films and television as well as books. In the first issue of the newspaper this ‘Complete bestsellers list’ was brought forward to p. 2 of the main news section of the paper. After a while it was relegated to the penultimate page of the ‘Weekly review’. Meanwhile Paperback and Popular Hardback Buyer—now retitled Paperback and Hardback BOOK BUYER—had gone back on its June 1979 stand, and by January 1980 was offering domestic bestseller charts once again. All this, taken against the Book Marketing Council’s pious contention that ‘the industry must have an effective and credible bestseller list’ (which ‘the industry’, manifestly, had no immediate intention of setting up), indicated the inability of the British book trade to make its mind up, one way or the other.

British objections to the bestseller lists fall under several heads. In the first place, the lists are suspected of being inherently spurious in their attention to quick, rather than real, bestsellers. Their week-to-week attention singles out sensational books of the moment, at the expense of longer-lived titles or groups of books which might eventually have the larger if less dramatic sale. Anthony Blond convincingly demonstrates what are the ‘real bestsellers’ in the supplement to his 1971 book, The Publishing Game. They are in the main a very drab selection of cookery books, educational texts etc. When Now! was launched in 1979 it carried, true to its Time/Newsweek inspiration, a bestseller list; predictably it was attacked by British book trade commentators as capricious and inaccurate. But worse than any likely inaccuracy, what British lists we have are alleged to carry a taint of corruption about them. Speaking while still the literary editor of the then silenced Times, Ion Trewin, in the Summer 1979 British controversy on the subject, made an outright accusation that ‘some booksellers are being tempted to feed in titles which are not moving but to which they are oversubscribed’. Lists thus cooked, Trewin concluded, were not worth the paper they were printed on. His outburst could be taken to support the criticism, common enough in Britain, that the American book trade, by institutionalizing bestsellerdom, has sold out to its basest commercial element.

Suspicion as to the integrity of the bestseller list is confirmed by regular scandals to do with pop record charts (also an American innovation—but one to which there has been no comparable British resistance). Notoriously these charts do not merely record success, they are methodically used to generate it; that is to say a record sells because it is number one, as much as it is number one because it has sold well. The number one record in fact gains its top position by rate of sale over a week in some 300 selected stores all over Britain. Once placed, it only then achieves the bulk of its sales. Despite their pseudo-objectivity the charts are thus a potent and invitingly accessible instrument for maximizing profit and minimizing risk. Not surprisingly they are regularly suspected, and sometimes convicted, of being rigged by big business interests in the music industry. At the very least the lists and their effect on radio’s weekly ‘playlists’ condition consumers into thinking that there are only a very few records which matter at any moment—perhaps only one. In America, pop record charts and bestseller lists have much in common; as with hit records the number of copies a book has already sold, or its ‘place’, is used to bludgeon other readers into buying their copy, if not immediately, then when the book comes up in paperback or book club form. ‘Do we want to sell books like gramophone records?’ was one question posed in the Trewin controversy (Publishing News, 4 May 1979). The questioner’s anticipated answer was a horrified ‘No!’.

Given British dissatisfaction at the inevitable inaccuracy and possible venality of weekly lists based on ‘outlets’ it is conceivable that publishers might release their figures, along the lines of the annual Publishers Weekly roundup. But it is a well known feature of the British book trade that it is always coyer about giving such information than its American counterpart. No American publisher, apparently, feels it necessary to veil the successful side of the firm’s annual dealings. In Britain figures are occasionally winkled out (the Evening Standard makes an incomplete and impressionistic survey every Christmas), and paperback publishers are more forthcoming than hardback; but generally sales remain a trade secret, ‘a confidential matter between author and publisher and never divulged to outsiders’, as one famous British publishing house once told me. (Another publicity manager, who actually did divulge sales figures for a novel, requested that they not be specifically cited in print, that his name not be revealed and ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One An American kind of book?
• Chapter Two The bestseller machine and its diverse products
• Chapter Three The Godfather
• Chapter Four The novels of Arthur Hailey
• Chapter Five Frighteners of the 1970s: Children of the Dark
• Chapter Six Women’s fiction I: The Thorn Birds
• Chapter Seven Women’s fiction II: liberation and female masochism-Erica Jong and the ‘bodice rippers’
• Chapter Eight Star Wars
• Chapter Nine Alistair MacLean and James Clavell
• Chapter Ten Jaws
• Chapter Eleven Harold Robbins: the roman à clef I
• Chapter Twelve The roman à clef II
• Chapter Thirteen Full disclosure: research and insider novels
• Chapter Fourteen Death Wish: from stetson to hard hat
• Chapter Fifteen The ‘new western’ and the middle-aged reader
• Chapter Sixteen Images of war I: secret histories
• Chapter Seventeen Images of war II: the nightmare that wouldn’t die
• Chapter Eighteen Fashionable crime I: hijack
• Chapter Nineteen Fashionable crime II: embezzlement-the man with the briefcase
• Chapter Twenty QB VII and the bestselling novel after Auschwitz
• Chapter Twenty-one Nightmare and medicare: Coma
• Chapter Twenty-two Documentary, superdocumentary and technology
• Chapter Twenty-three Disaster
• Chapter Twenty-four British pessimism: the ‘as if’ narratives
• Epilogue
• Checklist of fiction
• Bibliography of non-fiction
• Index