Congestion on the road less travelled

Apparently, in the recent film version of Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker is seen reading a book called Love Letters of Great Men. This has provoked thousands of enquiries in bookshops, us included. The book, however, does not actually exist as anything more than a prop.

Or at least it didn't. Macmillan have announced that they will be rushing into print a book with that very title.

I suppose it could be argued that now hundreds of people will be delving into belles-lettres who wouldn't otherwise and that one shouldn't dismiss this as an opportunist piece of marketing designed to extract money from people who wouldn't recognise a well-turned romantic entreaty even if borne on the paws of a bear from Clintons with a heart on its tummy.

But I think cynicism is the correct response here. I'm reminded of when, a few years ago, Geri Halliwell was photographed reading Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck. Within days sales of the book had multiplied tenfold; sales of The Road Less Travelled, which would make reading the book Halliwell was snapped with make sense - in as much as that sort of woolly gibberish makes any sense at all - remained unaffected. So I think to describe people as sheep in such circumstances would be insulting to the ovine race.

Perhaps the publishing industry should employ the idols of the Heat magazine demographic to be seen in public reading books. It would be interesting to see how far one could push it. Ulysses? The Divine Comedy? The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine?

Of course it's wonderful that Richard and Judy can get thousands of people reading The Outcast or Cloud Atlas and that Oprah can push Anna Karenina to the top of the charts. But publishers have remarked, in the UK at least, that it doesn't help sales of many authors' other books very much. The fabled Richard & Judy 'bounce' is, if not a myth, a remarkable feat of marketing. Dorothy Koomson, Simon Kernick and 'Sam Bourne' (Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland's pseudonym for his sub-Da Vinci Code thrillers) have been almost as successful with subsequent books, but they are very much the exception.

Mind you, this difficulty of branding authors exists at the literary end of the scale too. Almost every Booker winner is disappointed to discover that their backlist doesn't really shift any more copies and indeed one got his publisher to rejacket his backlist three times, convinced that was the key. It wasn't, of course. But I suppose most readers even of a Booker Prize winner are more casual readers, who don't really seek out new authors, and they're just as likely to be led by what's hot as as any other sector of the market.

I remember just after I'd started out as a bookseller, a book entitled 'Flying Fishing by J R Hartley' was produced on the back of the rather endearing if a little overmilked TV ad for Yellow Pages in which a genial gentleman of advancing years was seen to phone around second-hand bookshops in search of that very book, of which it transpired he was the author. So inevitably it wasn't long before one gurning little twerp of a teenager came into the shop and, to show how his mate how terribly, terribly funny and clever he was, asked for Flying Fishing by J R Hartley. I reached over to a nearby display and presented him with a copy and will forever take great pleasure in his look of confusion and disappointment as he turned and skulked out of the shop, leaving his friend standing there, blinking mutely.

Another point to the booksellers there, I think. I'm sure we must be well ahead by now.