Bookworm

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 18:59

CAT ANTICS MOST years, the No 1 Christmas best-seller has surfaced by now, the one book that has somehow struck a chord with the present-buying masses in the (for once) crowded bookshops.

This year, however, there's no such runaway must-have stocking-filler. Canongate are pushing the claims of Simon's Cat by Simon Tofield, the spin-off book from the award-winning YouTube cartoonist with proven (45 million hits) mass appeal, and true enough it makes the Amazon Top 20, even though Frankie Boyle's My Shit Life So Far looks like overtaking it at the final hurdle in the humour category. It is, however, a clear winner in Amazon's comics and graphic novel list.

So far, 120,000 copies of Simon's Cat have been sold, with nearly 2,500 selling this week alone. "That's a 20 per cent increase on the week before, which was in turn 20 per cent higher than the week prior to that," says Sophie Hopkin, head of sales at Canongate.

"You can never guarantee that humour titles will sell at Christmas, but there's always one book which is a surprise hit. This year, Simon's Cat is that book."

TURKEYS AND DOGS

WORKING out the publishers' Christmas turkeys is a lot easier. Celebrity memoirs in particular are taking a big hit, with overall sales down by between 25 and 30 per cent. Even books by the genuinely famous – Terry Wogan or Formula One champion Jensen Button, for example – have been left out in the cold.

According to the Bookseller, titles by Jack Dee, Dara O'Briain, and Justin Lee Collins have been particularly disappointing, while Peter Kay's Saturday Night Peter has come nowhere near emulating the success of his 2006 runaway bestseller The Sound of Laughter.

To everyone apart from a few star-struck commissioning editors, none of this should have come as too much of a surprise. Firstly, the laws of supply and demand should tell us that there's an oversupply of new titles by TV comedians. Secondly, a second memoir within three years is almost doomed to failure unless what you've got to say is of world-changing importance.

Then there's the phenomenon of books by people who were never famous enough in the first place. The example of the memoir by Cheryl Gascoigne, ex-wife of footballer Paul, springs immediately to mind.

"There's been some barrel-scraping with this year's book," says one publishing insider, "but that one was a classic. Who was going to buy it?"