Are publishers getting increasingly desperate for bestsellers? A recent Hugh Howey post I discussed suggests just that–and a Sydney Morning Herold story about the way Big Five publisher Penguin handled a recent literary scandal seems to provide supporting evidence.
The scandal centers around a cookbook by Belle Gibson, who claimed to have cured herself dietetically of terminal brain cancer, based on her “The Whole Pantry” mobile app. The claims were subsequently determined to have been entirely fraudulent. Gibson has since experienced considerable public backlash, up to and including having personal details about her posted online.
The article notes that Penguin knew about discrepancies in the story behind the book five months before it was ever published, but went right ahead with it anyway–and its first move after publishing it was to hire a PR agency to determine ways to deflect any potential claims Gibson might be lying.
Penguin ended up recalling and pulping the book, for which it paid Gibson a $130,000 advance. (As this is an Australian news source, it’s not clear whether that is US or Australian dollars; if it’s Austrailian, that converts to just under $99,000 US–still a lot of money.) Penguin reportedly paid $15,000 to a home economist to help develop recipes for the book, and is also paying a $30,000 fine for its part in the deception. All things considered, it’s clear Penguin did a terrible job fact-checking the book; the attempt to deflect concerns about it with PR is just the icing on the cake.
Why didn’t Penguin pay closer attention? Could it be that it simply wanted a hit book, and the story sounded good enough that it was willing to stick its fingers in its ears and willfully disregard any possibility that it could be false? How else could a multi-billion-dollar publisher let itself be so completely taken in by a story that clearly had considerable discrepancies?
Of course, there have been plenty of publishing scandals centering around poorly-fact-checked books through the years. That there should be another one is nothing new. But when you consider how book sales have been falling lately, and it’s only the fad for adult coloring books that masks the true extent of the decline, any case where a publisher is so easily and willingly fooled starts to look less like an innocent error of judgment and more like sheer desperation.
teleread.org 
Quote: “Are publishers getting increasingly desperate for bestsellers?”
Increasingly? Maybe not. Look back and you’ll discover numerous other examples. (JFK won a Pulitzer for a book he didn’t write.) If they think it’ll sell, they’d be tempeted to publish it. Only an exceptionally booming market is likely to deter them, and in publishing, boom times are rare.
I also doubt a book on curing brain cancer by diet would become a bestseller. There just aren’t that many potential customers. The readers would be those with brain cancer for which all other treatments have failed. Here are the statistics:
http://www.abta.org/about-us/news/brain-tumor-statistics/
True, brain cancer recently passed leukemia as the leading killer of children and teens. But that’s because cure rates for leukemia have improved dramatically. When I cared for kids with leukemia, the five-year-survival rate for the most common form, ALL, was 70%. Now it is an amazing 90%. That’s incredible for a cancer that, until the late 1960s was considered a death sentence. Learning to treat childhood leukemia taught medicine how to treat a host of other cancers.
–Michael W. Perry, author of My Nights with Leukemia
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