This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Evidence of the old-style book world’s incremental retreat from the Olympus it once occupied to a fraught subsidiary crag continues to pile up like windfall apples on the orchard floor. Only the other day the Secret Author was stopped in the street by one of his neighbours and asked to explain the mystery of that week’s Sunday Times bestseller charts.
Why was it, the neighbour demanded, that the same names recurred up and down the fiction lists and that he hadn’t heard of any of them? Had they been reviewed anywhere, and what had the critics thought of them? It was left to the Secret Author to explain that this was an example of BookTok working its fatal magic, and that an online buzz is sufficient to propel all kinds of unvetted talents into the public eye.
Item number two came in a Substack piece by the author and publisher Sam Jordison, which drew his readers’ attention to the judging panel for this year’s British Book Awards, otherwise known as the Nibbies. Mr Jordison, who has featured in this column before, runs the estimable Galley Beggar Press with his wife Eloise Millar and is a thoroughly good egg.
And who had been chosen to cast an expert eye over the achievements of UK publishing here at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century? Well, our chair was Dame Prue Leith. Others featured at the top of the press release were Yulia Navalnaya, Oti Mabuse, Ardal O’Hanlon and Jamie Smart.
That is, respectively, a restaurateur, a human rights activist, a dancer, a comedian and a comic artist. Further down the release came mention of Janet Ellis (Blue Peter) and finally a reference to “authors Raksha Dave, Laura Mucha and Abir Mukherjee”.
Philip Jones, editor of the Bookseller and chair of the judging panel, remarked that he was “delighted” to be presiding over an assembly that “brings all the talents together” — an altogether extraordinary statement which Mr Jones, who is an intelligent man, can’t possibly believe and can only have assented to after a good going-over by the PR team.
Sam Jordison was understandably cross about this, for what we have here is yet another illustration of how lightly books are regarded by the people charged with promoting them.
No disrespect to Ms Mabuse, a lively performer on Strictly Come Dancing and no doubt an habitué of the Waterstones bestseller tables, but if she is considered qualified to judge the 2026 British Book Awards then why can’t Kazuo Ishiguro be invited onto Match of the Day to give his views on Manchester United’s back four in place of Alan Shearer?
It could possibly be argued that the very existence of the Nibbies and the hoo-ha that surrounds it is an example of an industry taking itself seriously.
The tiny contingent of remaining literary editors are the heroes of the modern literary age
In fact, the reverse is the case, and the spectacle of Dame Prue marshalling her panellists is actually a measure of how the world of books doesn’t take itself seriously enough.
If it did, it wouldn’t trivialise and sensationalise publishing and condescend to the people who pay its wages by buying its products. All of which reminded the Secret Author of some remarks dropped by the late Martin Amis about 15 years ago, just as all the digital horror was beginning to make its presence felt.
Amis (b. 1949) had cut his teeth in a world where books had occupied a fairly modest place in the media pantheon, left to the comparative obscurity of the books pages and rarely hitting centre stage. In his thirties, on the other hand, he had been able to take advantage of the tidal wave of money and publicity that transformed the 80s-era publishing industry and put bestselling writers onto the covers of the colour magazines and into gossip columns previously restricted to showbiz.
Now that tide seemed to be receding, leaving Amis — if not the rest of us — unfazed. He had had his moment in the sun, he deposed, and was happy to return to the margins.
A decade and a half later, the attention paid to proper books — rather than the items Dame Prue and her crew exclaim about — continues to diminish.
In this fraught and devitalising atmosphere, where are our saviours?
Well, the people keeping the book world going these days, apart from a handful of old-style publishers, are the tiny contingent of literary editors who still retain their jobs.
Robbie Millen at The Times; Cal Revely-Calder at the Telegraph; Sam Leith at the Spectator; Nancy Sladek at the Literary Review — these are the heroes of the modern literary age, the savants determined to make space for promising first novels from independents, rather than buxom bestsellers sponsored by Penguin Random House.
When he began his career, the Secret Author thought that literary editors were the enemy — hidebound, cavalier and obstructive. Many years later he regards them as one of the very few positive forces left in the industry. They will all be highly amused by this year’s British Book Awards.
