Big Books across Markets: From Bestsellers to Celebrity Authorship

My current book project examines the significance of contemporary science and speculative fictions to ideas about economic freedom and concepts of collective economic living. What work precisely do these fictions accomplish in these areas of knowledge? How do their forms, narrative techniques, rhetorics and discourses, as well as cultural functions and institutions relate to them? As the...

Beginning in the 1950s, the American market for cookbooks was transformed from one with a small number of all-purpose cookbooks to one overflowing with cookbooks competing for space on bestseller lists. In order to fulfill the demand for unique and inventive cookbooks, publishers began to buy the rights to community cookbooks: self-published fundraising cookbooks by women’s associations....

She calls herself a “Professional Make Believer”: Colleen Hoover, best-selling author and literary phenomenon, is storming the best-seller lists world-wide. Hoover does not like “to be confined to one genre”, and her books are published as romance, YA, thriller, women’s fiction and paranormal romance, among others. Having achieved great success with self-publishing her first series, Hoover...

In our Cambridge Element, The Frankfurt Book Fair and Bestseller Business (2020), we theorised buzz as existing in “hard” and “soft” forms. Hard buzz, we argued, occurs in market-ready reports in the mainstream media. Soft buzz, on the other hand, exists in the form of partial, lived experience, frequently generated at convivial events. Movement between these two buzz states - for example...

While the US Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia legalized interracial marriage in 1967, it was only in the 1990s that one could witness a broad paradigm shift toward the cultural legitimization of interracial kinship. Part of this cultural shift was the emergence of numerous autobiographical bestsellers that focused on experiences of interracial family life, ranging from James...

The Age of the Influencer has had a significant impact on the publishing industry, from the ubiquity of Bookstagram and BookTok, to celebrity book stylists and influencer book deals. The influencer book deal has become an established phenomenon, often accompanied by handsome advances and elaborate publicity campaigns. However, as Julie McCarron and Michele Matrisciani point out in the...

What makes a memoir move across languages and markets? More particularly, how does an English-language memoir become a bestseller in the German market? In this presentation we begin to parse out the different roles played by publishers and readers in producing bestselling memoirs in Germany by focussing on some recent high-volume sellers. Some, like Prince Harry’s Spare (Random House 2023) and...