Letter Issue 6,117
On the cover Rising Stars:
the Class of 2025
Should publishers take the high road on fact checking, asks Philip Jones
Editor, The Bookseller ‘A
fictional tale in which two people take a walk across some of England’s most beautiful scenery has made it to the top of the charts,” wrote our charts
editor – and indie bookseller – Alex Call this week, reporting, of course, that it was David Nicholls’ much-loved You Are Here (Hodder) that was top of the charts, its paperback having been released a week earlier. The reference – a cheeky one at that – was to Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, the veracity of which has been questioned by a piece in the Observer that delved deep into the author’s background. The Sunday newspaper – recently bought by
Tortoise Media – asserted that the story of redemption portrayed in the book, and its follow- ups, was false, that the author’s financial back- ground was not as described, and that the partial recovery from illness of her partner, Moth, was overplayed. Winn has responded by describing the claims about her husband as “utterly vile, unfair and false”, and dismissing other charges as either mistakes she had already rectified, or simply misleading. Meanwhile, her publisher Penguin Michael Joseph has asserted that it “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence”. While it has not stopped selling
The official charts This week’s number ones
Contents In this week’s magazine p44
Publishers are not journalists, and most must instead rely on common sense when dealing with stories that might appear, well, too good to be true
the book, or dropped the author, it has delayed a fourth book. Perhaps in a hint towards a future rebrand, Winn now calls the story “a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope”, not a detailed transcript of “every event”. In turn, the Observer has posted a lengthy response to Winn’s counter claims, while its investigative reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou went on its News Meeting podcast to give more background to its report. The piece has, as Hadjimatheou said on the
podcast, scratched a nerve. Fact-checking across non-fiction has been under the microscope: back in February, my colleague Heloise Wood wrote about how editors felt compromised by the need to get the work out of the door, despite concerns over accuracy. “It’s a carelessness that I think is rife in publishing at the minute, because of the increased workload being given to already overworked staff,” said one editor. Past Penguin General communications director Amelia Fairney went a step further in an op-ed for the Observer that will have been a painful read for insiders in the 90th year of the founding of Penguin by Allen Lane. His mission, wrote Fairney, to bring quality information to a mass audience, was “now under threat from publishing processes that put profit before truth”. Some of this feels a little heavy-handed.
It took months for the Observer to pull its piece together, following a tip-off from a contact whose name and reasons for sparking the investigation have not been disclosed. Publishers are not journalists, and most must instead rely on common sense when dealing with stories that might appear, well, too good to be true. Agents are also hardly blameless either. In a conversation I had between a publisher and an agent about The Salt Path, neither side could quite agree on who should vouch for the author. Both wanted to pass the buck to the other. In the age of computer-written books, accountability is going to be a growing issue for everyone. It is possible that some mistakes are not part
of a wider fault-line and that some authors are just particularly adroit at spinning tales – true or not. However, the widespread reaction to the Observer’s investigation is worth reflecting on. If readers stop trusting us, we may not be able to walk it back.
Books Author Profiles: Len Pennie Harriet Lane SenLinYu
Children’s Preview PRINT E-BOOK AUDIO Average selling price Year/Year rise £9.09 1.2%
Rising Stars 2025 Francesca Pathak interview 26-27 Vicki Leech Mateos interview 28-29 Rising Stars Preview
31-43
6-7 8-9
10-11 12-22
Charts The Official UK Top 50 Fiction
Non-Fiction Children’s
Audio & Digital Market Spotlight
Classified Jobs in Books
p8
44 46 47 48 49 50
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05
Welcome
BARNABY CRITCHLOW
Comment
Leader
18.07.25
Introducing The Class of 2025
As this year’s cohort of Rising Stars are named, we meet nominees from previous years and look at the legacy of the initiative as it celebrates its 15th instalment PP24–43
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