Public loses interest in celebrity books

The big celebrity book, long publishing's most lucrative and sexy genre, is at a low ebb. The successful rhythm that gave publishers delirium with huge sales is broken. Instead, the parade of celebrity- book disappointments has nearly killed the category, some believe, and what was once enchanted is now publishing's equivalent of the villains whose faces are tacked to post office bulletin boards.

The dizzying tumble from grace was headed this year by Whoopi Goldberg and Paul Reiser, both of whom wrote books for Weisbach/Morrow that are considered colossal failures. Although the publisher denies it, Goldberg reportedly received a $6 million advance for Book and Reiser $5.6 million for Babyhood after his first book, Couplehood, was a success. The publisher, Rob Weisbach, declined to reveal the advances paid.

Other celebrities who have recently taken the literary journey, ranging from failure to underperforming disappointments, include Della Reese (G.P. Putnam's Sons), Lorrie Morgan (Ballantine Books), the rock group Aerosmith (Avon Books), LL Cool J (St. Martin's Press), Jake Steinfeld (Random House), Mia Farrow (Nan A.Talese/Doubleday), Anita Hill (Doubleday) and Gladys Knight (Hyperion Press). Last year's failures were topped by Jay Leno's Leading With My Chin, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for only three weeks and gave HarperCollins, its publisher, a $4 million walloping. Still, publishers say that the public's fixation on celebrities has hardly abated, and that the popularity of celebrity interviews on prime-time television and in magazines clearly suggests otherwise. What has apparently abated is the public's willingness to pay $25 to $30 for celebrity books when the same information is perceived to be available on television and in magazines. Even headline-driven books, or maybe especially such books, have a high and quick mortality rate. Kelly Flinn was front-page news for weeks while the Air Force and the country debated whether she should have been drummed out of the service, but her Random House book crashed on takeoff last month, as did the house's earlier book by the former Chief Judge of New York State, Sol Wachtler. Joe Torre won the World Series in October 1996, and his Bantam book was on and off the shelves last March. Six months is a short time for making a book, but an eternity for a headline. The signal that the glory days for celebrity books is at least on hold might have been sent by Ann Godoff, who had signed up Flinn, when she took over as head of Random House and set what is now considered in the business a more sensible publishing agenda. "I'd rather sign authors with multiple books rather than one-shot celebrity authors," she said. Her predecessor, Harold Evans, had signed up Gen. Colin L. Powell, Dick Morris, Christopher Reeve and Michael Eisner, and since his departure has been much criticized for that, but it was Evans who did much to revitalize the house with some of his high-profile acquisitions. Not everyone agrees that the end is here. Weisbach insists that there are "benefits still to be gotten" from Goldberg's and Reiser's books, "because these books will sell for a long time," even though "there wasn't instant heat." To most people in publishing, that seems like extreme wishful thinking, since Weisbach shipped only 350,000 copies of Goldberg's book and 500,000 copies of Reiser's, small quantities for such large advances. The returns from the booksellers are well on the way. Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chairman and chief executive of Time Trade Publishing, says celebrity books have "dwindled in popularity because the tabloidization of the country has stolen much of the explosive content of the books." Under him, Little, Brown had an expensive failure with Paula Barbieri's book. Warner Books, for more than $1 million, won a hotly contested auction to publish the memoir of a 98- year-old Kansas grandmother, Jesse Lee Brown Foveaux. Grandma Foveaux's book sunk. Still, Kirshbaum maintains that what he calls "the celebrated book" -- i.e., Kitty Kelley's book about the royals or Seymour M. Hersh's Kennedy book -- "have enough content to sell, not filled merely with the one-liners of celebrities." He also says that what he calls "niche celebrity books" have a future. These include Making Faces by Kevin Auchoin, a makeup artist, who was paid a six-figure advance by Little, Brown. "We are sated with the amount of tabloid experience on television and in newspapers," Kirshbaum said. "So if you are going for a celebrity book it better have something to say." That's the catch. People still like to feast on news of the famous, but seem to have been inoculated from buying the books in great numbers by the very clutter of celebrity they so much enjoy. Jim Silberman, a veteran book editor, says what has happened with celebrity books is a not infrequent phenomenon in publishing. "Suddenly the public erects a brick wall against a type of book," he said, "and the publishers crash into the wall and get all bloody." Certain people can always crash through that wall with their books. Ellen DeGeneres, George Carlin and Jerry Seinfeld have. So did Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Powell. But could any of them do it a second time? Not likely, most publishers agree. They also agree that for even a first-time celebrity book to succeed now, potential readers must be convinced that the celebrity is likable; that he or she is someone readers would like to invite into their homes, and that the celebrity's life, information, wit, style and point of view are worth more than consumers can get from television or a magazine. Such celebrities do exist, one supposes. So, somewhere someone is writing a celebrity book that will be a blockbuster.

Copyright 1997
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