Publishers Have High Hopes for Comedy Memoirs to Top Bestsellers List

The publishers of celebrity memoirs are getting ready for Super Thursday, a day so named because it offers the best chance for potential Christmas bestsellers to launch on the mass market.

Strong contenders for 2011 include quite a few autobiographies by leading comedians, a sure sign that the light entertainment life story is the way to go. Last year’s expectations fell flat despite the fact that publishers threw quite a few prominent titles on the table.

On Thursday, books by James Corden, Johnny Vegas, Lee Evans and Jason Manford are set for the launch. A second batch by well-known comedians is due to come out two weeks later, on October 13th. These include Rob Brydon’s Small Man in a Book, which publishers Michael Joseph have described as “a funny, heartfelt, honest, sometimes sad, but mainly funny, memoir of how a young man from Wales very, very slowly became an overnight success.”  And Peter Kay’s anarchic return to his Bolton childhood in Peter Kay: The Book has already hit book shelves.

The October batch brings Julian Clary’s Briefs Encountered, with Ebury Press, Frankie Boyle’s iconoclastic Work! Consume! Die!, with HarperCollins,  and then, from the same publishing house,  Steve Coogan’s alter ego Alan Partridge in I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan.

“In other years it will be film stars, not comics. But these are all books that make excellent gifts,” said Andre Breedt, an industry analyst with Nielsen BookScan. ”It is hard to predict which will do best. But it matters if they have been in the public eye recently or if they have never written a book before. There are only so many people out there who are going to buy a book, so you have to have as many out there as possible.”

Check out Rob Brydon live at the Apollo, courtesy of YouTube:

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