The holy trinity of publishing: Richard and Judy with JK Rowling (left). Photograph: Ian West/PA
The news could have been worse. Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan might have brought their book club - vying with Harry Potter as the most important driver of book sales over the past few years - to an end. Instead, they have taken it to a channel that attracts around 1% of the viewing population.
Richard and Judy revealed at the end of 2007 that they were to quit their Channel 4 chat show, but hinted they would continue to present their Book Club on the network. Now they have announced that they are taking the show and the book club to UKTV. On Channel 4, they broadcast to audiences of around two million people. On UKTV, that figure is likely to be quartered, at least.
The implications for the book industry are worrying. In 2007, three of the four best selling novels in the UK were Book Club selections. They were The House at Riverton by Kate Morton (574,000 copies sold), The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards (702,000 copies), and The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld (819,000 copies). The odd one out was none other than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Book Club picks occupied 10 of the top 50 places. Richard and Judy generated 8% of the sales of the top 5,000 paperbacks.
The Interpretation of Murder offers an interesting case study. Rubenfeld's novel won big advances from publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. But it flopped in the US, where articles were written on what had gone wrong. Headline's hardback edition made only a modest impression. Then Richard and Judy came along.
At the recent British Book Awards, author after author got up on stage to pay tribute to Richard and Judy and their "magic wand". This was not simply sycophancy towards the hosts of the evening. The authors meant it. The Book Club has transformed careers.
Not everyone loves the club, though. If you are an author who does not get selected, and who has a new title out when the Book Club or Summer Reads are dominating the display spaces in bookshops, you are likely to feel a chill. The Richard & Judy effect has heightened a trend that was already apparent in the book market: towards a greater concentration of promotional efforts behind fewer titles. The result is that the gap between the sales of these titles and the also-rans is growing. From the top 5,000 sellers of 2007, just 37 titles generated half the revenue.
So perhaps Richard and Judy's move will offer fairer opportunities to more authors. But it would be rash to make predictions. When they introduced their club, some observers - I was one of them - made the doubtless snobbish assumption that a daytime chat show would exert little influence over buyers of books. Who knows, maybe the Richard and Judy effect may be powerful enough to overturn our assumptions about satellite TV as well.
