This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
It’s not often that a specialist trade magazine manages to exemplify the various crises which the industry it represents is undergoing in a single issue. So hats off to the Bookseller of 21 February 2025 for, albeit unwittingly, exposing practically everything that is currently going wrong in the British book trade.
The collapse of the mainstream, the tide of rubbish, the gender imbalance, the desperate search for green shoots, the subservience to social media — it’s all there and made worse by being cunningly disguised as a series of challenges and searches for opportunity.
Forty years ago, when the Secret Author first began to read it, the Bookseller was a staid but reliably amusing periodical, full of venerable columnists and host to a fruity old gentleman disguised by the pseudonym “Quentin Oates” who filed an impossibly Olympian summary of the previous week’s reviews under the heading “Critics’ Crowner”.
It was an honour to be patronised by him, and the Secret Author venerates his memory. These days it is an excitable tip-sheet — not, of course, the magazine’s fault, but an indication of the manner in which book marketing has changed in the past couple of decades.
What is so disquieting about the issue of 21 February? To begin with, there is the gender bias. Of the five author profiles, four are of women and the remaining slot is given over to the veteran Gavin & Stacey actor Larry Lamb, who has written a novel and, to be fair to this celebrity author, is publishing it himself.
To return to gender, of the 48 photographs on display, 31 are of women and 17 of men. It is possible that this upward tilt of the seesaw is connected to the issue’s focus on children’s books, most of whose authors are women.
On the other hand, a glance at newspaper review pages insists that Planet Literature, as currently constituted, is a sorority house party.
And no bad thing either, it might be argued, given how male-dominated the world of books was for so very long. But what sort of books are we reading these days? Turning to the best-seller lists, the Secret Author discovered — not to his great surprise — that the Original Fiction roster was packed out with romantasy novels.
Of the 20 books featured, four — by Anne Tyler, Asako Yuzuki, Han Kang and Sally Rooney — fell into the category of items it is possible to respect. Over in mass-market fiction it was even worse, with only the Booker-winning Samantha Harvey’s Orbital flying the flag for respectable taste.
Hardback non-fiction was a little better, despite the presence of various air-fryer primers, and contained not only Jonathan Sumption’s The Challenges of Democracy but the Penguin Classics edition of Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars.
Of the 80 books on display in the four sections, maybe a fifth of them might be worth reviewing
Over in paperback non-fiction lurked books about murdle, hygge, SAS heroes, four colouring books by Coco Wyo with titles like “Stress Relief” and “Cozy Friends”, the Highway Code and one or two more serious items such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation.
Of the 80 books on display in the four sections, perhaps a fifth had something going for them and might be worth reviewing in a proper newspaper.
Elsewhere, deeply worrying tendencies were being talked up as positive advantages. Thus, the near-complete lack of interest shown by mainstream fiction publishers in new talent has apparently brought a “golden age” for independent authors who can choose whatever route to publication suits them.
What this actually means is that you can either choose to be paid and distributed, or not paid and not distributed, but the Bookseller wouldn’t dare to state this alarming fact.
Elsewhere in the magazine, everything is determinedly niche. The Secret Author was particularly amused by the Teenage and Young Adult book previews and their breathless plot summaries (of Katy Birchall’s Hot Young Royals, “Ruby discovers that her father is the king of England after the death of her mother and moves to Clairmont Hall, where the corridors are ruled by ‘the Elites’. Birchall’s novels are always great fun and Hot Young Royals has glitz, glamour and — for the TikTok crowd — swoony #FakeDating tension.”)
As for World Book Day, the trade was no doubt delighted to find that “Bluey leads the way” (a blue heeler puppy, in case you didn’t know). All was not lost, though, for towards the end of a crowded number came the regional and country finalists of the 2025 British Book Awards’ “Library of the Year”, “Small Press of the Year” and “Indie Bookshop of the Year” categories. And here were several old friends — Colchester’s Red Lion Books, Hebden Bridge’s Bluemoose Books, Wandsworth Town Library.
Curiously enough, there is an informed, intelligent readership out there, keen on expanding its horizons, encouraging its children and — without sounding like F. R. Leavis in one of his astringent moods — keeping literary culture going. But you doubt that many of its members will be very interested in the kind of thing so enthusiastically puffed in the Bookseller.
