![\"sales-1960x500\"](\"http:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/sales-1960x500-1024x261.jpg\")
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Increasingly, celebrities and YouTube stars are getting lucrative book deals across the world. Think of any famous teenager and, more likely than not, they have a book out or in the works. Zoe Sugg, a YouTube celebrity, had the fastest-selling book of 2014 with Girl Online, <\/em>which also spent some time on the New York Times bestsellers list.<\/p>\n Some see this as a threat to \u201cgreat literature\u201d and sophisticated art in general. How are booksellers meant to react to this trend? Are they to pay more attention to skilled debut novelists, or the latest\u2019s works by famous YouTubers? The opinions across the book publishing world are divided.<\/p>\n According to Jon Riley, the editor-in-chief at Quercus imprint riverrun (in an interview with Publishing Perspectives), \u201cthe market is so competitive that literary titles have to compensate for the attention of sales, marketing, publicity people-and a pre-publication response from a limited number of retailers-with the most obviously commercial fiction and nonfiction titles\u201d. In other words, it\u2019s almost like classical music making way to pop. Yet, not everyone sees it this way.<\/p>\n Simon Prosser, editorial director of Penguin Random House\u2019s Hamish Hamilton (in an interview with Publishing Perspectives), thinks that it\u2019s \u201ca great time for literary fiction\u201d, as \u201cpublishing and bookselling together form a highly mixed ecosystem\u201d. He dismisses worries about celebrities, as he believes that \u201cthey have been given book deals pretty much since the dawn of commercial publishing\u201d, without negative repercussions on the quality of books across the publishing world.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a third side to the debate as well: the pragmatic side. Suzie Door\u00e9, publishing director at HarperCollins\u2019s literary imprint, Borough Press (in an interview with Publishing Perspectives), says that she thinks \u201cthere\u2019s room for everyone. I feel quite \u2018live and let live\u2019 about it. If enough people want to read a novel by a celebrity, then it\u2019s a good business decision to publish it. I don\u2019t believe it takes shelf space away from literary fiction. They are different areas of the market.\u201d<\/p>\n This approach seems to make a lot of sense. There has always been demand for books by celebrities, and some have even been positively received by critics at large (like Girl Online, <\/em>for that matter). Their existence doesn\u2019t really threaten traditional books by \u201cserious\u201d authors, as readers aren\u2019t likely to abandon them altogether.<\/p>\n Source: \u201cLiterary Debate: Commercial Success vs. Artistic Value\u201d, Roger Tagholm, Publishing Perspective, Spring 2017, p.15<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Increasingly, celebrities and YouTube stars are getting lucrative book …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5712,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1926,1925],"tags":[1993,1992,1994,1708],"class_list":["post-5709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adults","category-articles","tag-celebrities","tag-commercial-success","tag-youtubers","tag-zoe-sugg","cat_1926","cat_1925"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5713,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5709\/revisions\/5713"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}