Celebrity biography, Bush-bashing and cookery books are on their way out; 1980s blockbusters are going to make a comeback. Toby Mundy predicts what will and won't be hot in 2005
At the turn of the 20th century, the philosopher George Santayana wrote: "Fashion produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit." Although the same might be said of British publishing in the 21st century, it is still possible to hazard some guesses as to what will and won't be hot in 2005.
The past year has been dominated by Dan Brown. The stupendous success of The Da Vinci Code has catapulted his other novels - Angels and Demons, Deception Point and Digital Fortress - up the bestseller charts and made a packet for Corgi, his British publisher. Otherwise, the usual suspects have dominated the fiction charts: Martina Cole, Patricia Cornwell, Terry Pratchett, Maeve Binchy, Ben Elton, Ian Rankin, Sue Townsend. Over the past
12 months, Lynne Truss's surprise bestseller of last Christmas, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, has continued to roll off the shelves, as have books by trusty favourites such as Michael Palin, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver. Jostling them has been a spate of celebrity biographies: by Sheila Hancock, Joanna Lumley, Paul Gascoigne and Katie Price, whose Being Jordan, acquired by Blake Publishing for a snip, has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
In order to begin making predictions for the coming year, two questions are necessary. First, will a new genre suddenly appear and take the publishing world by storm (previous examples here include Longitude, Bridget Jones's Diary and Schott's Miscellany)? Second, what will be the trends in more established categories, such as the thriller?
Literary genres ebb and flow: most British publishers today would run a mile from "chick lit" (although their American counterparts, as usual five years behind, would froth with excitement at any book describing the adventures of a young, single metropolitan woman lost in a sea of booze and brand names). Similarly, publishers seem to be observing a moratorium on books with the words "brains", "minds", "genes" or "consciousness" in their titles, a development that has stopped popular science in its tracks (although, frankly, popular science was never that popular anyway). And after a run of nearly a decade, it seems that every conceivable micro-history, be it of cod, gunpowder or dust, has been written.
If the public is no longer interested in books with titles such as Compost: the story of the mulch that fertilised the world, it has also turned against the 1,001 volumes of amusing lists that followed in the wake of Schott's Original Miscellany. The year after Schott's appeared, publishers glutted the market with books of quirky knowledge - much as they had showered booksellers with "little books" of everything a few years earlier. Despite this, I have a suspicion that Schott's might provide the template for reference book publishing in the post-internet age.
Some types of non-fiction publishing are more durable: biography is still going strong, although the craze for celebrity biography, at the height of which anyone who had appeared on television received a decent advance for his or her memoirs, mercifully seems to have been halted by the advent of magazines such as Heat.
In 2005, it seems likely that works of non-fiction which use devices borrowed from fiction and documentary film-making will have even more success. I am thinking of books such as Anna Funder's marvellous Stasiland, James Fergusson's Kandahar Cockney or Tom Holland's Rubicon. It is hard to imagine quite so many cookery books being published, or that there can be many more Bush-bashing books. Michael Moore may continue to thrive, but other Dubbya-haters will, I suspect, fall away. This year's quiet renaissance in humour will probably continue.
It is still the case that people turn to books to make sense of the world, and that publishing is increasingly responsive to the news agenda. So we should expect to see more books on the world's future flashpoints, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.
My hunch, however, is that the biggest excitement next year will come from fiction. For the literary novel, 2005 may well prove to be the year that British readers finally turn away from America and open their eyes to the rest of the world. Book buyers can expect to hear startlingly fresh literary voices from countries as diverse as Thailand, Poland and Tahiti. We should also see the return of the espionage thriller - a genre officially declared dead at the end of the cold war, but resurrected by the war on terror.
We may also witness the return of an old favourite: the long, escapist, mass-market female novel that hums with sex and glamour - the 1980s blockbuster with an ironic, 21st-century twist. Her name may sound just too much like "Jilly", but my bet is that Tilly Bagshawe's racy and extremely long Adored (published by Orion) will lead the field.
Toby Mundy is managing director and publisher of Atlantic Books
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