Time was when popularity was the mark of artistic failure. David Shepherd’s painting Elephant was dismissed as art because so many people bought it; Tretchikoff’s ubiquitous print The Chinese Girl appalled art critics. Paganini filled concert halls too easily. Dickens always lingered as a slightly dubious figure in the ranks of fame, as did Tennyson. If the common man likes it, the theory went, it can’t be any good.
 
These days it’s the other way round. ‘Bestseller’ betokens artistic success. It is the publishers’ ultimate accolade. If enough others like it, the suggestion is, so will you. Popularity becomes the measuring stick. A ‘good’ book is, by inference, an easy book. A ‘good’ book is one which sells.
 
Today’s famous writers are not the enigmatic Nabokov or the mysterious Kafka but Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling. Their pictures are on the jacket: their life histories known by all. Their function is to make money for their publishers. And this is bad for ‘serious’ writers, who have something more complex to say about the state of the world, and also for those publishers who play safe and will only publish if a profit is assured. But when it comes to public taste nothing is assured. ‘Bestselling’ should not be an accolade so much as a warning.
 
Today, the danger for writers who continue to aspire to ‘good’ in the old sense is that they won’t get published at all, or if they are, it will be with miserable print runs. The synopses they must contrive and have approved before they begin a commissioned book will please the marketing rather than the editorial department of their publisher. Caution is the death of creativity. The field of biography narrows because authors are told to steer clear of unsung heroes and stick to household names. Children’s writers must stick to their age groups, fiction writers to their accustomed themes. That way profit lies. Our area of interest shrinks with our vocabulary. Life gets dull for the writer and the reader. Dull does not sell, and never has.
 
Noticeable, and dangerous, that the Christmas books splashed over the Underground this year were spin-offs from TV series, not original work by recognised writers. This should make everyone involved uneasy: an admission that TV rules; the printed word is subsidiary. And did the marketing department get it right anyway? This year’s PLR figures reveal that many writers get more from library borrowing than from actual sales – which might suggest some serious flaws in selling strategy overall. Money – perhaps, oh, sacrilege – is being spent on promoting the wrong books.
 
A terrible sense of inconsequence hangs over today’s publishing houses. From outside it seems as if they act on whim. The culture of the group prevails: individual decision is discouraged, committee rules apply. It can be thumbs down for some splendid book on an unfashionable theme – babies were in last year, not now – or if the author is not photogenic, or is too posh, or for a variety of reasons which weigh heavily with marketing people, no matter how enthusiastic editors are. Chain booksellers are rumoured to control everything, even down to the jacket illustration, which may fail to reflect the contents of the book, but never mind: a book with that typeface bestsold last year. They too must be placated. Submitted manuscripts get stuck in-house for years while internal departments fight it out: by the time the decision is reached the book’s old hat. The rejection letter comes in the form of a rave review followed by ‘However, not for us.’ No one wants to offend, everyone wants to be liked.
 
The danger for publishers who ignore their dignified middle market is that they get their fingers burned running after trashy bestsellers that then do not sell. As with films, vast sums can be spent on duds. What’s happened in the visual media shows signs of happening in the book world too. As the sequels and prequels take over – if they liked that one, surely they’ll like this one too – the creative imagination withers. It’s already happened in TV drama, which is a pitiful version of what it once was. Audiences fall and the young stick iPods in their ears and look away. They’ve seen it all before: nothing new happens. The bad coin would be fine – and at first it’s fun, often enjoyable – but then it ousts what’s good and what’s new. For every sorry Dan Brown lookalike on the shelves of W.H. Smith, a good book has been turned down.
 
The advent of the Booker was oddly pernicious in the public perception of what the writer does for a living. In the view of schoolchildren – or so I deduced when sent to talk to them – the writer’s aim could only be to write bestsellers and so become rich and famous. Adults had a vague idea there might be more to it than that – even that, like Shakespeare, writers tried to reflect on the human condition and so improve it, and weren’t primarily concerned about money, other than that they had to live. But then with the Booker, the Whitbread, and others, a simpler concept arose – that the aim of the literary writer was to win the Prize. The pursuit of excellence was yesterday’s preoccupation: the writer’s skill now lay in how he or she conducted the race to the finish, the race to celebrity. The camera fixed on six faces, and then whipped the cheque away from all but one of them – there was a novel in itself.
 
Perhaps if the newspapers could be persuaded not to publish the bestseller lists, we would be better off. In the meantime we must try not to be envious of the undeserving but successful. We were all golden lads and lasses in our time, it’s just the sun now shines from another and rather puzzling direction.