The one prediction I made about books and publishing at the start of the noughties turned out to be spectacularly off. I was absolutely certain that the debut novel on which I was then working – an elegiac, meditative piece about a lethargic, unexceptional man in which nothing really happened and nobody really did anything – would charm the bestseller lists, seduce the awards judges and lay waste to the metaphorical virtue of a planetary readership.

Then again, I was wrong about a lot of things. I would never have dreamed, for instance, that "misery lit" memoirs would find such a rapacious, enormous audience of ghouls and dupes prepared to pay for the doubtful pleasure of wallowing in another person's (often invented) pain. I couldn't have foreseen that a cheap, derivative thriller from a nondescript hack called Dan Brown, which read like it had been dictated by a hyperactive child recounting a Scooby Doo plot, would sell 80m copies and spawn an entire industry.

I certainly didn't predict the plague of celebrity fiction deals, TV spin-offs, collections of miscellany with initially amusing but quickly annoying names, Mormon vampire novels for kids, non-Mormon vampire novels for kids, bad crime fiction, worse crime fiction, John Banville's crime fiction, electronic readers, self-referential networks of literary blogs, the publishing industry going into meltdown, and books with very long titles in which the hero is a child with uncommon perspicacity and emotional sensitivity.

Buy hey, when you fall off the horse, what do you do? That's right, you get back on. So here are my predictions of what lies ahead for books and publishing in the teenies, or whatever we're calling these next 10 years:
 
2011: Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan jump on the aforementioned teen horror bandwagon by co-authoring the Zoroaster Loveblood series, about a mopey, overweight Burnley schoolgirl with a memorable and appropriate but not totally plausible name, whose life is turned inside out when she's bitten by a zombified radioactive vampire spider from a parallel dimension. Creative differences will soon send them to Splitsville; Ian will eventually resurface with Loveblood's Flood Mud Pud, a teen horror-environmentalism-gardening-cookery crossover.

2012: The invention of self-aware e-books that only allow you to read Katie Price's latest fictional masterpiece or Volume XII of hagiographic epic Simon Cowell: the Man, the Magic, the Inexplicable Johnny Unitas Haircut, and threaten to send Sellafield into meltdown if you politely refuse and ask if it wouldn't be possible at all to get that new William Gibson one instead. Gizmo possibly to be called The Brain Drainer.

2015: A tear-soaked Martin Amis shocks the world on the last ever Oprah by admitting that his many works of lauded fiction were in fact written by a parakeet called Jobie, using its bill to hammer away at the keys while under the influence of absinthe, caffeine pills and four different kinds of non-prescription cough syrup. He then claims that the "Martin Amis" featured in his non-fiction doesn't exist, but is an illusory construct devised by a different parakeet called Mr Chuckles. A confused Oprah manages to ascertain that Amis's teeth, at least, are real.

2017: The ghost of Robert Ludlum gives a charming, self-deprecating speech, via video-link from heaven, on receiving the Silver Bullet Award at the annual ThrillerFest ceremony for The Bourne Infinitum, the 17th book in a series of post-mortem potboilers, ironically ghost-written by Eric Van Lustbader. Unfortunately his speech is cut short when a drunken Norman Mailer staggers into view and begins berating God for the "shitty" quality of champagne in his celestial mini-bar.

2019: After the runaway success of the first text message novel (in its entirety: 'LOL J WHERE U NOW GR8 CU DEN ROTFL ;) DE ND'), most of the major publishing houses just give up and quit actually producing books at all, instead diversifying into cottage cheese making, cyber-architectural endware solution provision, toilet seat manufacture, and the brokering of sales of chemical weapons on the global market for a reasonable commission, not including administrative fees and other sundry expenses.
 
What's your literary sixth sense telling you? What annoying, ridiculous and scarcely believable developments will strip bibliophiles of their last remaining shreds of faith in mankind between now and 2020? Do let us know …