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Hype has become to publishing what global warming is to the polar icecap.

27 January 2002

'Hype has become to publishing what global warming is to the polar icecap. The damage to the cultural ecology is hard to quantify but pervasive. It affects the way literary agents offer books, the way editors acquire them, the way sales people promote them and, finally, the way newspapers at the end of the hype cycle respond...

'The publisher has to hype his or her wares, moreover, because the book trade has become indifferent to books sold in any other way. Fed on a high-fat diet of inflated expectations, increasingly desperate for sales, all the book trade wants is 'the next Tom Wolfe'. All the trade statistics of the past decade show that while volume has risen, this volume increase has been achieved from fewer and fewer titles'.

Robert McCrum in the Observer