Celebrity Stories

By Joy Lanzendorfer, AlterNet. Posted August 9, 2004.

Pamela Anderson's first book, Star, is about a busty blonde who journeys toward fame and riches while having a lot of kinky sex along the way.

But it isn't a memoir. It's a novel.

Anderson has taken pen to paper, the latest in an increasingly long line of celebrity writers. While autobiographies have long been the means by which celebrities get their literary yah-yahs out, these days, they are branching out. (Even though, in an autobiographical twist, the buxom woman on the cover of Star is in fact Anderson.) They are writing children's books, novels, poetry, self-help, and political books. Increasingly, editors seem to think that it's not what you read, but who wrote it that matters.

Celebrities who have published books in the last few years include: Madonna, Spike Lee, Jerry Seinfeld, John Lithgow, Dolly Parton, Carl Reiner, Jay Leno, Maria Shriver, Billy Crystal, Britney Spears, Ethan Hawke, Marlee Matlin, Steve Martin, Al Franken, Jewel, Jamie Lee Curtis, Keith Hernandez, Carrie Fisher, Jane Seymour, Shaquille O'Neal, Ashanti, Julie Andrews, Will Smith, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Buffett, LL Cool J, and Shaggy, among others. More are on the way. Billy Joel, LeAnn Rimes, Paris Hilton, Mia Hamm, and Bob Dylan are coming out with books later this year.

"There are absolutely more books by celebrities on the market now than there used to be," says Sandy Whelchel, Executive Director of the National Writers Association. "Name recognition sells books. There's no doubt about that."

Despite being wooden, didactic, and borrowing a little too heavily from Cinderella, Madonna's first children's book, The English Roses, debuted at No.1 on the New York Times Bestsellers List and stayed in the top 10 for 18 weeks. A week after its publication, Pamela Anderson's novel was number 77 on the Amazon.com sales ranking. After seeing numbers like that, some publishers are looking at celebrities with renewed interest.

Building the Brand

The preferred term for celebrities these days? Entertainers. Don't ghettoize them as singers or actors. Stars are expanding their name (or brand) to include movies, albums, TV shows, product endorsements, restaurants, clothing lines, and more. For them, a book may be just another product with their name on it.

Luckily for them, corporate conglomeration makes branching out that much easier – since one branch is just a small step from the trunk. The same media corporations that control much of the TV, movies, and music in the United States also own the major publishing houses. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns HarperCollins, Bertelsmann owns Random House, Time Warner owns Little, Brown, & Company, and Viacom owns Simon & Schuster, as well as MTV, VH1, Showtime, and Nickelodeon.

Given the corporatized convenience, the sudden proliferation of celebrity books may be part of synergy, i.e. cooperative interaction among the subsidiaries of a corporation to make as much money as possible.

"Synergy is a part of the total package with these books," says Neal Wyatt of the American Library Association. "Martha Stewart is a good example of someone who did that – though she did it herself – where she had the books, then the magazine, then the TV show, and they all feed off each other. So yes, there's a bit of a corporate collecting up of different parts of celebrity here."

However, industry experts say that while synergy was the goal when major corporations consolidated in the 1990s, it never quite happened in the publishing world.

"I've always been surprised synergy hasn't worked for books," says Pat Schroeder, CEO of The Association of American Publishers. "They have tried to get it to work, but it never has. So it's really not a one-stop shop where an actor puts out a movie and then says, by the way, I have a book too. It's more like the movie house puts out the movie, and then someone else puts out the book."

She adds that in most cases, it's probably the celebrity who seeks out the publisher, not the other way around.

The Forest for the Trees

On the other hand, some celebrities do seem to have literary ambition. Some, like Jamie Lee Curtis, John Lithgow, Steve Martin and Carrie Fisher have earned respect from critics and readers alike. These celebrities tend to spend more time working on their writing. Martin has written from the beginning of his career, starting with screenplays and then moving to articles in The New Yorker before branching into novels.

"I think celebrity books should be judged by the individual book, not the celebrity," says Wyatt. "Some are very good and some seem like more of a vanity publication, with people just living off their name."

Vanity plays a large part in the plots of many celebrity children's books. Madonna's book is about a blonde girl who everyone is jealous of; Shaquille O'Neal put himself in fairytales; soccer player Mia Hamm's book Winners Never Quit has a girl playing soccer on the cover; Spears writes about a girl who want to be a singer; and Jerry Seinfeld's character is a greedy, wise-cracking kid who demands "NAME CANDY ONLY" on Halloween. The illustrations are likewise similar to the celebrities, with child-like versions of Jerry Seinfeld or Jay Leno gracing the pages.

Joy Lanzendorfer is a freelance writer living in Northern California.

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