Gareth Southgate prompts new round of an old game: cash-in books

His redemptive World Cup performance has set publishers chasing after a time-honoured goal: getting a hot topic on to shelves while it’s still warm. But can anyone beat a Michael Jackson biography written in 48 hours?

Not content with winning the hearts of a nation, or transforming the humble waistcoat into the coolest thing that’s ever come out of M&S, England’s sweetheart Gareth Southgate has now inspired the country’s publishers. While they chase Southgate, Harry Kane and the rest of the squad to write books after their World Cup success, some are not waiting for their involvement at all. Zero to Hero: The Southgate Story, by sports writer Rob Mason, is set to trace Southgate’s journey from “zero to hero”, from his start at Crystal Palace until this year’s World Cup. The biography, like HarperCollins’s similarly rushed England’s Heroes: A Tribute to Our Young Lions, is due out in just three weeks.

Celebrities capitalising on a brief glimpse of fame (there are a startling number of Love Island books); politicians using memoirs as a final hurrah before an autumnal career speaking to rooms of bored risk analysts; publishers scrambling to keep up with our rabid news cycle. Speedy cash-ins are a long, if not entirely respected, tradition. Aside from World Cup books, there are plenty more heading our way. The Thai cave rescue? Very likely, as three big publishers told the Wall Street Journal this week – but they have to be quick – one sceptic pooh-poohed the idea that readers would still care in “months” – an unimaginably distant future. How about the Novichok poisonings? On Tuesday, Pan Macmillan announced that it will publish “definitive” account The Skripal Files by Newsnight’s Mark Urban, in October – just seven months after the Salisbury attack and just in time for Christmas.

Continue reading...