The Scotsman profiles the woman who can unite Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson in all their feuding glory, change the face of the book industry and affect which ones get sold. Who is it? Amanda Ross, of course, the booker for the Richard & Judy Show:
As executive producer of Richard & Judy, Ross decided three years ago to introduce a book club. Channel 4’s executives were sceptical, but Ross had seen what a book club did for the Oprah Winfrey Show in the US and was convinced that success could be replicated in Britain.
She’s been proved spectacularly right. So right publishers have long known that a discussion of one of their authors’ works in the ten-minute book club slot on the Wednesday editions of the show is usually enough to turn it into a bestseller.
They call this “the Richard & Judy effect”, and in sales terms it’s colossal: at least one in every 50 books sold in British bookshops is reckoned to be down to its endorsement on the show. Proportionately, that makes Amanda Ross even more influential than Oprah.
Not bad, huh? Of course, when someone can be so powerful as to affect cover design, she can invite some incendiary comments (like Virago’s Carmen Callil crying ‘she can take a running jump!’) but Ross, who works in a converted polystyrene factory in Kensington, takes her power in stride. “They know I know what sells,” Ross says. “The book that proved that was Cecilia Ahern’s debut novel PS, I Love You. When the publishers asked me what I thought of its cover, I said, ‘I’m not going to get Richard sitting there with a pink book!’ They changed the cover to blue and that was it.
“Now the publishers all send their covers to me and we can change them if we want. It’s important for us that the books we promote are universally appealing.”