THAT SOUND you hear on the chill summer wind is a chorus of cynical snorts from the nation’s authors. Reports have “revealed” the so-called secret fees paid by publishers to booksellers in order to get books stocked, “chosen” and recommended by the big book chains.

That W H Smith’s “book of the week” title, which attracts you as if it had won a prize, has been bought and paid for. The publisher handed over £50,000. Waterstone’s Book of the Week accolade is £10,000, less for ecstatic mini-reviews. Borders charges for “fiction buyer’s favourite”. Smaller sums buy other levels of prominence; only some local staff “picks” are related to actual content. It is not uncommon for a catalogue to recommend a title warmly before the compiler has even seen it. A pre-Christmas push costs £200,000 and a big campaign double that. One publisher told a newspaper: “We’ve got to play by the rules because we need them.” It is considered suicidal not to join in.

Even though this deal was exposed five years ago by The Sunday Times, it is not well understood by browsers. One said: “I’m shocked . . . you trust bookshops.” Another: “I thought book of the week meant it had, like, sold a lot.” In your dreams, reader. The word “bestseller” is now meaningless (note its use in the ridiculous journalistic sentence “he is writing his new bestseller”) and the book trade has caved in to paying for recommendations. It is considered routine; though you might, it occurs to me, be a bit shocked if your local butcher said one day, “Hey, this is the most fantastic bacon I have ever tasted!” and you then learnt that he’d never tasted it at all, but was paid £100 by the farmer to say so.

I mentioned the cynical groans of authors because they do, in fact, know about this. It is often made clear to them by their publishers that their advance (already long spent) was the least of the expense, and that their months of slogging round festivals and welcoming impertinent journalists to comment on their front room are relatively unimportant. Seventy per cent of promotional budgets go on furtive payments to bookshops. The message to the author is: “Nobody would read you if we didn’t pay, so shut up grumbling.” To the reader the message is: “You are a fool pig, guaranteed to go for the shiniest swill-bucket.” To the newspapers who publish bestseller charts it is simply: “Gotcha!”

Most of these charts cover sales in one particular week, so they favour the fast-selling and heavily displayed. They are no index of pleasure or even real popularity. It is not uncommon for a book to reach high rank one week and live off that glory (“surprise soaraway bestseller for tragic Gwendolen”) when in fact it has shifted fewer hardbacks than another book that never got near the top 20 because it sold more gradually.

Well, so be it. Bookselling is a trade; it is sad but not criminal that it operates like one, cutting deals to maximise profit. It is sad but not surprising that big booksellers do not care that their practices are widening the gulf between hyped authors and the rest, squeezing out new writers and truncating the careers of those who fail to return the publisher’s investment fast enough. They do not care that the literary double-or-quits economy prevents the slower, organic growth of writing careers.

The responsibility spreads wider, though. You would think that, knowing how skewed the trade has become, book page editors would question the status quo as journalists do in every other area. You would think that their mission was to seek out interesting new books while scornfully ignoring hype-fests. There is little evidence of this, except in some odd and praiseworthy corners. Journalists like to feel they are up there with the “buzz”, even if the buzz is largely artificial. Where reviews do diverge from the well-trodden track of the week’s “key” books, it is often only into a cosy circuit of settling old scores, or bigging up friends who will soon return the favour. This is often undeclared, which shocks the strait-laced American media (read the New York Times arts ethical policy online, boys, and hang your heads).

Newspapers and magazines are also magpies, attracted to the glitter of the young, the pretty, the well-connected, the celebrity. If Keira Knightley publishes a novel tomorrow it will not go short of attention, while if a new Orwell or Greene emerges from the ranks he may fall back unnoticed. There are some flukes, but even notable “word of mouth” successes often turn out to be no such thing. And the moment an unhyped book starts to move, the big chains will be on to the publisher with display offers they dare not refuse. All success becomes a commodity.

If books matter, if they are to remain different from packets of detergent, the ball is in the publishers’ court. Publishers, after all, still like to think of themselves as midwives to ideas and patrons of beauty. They do not want to be just another consumer trade. They still trail clouds of glory (albeit apologetically, tucked discreetly under the jacket during sales conferences). So publishers have got to find new ways to inform and fascinate the public. Perhaps they need to bring out fewer books, more carefully; certainly they need to expand publicity departments and work out ever craftier ways to use the internet and other media. Maybe they should club together for a national speech or TV network and do readings all day, every house having an hour to showcase the books it really rates. Maybe Amazon and downloadable e-books will finally give the high street a bloody nose.

But two things are clear: somebody has to care about books, and bookshops must be made honest. They should, in however small a font, admit exactly how much it cost Lorelei Loosegusset’s publishers to have her labelled a favourite.

Read recent column by Libby Purves here

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