I understood that if I was going to do it, I would have to put 100% of myself into it,” says Richard Osman about writing his debut crime novel The Thursday Murder Club, which was an immediate bestseller when it was published in 2020. He had attempted a novel before, but “I wasn’t giving it everything, I had too much on. And this was the first time where I thought: No, I’m able to focus on this for a couple of years now.” Osman’s agent, Juliet Mushens, adds: “He told me he was working on a novel, but he didn’t want to show it to anyone until he finished the whole thing.” When he did, “we did a couple of drafts and submitted it to publishers”. The rest is history: since The Thursday Murder Club was released, Osman has published three further novels and sold more than 10m books worldwide.
He is the most successful example of a phenomenon that is more prominent than ever: the celebrity novelist. Of course, famous people have written novels for decades – from Alan Titchmarsh to Ben Elton. And the children’s market has become saturated with celebrities, including David Walliams, Geri Halliwell-Horner, Paul McCartney and Jamie Oliver. But sales of adult fiction by celebrities have remained relatively low, until recently. According to Nielsen BookScan data, in 2018 the Top 100 paperback fiction bestsellers contained just one title by a celebrity author – Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks – with none in the Top 20. In 2023, the picture changed dramatically: eight of the top 100 bestselling paperback fiction books, and five of the top 20, were by celebrities – including books by Bob Mortimer, Richard Coles and Dolly Parton. Osman’s exceptional success has seen an army of celebrity novelists follow in his wake.
Opinion is divided on the phenomenon: some argue that a rising tide lifts all ships, so increased sales of novels by celebrities attracts readers to other books, too. Others believe that celebrity novels steal the oxygen of publicity from writers who don’t have another career to fall back on. I spoke to publishers, agents and writers – celebrity and otherwise – to find out more about the growth of this very modern trend, and where it might go next.
The first point of dispute is whether we should use the label “celebrity novelist” at all. “It’s a bit of a pejorative,” says literary agent Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown, suggesting, he says, that “they’re not serious writers, it’s a bit of merchandise. They have a line of shoes, they have a podcast, and they have a book out.” Broadcaster and journalist Lorraine Kelly, whose debut novel will be published in February, agrees. “I’d rather just ‘novelist’, to be honest.” Non-celebrity novelist Stephanie Merritt, who writes as SJ Parris, dislikes hearing it for different reasons. “My heart sinks. I’m not alone in feeling a degree of resentment at the investment that gets made into famous names.”
“It’s something I find a bit frustrating,” says Mushens, “because I don’t think anyone would describe Stephen Fry as a celebrity novelist, would they?” That is probably true, even though Fry was an actor and comedian before publishing his debut novel, The Liar, in 1991. Many of today’s celebrity novelists were writers of another kind before turning to fiction. Bob Mortimer and Dawn French are comedians, and Osman was a writer and script editor for TV. Osman says that for people like these, “it would be surprising if they didn’t write books. If you write and you read, there comes a point where you have to write a book, otherwise something else is going to erupt out of you.” Geller agrees: “It’s got to be an obsession.”
But not all celebrity novelists are known for writing, nor do they always have books erupting from them. “The way the industry works is that we jump on bandwagons,” says Phoebe Morgan, publishing director for commercial fiction at Hodder & Stoughton, who publishes Graham Norton and Sara Cox. “If you get someone like Osman breaking out, everybody else tries to replicate that kind of success.”
This is not surprising: publishing is competing with other forms of entertainment in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, and an author with existing name recognition is a tempting prospect. The rise of TikTok as a book promotion tool means, says Geller, that publishers “can actually look at which people are trending, what themes people are reading, and can monetise that”.
“There’s no question,” adds Geller, “that publishers are looking for people with platforms; they’re bringing a ready-made audience.” His agency, Curtis Brown, “has a big talent and presenters department, [and] we’d get emails every week saying, ‘Would so-and-so write a novel?’” Morgan confirms that it usually happens this way around: publishers approach celebrities. (Osman, who wrote his book before approaching an agent, seems to be an outlier.) But they’re not looking for just any celebrity. “They like the idea of national treasures,” Geller says, “because people identify with them.”
One who surely fits this mould is Lorraine Kelly. “Yes, we were approached,” she says, “but I was so excited about the fact that it was Maeve [Binchy]’s publisher!” Kelly’s novel, The Island Swimmer, set in Orkney, is described by her publisher, Orion, as “an emotional novel about community, grief, connection and hope”. Once the deal was agreed, however, “they left me to it”. Kelly had to “carve out chunks of time” to write her book, because “writing is a full-time job, and I already have a full-time job”.
But there is another kind of celebrity novel that is different from those by Osman or Kelly or others mentioned above: the ghostwritten novel, where a famous name, who may contribute ideas for a story or character or other elements, will work with a professional writer who does most, or all, of the actual writing. As Merritt says, “publishers are chasing after basically anybody who’s been on the telly, whether or not they have the ability to write a novel.” For Osman this is “an entirely different industry: people who are famous for different things, ghostwriting a book and putting that out.” As he says, “Of course the publisher will publish, because there’s not really a downside.”
These ghostwritten celebrity novels also have a lineage: Naomi Campbell’s Swan (1995), for example, was written by Caroline Upcher with almost no input from Campbell. The modern version tends to be more collaborative, drawing on the celebrity’s knowledge of their industry, like Shirley Ballas’s Murder on the Dance Floor – a cosy crime novel set in the world of ballroom dancing, which was written with Sheila McClure, an author of more than 30 novels. “What publishers are looking for is clarity,” says Geller. “If someone is famous for something, the novel should reflect that. If a celebrity on Gogglebox wants to write an adaptation of Medea, that’s quite a challenge for a publisher.”
It seems that a key factor here is openness. “Most people who don’t write their own novel are open about it,” says Osman. “And that, to me, is not a con, because you know what you’re getting. It’s a brand thing.”
A recent example is Millie Bobby Brown’s Nineteen Steps. Brown, an actor best known for Stranger Things, worked with ghostwriter Kathleen McGurl. But for her editor, Katie Seaman, who now runs her own editorial consultancy, Brown’s personal connection to the book was crucial. “What attracted me was that it felt authentic,” says Seaman. “The fact that it was inspired by her family history – she was very close to her nan, who lived in Bethnal Green during the war.” Brown’s novel is in part about the Bethnal Green tube disaster, where 173 people were killed in March 1943. “In terms of a government cover-up, and the way it was portrayed by media, it felt timely,” adds Seaman.
McGurl is named on the title page (though not the cover), and Brown was open about the book being ghost-written, posting a photo with McGurl for her 63 million Instagram followers. But Brown attracted criticism nonetheless. “Ghostwritten celebrity novels have ruined children’s fiction and now they’re doing the same thing to adult fiction,” wrote one user on X (formerly Twitter).
“Publishing is always a collaboration,” says Seaman. “When I’ve edited a book, it’s always felt like a partnership. If people are making an argument for a ghostwriter to be on the cover, where do you draw the line? Because often an editor could have a really heavy hand in shaping a manuscript.” This is true: Raymond Carver’s stories were cut to pieces by editor Gordon Lish to create the minimalist voice for which Carver then became celebrated. Why did Brown’s novel receive so much opprobrium? “It did feel like some of the things that were levelled at her were ageist and misogynistic,” says Seaman. “Maybe there’s a different standard that young women are held to.”
What about the shadowy third category: the novels suspected to be ghostwritten but not declared as such? For Osman, “The contract you have with readers is that … at least [the author] has gone to extreme lengths to write something that represents them. That’s the heart of all literature, whether commercial or literary. And if somebody doesn’t do that, it just feels like a kick in the teeth.” Lorraine Kelly agrees: “As long as you make it clear you’re working with someone … because that’s not fair if whoever’s done all the work doesn’t get the recognition.”
Sometimes there are suggestions a celebrity may have had help. In his novel Deadly Game, Michael Caine thanks journalist Matthew d’Ancona for “helping me put it together”. Rob Rinder’s novel The Trial acknowledges journalist Emily Fairbairn “for weed-whacking through my cerebral detritus to find an intelligible story”. Neither novel credits a ghostwriter. (Rinder’s publisher declined to speak to me for this piece.)
Some may feel any ghostwritten book is intrinsically bad: that a novel is – in Evelyn Waugh’s words – an exercise in language, and that a writer cannot convey an authentic vision of the world using someone else’s words. But not all readers agree. “Some people might be intimidated by a very literary novel,” says Phoebe Morgan at Hodder & Stoughton, “but they look at celebrity fiction and think: ‘That’s accessible, because I recognise that person from TV.’” Geller points out that nobody minds about ghostwritten memoirs, but with fiction, “everyone feels quite precious about it”.
Maybe that is part of a larger objection to all celebrity novels, ghostwritten or not. “They seem to get to the front of the queue,” says Merritt. Furthermore, “you don’t hear it in other media. Judy Murray’s agent is not saying to her, ‘Oh Judy, you’ve given birth to a famous tennis player, why don’t you have a show at the Royal Academy?’” It is, says Merritt, “a devaluing of writing as a craft that requires any professional skill”.
Crime novelist Ian Rankin says: “When I wasn’t so successful I might have been pissed off about it. I used to moan to my agent and he said [celebrity novels] get people into a bookshop who have never been in a bookshop in their lives. I’m a lot more sanguine than I used to be, but I can afford to be more sanguine.” Morgan agrees with this analysis. Publishing a successful celebrity author means that “we might be able to take a risk on a debut author, because we’ve made that money”.
Geller, who represents comedian Ruth Jones, acknowledges that “there’s no question she has an advantage over a debut novelist living in the middle of nowhere”. It is, in other words, easier to get your debut published if you have a public profile. But you cannot sustain four novels this way, as Graham Norton has, or – like Osman – enjoy success in countries where you’re not already famous. Passion for doing it is key. Lorraine Kelly talks persuasively about “the sense of achievement I’ve got, holding [my novel] in my hand”.
Osman’s success may explain why other celebrities have followed him into crime, including Rob Rinder and Reverend Richard Coles, but there are notable celebrity hits in romance and comedy, too. Are any celebrities writing literary novels? Morgan suggests it may be that “the more commercial publishers are the ones that approach a celebrity, whereas more literary imprints don’t do that as much”. For Osman, literary fiction for a celebrity novelist is “a harder nut to crack”.
One who tried it was David Baddiel. After two comic novels, his third, The Secret Purposes (2004), was an ambitious literary novel about the internment of British and Jewish-German refugees on the Isle of Man during the second world war. But, he says, there is a “deep resistance” to celebrity novels in literary culture. “And then I wrote The Death of Eli Gold, probably my best novel. And it’s shallow on some level to want these books to be nominated for a prize,” but there is, he says, “an unfortunate ecosystem between literary fiction and prize winning. It doesn’t get read, really, unless you get nominated for one of the major prizes.”
He attributes this to the fact that “fame is so fragmented now. Here’s your corner of fame. People don’t like it if you’re encroaching on other arenas.” He mentions Magnus Mills, whose debut, The Restraint of Beasts (1998), was shortlisted for the Booker prize while he was a bus driver. “That was an absolute plus for him. But if he’d been a famous bus driver, if he’d been on a reality show called The Bus Driver, it would not have been a plus for him.” In the end, after Eli Gold, Baddiel “gave up writing literary fiction”, turning instead to highly successful nonfiction and children’s novels.
Not all celebrity novels do well, anyway. Remember model Cara Delevingne’s Mirror Mirror (2017)? Me neither. “If you look at the charts for adult fiction, it isn’t dominated by celebrities at all,” says Juliet Mushens. “The books that work in the area are genuinely, extremely good.” Osman thinks “the fiction world is actually unusually healthy for unknown voices. The hugest hits of recent years – Gabrielle Zevin, Bonnie Garmus – wouldn’t have happened in film or TV.”
And will the bubble pop? Not just yet. Kelly is “already working on my second one”. Osman would “love to do 20 or 30. It’s the thing that most represents who I am.” Morgan confirms she has recently signed two new celebrity novelists – names withheld, but they fit into Geller’s “national treasure” category. “I think it’s those personality types that people love and recognise, and also have a good story to tell,” she says. “That is the best version of celebrity fiction.”
But will anyone surpass Richard Osman, whose latest book was the fastest-selling hardback ever by a British author – beating the record set by his previous novel? Geller has an idea. “The most popular book that hasn’t happened is Taylor Swift’s novel,” he says, smiling. “That will get every demographic.” Mr Osman – watch out.
