The top selling black author of 2011 is Lorraine Pascale.
Her first book, Baking Made Easy came in at 41 in the top 100 UK book sales
list. It sold 182,258 copies, and earned her publishers over £1.9m. It was originally priced at £18.99 but
mostly sold for £10.60. Here is the review that I did of it back last April: Lorraine Pascale – the only time to be honest, that I have cooked from it.
Lorraine has proved to be the only contender for Jamie’s chef
cookbook crown - his book came in at number 2 on the list, generating over £6m.
Lorraine’s newest book, published last September, Home Cooking Made Easy, (at no
60) has already sold 157,817 copies, and made £1.6m. The recommended price is
£20, and it is selling mostly at under £10 per copy – though, as with the first book,
it also had a TV tie-in and was of course, published in time for the Christmas
gift market.
Interestingly, the only other black author on the top 100 list,
is Andrea Levy, for her 2010 Booker long-listed The Long Song. It was published
on the same day (6 Jan 2011, paperback edition) as Lorraine’s first book, and
came in at number 58, selling 161,466 and making £863,649.92 for her
publishers. These are the figures for both paperback and hardback sales, so
while it may look as though there is only almost 20k copies in sales difference
between Andrea’s book and Baking Made Easy, neither of Lorraine’s books are yet
available in paperback. When they are, this could mean that Lorraine could be
on the top sellers list for a long time to come, as generally paperbacks sell
more than hardbacks.
A number of people sent me the link to Catherine Johnson’s
Comment is Free article from The Guardian – entitled Where are Britain’s Black Writers? In it she laments the lack of profile and drama writing work given to
black authors. Catherine is a published author and a scriptwriter. While I
don’t at all disagree with her messages in the article – in fact I’d go even
further to say that there should be more black reviewers and commentators
across all topics, I did think that a few things have been overlooked and
conflated in her article.
First is about who buys books, and what they buy. As you can
see from the UK’s top 10 list, dead authors, cooking and thrillers/crime in
paperback are what pay. It is this type of work that generates the income that
fund other books’ publication – essentially, what I prefer to read, well-written
literary books. Of course many of the readers buying any of the books on the
list will be black, but in the overall scheme of things the collective black
purchasing power is limited, as well as dispersed.
Catherine cites as garnering more editorial coverage because
they have white authors, Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English – long-listed during the year
for many literary prizes, and the recent Costa Prize new book award winning
Tiny Sunbirds Far Away by Christie Watson – which was actually published last
March, and has hardly been reviewed at all. If we take the Kelman book, its USP was the shocking murder of the young
school boy Damilola Taylor – which as a nation I don’t think that we will ever
recover from. It is probably for this reason that Waterstones picked up on it, promoting it before it was published. The book is about gang culture and so the London Riots fell into its
promotional path (framed as they were as being about marginalised urban youth & race - most of us knew that there were more complex than that), making it seem more topical than it might otherwise have been.
Yet, Pigeon English is not on this top 100. Published as it was in the smart
more expensive paperback format, with all that promotion (particularly in the
press) isn’t it surprising that it does not make the top 100 in its first year?
It has only just been released in a cheaper paperback format. I was
particularly disappointed that Catherine’s piece failed to acknowledge what a
competitive world the publishing world is – for anyone. Though I do note that the book that has
done tremendously well – is Emma Donoghue’s Room (no 4 on the top seller list.) Just like the Kelman book, it too comes
from a particularly gruesome true story that will live in the collective psyche
for a long-time.
I picked up somewhere recently, that it is not actually
editorial coverage and book reviews in the smart papers such as The Guardian, The Independent or The Sunday Times that sells book. What sells books in the UK is
getting on BBC Radio 4. High profile, often highly and frustratingly parochial,
but as a spoken word radio station, hardly mainstream.
My final point about Catherine’s article relates to the
drama/script writing. I think that when so much of mainstream British TV is
devoted week after week to the pursuit of the untalented, through shows like
the X-Factor. I find it hard to criticise Channel 4 (which is not really a
mainstream TV station) for supporting new drama writing in one of its high
profile evening slots. It seems to me that even where new drama writing exists,
it seems to focus on period pieces – more Downton Abbey anyone? I am sure that
Birdsong (the adaptation of Sebastian’s Faulks’ book) will be great – but it is
still after all another First World War adaptation. As an aside, I reckon that
Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues will be made for TV or filmed before Pigeon
English, simply because it is partially set in World War 2 (and it is also about Jazz.) I actually believe
that Half Blood Blues, with hardly any major newspaper reviews, is a far more successful
book than Pigeon English. It is a better story, well told and it did make the
Booker 2011 shortlist and has won Canada's top literary prize for its
Canadian-Nigerian author. So I guess that I am saying in response to Catherine,
is don’t let what is getting editorial coverage blind you to what is actually
being read and shared by word of mouth.
The other thing that occurs to me about the top 100 list…
not that I actually know about the contents of all the books on the list - but
I am going to state this anyway. It occurs to me, that the only book in the top
40 with black people in it is Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. At number 5 on the
list, it was originally published in the UK in May 2010, and has sold almost
400,000 copies and made just over £2m for the publishers in 2011 (The version
of The Help, that is being calculated here – is the film tie-in edition.) So yes.
Maids. Again. As much as I admire the work of the actresses in the film, and I
know that the wonderful Viola Davis is an Oscar contender, I am however in
conflict with the thought that in 2012, the next black actress with a chance of
winning this major award will have played a maid, over 70 years after Hattie
McDaniels won an Oscar for also portraying a maid in Gone with the Wind. Do let me know if you have come across more positive
black characters in any of the top 40 books on the top UK 2011 book sales list.
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