Do you want to know one of the publishing businesses best kept ‘secrets’?
It’s simple really.
If you’re going to tell your story-your real, lived, complicated, maybe even quietly remarkable story, then make sure it includes at least one of the following: a breakdown, a diagnosis, a death, a downfall, or preferably all four.
Because publishers, and increasingly bookshops too, aren’t just selling stories. They’re selling catharsis (ie) packaged pain with, ideally with a hint of privilege for the typically well heeled reader to relate to drizzled in.
The furore surrounding The Salt Path, following Raynor Winn’s admission that the original pitch for the book was ‘…not entirely truthful’, has sparked something of a reckoning. Readers who were moved by her apparent destitution and raw resilience now wonder if they were misled.
There are, of course, plenty of authentic and eminently readable stories out there waiting to be told and shared with no lack of expertise around to help tell them. I recall Clive James, in his first autobiography admitting a lot of it was embellished, whilst David Niven's The Moons A Balloon was as carefully crafted and scripted as any of the films he made in order to produce the best possible, if somewhat gilded, result.
But the deeper question is this: would The Salt Path have been published (and so widely embraced) if Winn’s life had been less…dramatic?
Or less tragic?
Or if, all the gods forbid, she had written simply and honestly about being middle-aged and a bit lost?
Publishers are businesses, after all. They care for only one line-and it isn't a written one.
It's their bottom line. End of.
They respond to trends and numbers. And right now, what sells isn’t quiet resilience or thoughtful reflection.
It’s trauma.
Transformation.
A bruised but Instagram-friendly kind of survival. There's a particularly lucrative market in stories of the comfortable middle classes being knocked off their crushed avacado perches because their pain is seen as being somehow more palatable and more intriguing, more worthy, somehow, than that of those who've lived with struggle as a constant rather than an anomaly.
The result?
Real stories, stories of people who live in the cracks of society, or who refuse to decorate their experience to meet a narrative arc are quietly sidelined. Writers who have something honest, insightful, and quietly powerful to say are passed over because their truths don’t tick the ‘pain-to-redemption’ boxes.
Not enough peril.
Not enough marketing potential.
Too subtle.
And in many cases, too working-class, too ordinary, too unadorned for the curated authenticity the industry now prizes. We hear less from the people who don’t shout, who live without drama, or whose resilience is a quiet, daily thing. Yet it’s often these lives, unflashy, unfiltered, that say the most.
There’s a place for books like The Salt Path. But let’s not kid ourselves that they represent the whole of human experience. For every glossy memoir about loss and rebirth, there are hundreds of people with quieter truths that deserve to be heard.
Maybe it’s time publishing stopped chasing the drama and started listening to the humbler, more human stories that sit in the margins?
If only-we might have some real life stories scattered about the bookshelves that are worth reading then..
.