Badge Books Blog

Don't blame Harry Potter for writers' low profile

Some authors may be getting sadly neglected by their publishers, but it's not JK Rowling's fault

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Defector? Joanna Trollope. Photograph: Peter Dench/Corbis

It used to be said that Penguin was the only publisher who could be named by the man in the street. Now Bloomsbury, thanks to a certain Master Potter, has also entered the popular consciousness. At least the Telegraph thinks so - making a big fuss about how Joanna Trollope has "defected" from the company, and claiming that other authors are upset by the "obsession" with J.K. Rowling.

Trollope's move is easily explained by the fact that her longstanding editor Liz Calder is stepping down from the Bloomsbury board. Her relationship with Calder was the only reason that the author continued with the archaic practice of having separate hardback and paperback publishers.

But it seems a strange time for the wider criticisms to emerge. After a decade of global domination, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel is behind Bloomsbury. Even if JK does decide to resurrect her hero, it won't be for several years, and spin-offs such as the official HP encyclopedia are hardly enough to preoccupy an entire company. In fact, this could prove a great time for a favoured author to be at Bloomsbury, which needs a stream of bestsellers to plug the post-Potter gap (the company's total sales have risen from £50m in 2000 to £150m in 2007).

They've already found one such sensation in the shape of Khaled Hosseini, whose A Thousand Splendid Suns is the second bestselling book of 2008 so far (behind the new Delia Smith); recently they've generated real momentum for Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. There are renowned editors and marketeers at Bloomsbury's Soho Square HQ who have never had anything to do with Harry, which was largely handled by the children's books team and the senior management.

That's not to say that the company culture isn't changing. To plan for the post-Potter era, co-founder Nigel Newton has bought in Richard Charkin, the acerbic former boss of science and educational publishing group Macmillan. He'll bring a dispassionate eye to the often overblown and inherently risky world of general books.

The winner-takes-all nature of today's industry means that marketing money is being concentrated on a handful of "lead titles" each month, and plenty of publishers are quietly shelving authors they perceive as irredeemably unprofitable. So spill a glass of wine at a launch party and you'll almost certainly soak a disgruntled writer.

But presumably some of these Bloomsbury grumblers were only too delighted to join the publisher at the height of the Potter years, when it had something of a reputation for paying over the odds in rights auctions - much to the annoyance of rival editors. They could always pay back their six or seven-figure cheques and move on.

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