There is something incontrovertibly sad about remainder bookshops. After all the hype - the big advances, the newspaper serialisation, the interviews, the signings, the readings, the appearance on Radio 4's Midweek or Woman's Hour - even the best of writers can find themselves consigned to cut-price corner.
While, for the book-reading public, remainder stores represent something approaching good value; for the writer, after the gargantuan effort that has gone into the creation of a book, to see it slashed in price from £20 to £4.99 and heaped high alongside copies of Rude Food, Ken Hom's cookery course and cheap art books must be utterly crushing.
At this stage in the day it may be hard to whip up sympathy for Anthea Turner, but Fools Rush In, her recently published autobiography, which was serialised with gusto in the Daily Mail, and followed up on the pages of many other newspapers, looks as though it may be heading for the remainders' shelves sooner than expected.
It emerged last week that Fools Rush In had sold a grand total of 451 copies in its first week and had entered the bestseller chart at number 531. Until now figures have been readily available through BookTrack, which monitors sales for the publishing industry.
But last week, after Turner's poor performance was gleefully picked up by the media, publishers met with BookTrack and an agreement was reached that figures for sales outside the top 100 should not be released in response to ad hoc inquiries. In other words, publishers are quite happy to tell us all about their success stories but are a little less candid about their failures. Of which, of course, there are far, far more.
Turner's publishers Little Brown paid an estimated £400,000 for her story. Last week they must have been watching David Beckham's success enviously as he found himself at the top of the hardback non-fiction bestseller list, shifting 4,726 copies of his glossy autobiography My World, bringing total sales to 15,235.
Likewise Martine McCutcheon's Who Does She Think She Is? was high in the bestseller list at number four, selling 3,375 copies last week (8,051 overall); Terry Wogan's Is It Me? sold 2,823 (24,392 overall), putting him at number eight, and at number nine, Barbara Windsor sold 2,711 (15,289 overall) copies of All of Me.
Such success stories are, however, comparatively rare in the publishing world. According to booksellers Waterstones, about 15% of all books bought by shops are returned to the publishers. In the case of Turner it is likely to be far more, possibly 50%. Many of those are then bought by remainder bookshops who sell them at hugely discounted prices.
On sale at The Works, a leading remainders bookshop in Camden High Street, London, last week were some of the casualties of the publishing industry, some high profile, others less well known.
There was Jeremy Beadle's Watch Out, reduced from £15.99 to £1; The New Alan Titchmarsh was on sale at £4.99, reduced from £16.99 and Norman Lamont's In Office, published amid much excitement last year, was on sale at £4.99, rather less than the original £20.
Getting publishers to talk about their flops is not easy. They are infernally optimistic. Martin Nield, managing director of Hodder & Stoughton, was one of the few prepared to admit to disaster, though for him it was a matter of bad luck rather than poor judgement.
"We published the Will Carling autobiography. Everyone was right behind it. There was a huge serialisation deal in place," Nield explains. It all looked very promising until Carling left his partner Ali Cockayne and their baby son, amid much negative publicity. "It could not have been worse timing. The sales dropped stone dead. Lots went into the book shops, but it hardly sold at all."
More recently, Charlie Dimmock's Enjoy Your Garden failed to match expectation, despite a major serialisation and plenty of hype. Nicholas Clee, editor of the Bookseller, says: "After they had done so well with Jamie Oliver, they thought Charlie Dimmock would do the same thing for gardening, but I'm not sure it was a huge hit."
Dimmock's publisher Michael Joseph admits to being disappointed: "It did extremely well in book clubs, in the real mass market, but it did not do so well in conventional bookshops. But we controlled serial rights, so from a financial point of view we are all right," one insider confesses.
Often serial rights are controlled by the author and her literary agent, which means that all the proceeds from a newspaper serialisation go to them rather than the publisher, as in the case of the Turner book, which was sold for £250,000 to the Daily Mail. Not a penny went to Little Brown. However, the six-figure sum paid by the Mail on Sunday for the Dimmock serialisation went to Michael Joseph, taking the sting out of the expensive advance.
So do newspaper serialisations help to sell books? Sometimes? Always? Or can a major serialisation satisfy the public's interest and destroy sales? "It is a way of alerting the public - a public which does not usually buy books - that this book is out there," says one publisher.
It did not work for the Nick Leeson book, Rogue Trader, also published by Little Brown which paid £450,000 for the story. It did not sell well despite a prominent serialisation in the Daily Mail and all the concurrent hype and publicity.
"You've got to be a national treasure. There has to be a great deal of affection, which is why you can see Terry Wogan working so well, or Dickie Bird," says Hodder's Nield. Leeson hardly fits into the national treasure category either. Likewise Anthea Turner.
"We turned down Anthea Turner," one relieved publisher confessed last week. "It does not surprise me at all that that book has not sold. She's a C-list celebrity who has hardly done anything in her life. She's not glamorous. I'm flabbergasted they paid £400,000. There are some people who fascinate the public, and others who do not. Anthea Turner was absolutely the wrong horse to back."
Alan Samson, editorial director of Turner's publisher, Little Brown, and a veteran of celebrity books (Cher, Whoopi Goldberg and the Spice Girls), sounded as if he were in deep shock last week. He insisted that she had sold far more than 451, but added: "The vilification Anthea has had has definitely had an effect so far in sales, but the book is not lost yet.
But while David Beckham, Terry Wogan, Martine McCutcheon and Barbara Windsor are tramping up and down the country, appearing at bookshops and signing endless copies of their books (apparently it makes good sense to sign as many books as possible as unsold signed copies cannot be returned to publishers, according to Lynda Lee-Potter, who is also on the publicity trail flogging her book Class Act), Turner will be keeping an uncharacteristically low profile. There will be no book signings, no publicity tour, no readings or public appearances.
"At the moment there's no point," says Samson. "Whatever Anthea does at the moment will be turned against her. If she dived into the Thames to save a drowning dog, people would say it's a stunt by her publishers."
There are always going to be books - high-profile or otherwise - that don't sell. Last year 109,000 books were launched in the UK, that's about 2,000 a week on average. Most do not sell. If there is a lesson to be drawn from Turner's disastrous book, it is this - never believe anyone who claims there is no such thing as bad publicity. There clearly is.
And when you are wandering around your local remainders store, fingering sad little piles of Fools Rush In, remember it could be worse. The real disasters are pulped.
