"We love you forever" MJ by yopse
10,000 words in 48 hours? The race to publish the first posthumous Jackson biography was relentless.
‘The perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time that you allot it.’ So goes Cecil Parkinson’s famous dictum. It’s a wise statement that explains why it can take Telefonica up to three weeks to install a telephone line and also excuses, a some extent, my inability to hand a piece of writing to an editor before deadline day.
But in short bursts and with enough rewards on offer, we humans are capable of staggering bursts of productivity. Whether it is that deadline day rush, the frantic tidying of a house or that 25 minute sprint from one end of Madrid to the other, we’ve all had our moments. But I can’t imagine any that compare with the literary achievements of a number of crazed authors in a few weeks last summer.
They were primed by the sudden death of Michael Jackson. The King of Pop, amid final rehearsals for his comeback tour at the O2 Arena in London, collapsed at his home in Holmby Hills at midday on 25 June and was pronounced dead two hours later at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. Within a day, authors were meeting publishers and agents, plotting frenzied bids to become to the first to celebrate Jackson’s life with a posthumous biography.
On 26 June, John Blake, a publisher based in London, was approached by Emily Herbert, an author who was desperate to do a book on Jackson. By midday he had commissioned ‘Michael Jackson: King of Pop 1958 – 2009’ and secured around 30,000 pre-orders. Blake’s biggest competitor was HarperCollins who had already drawn up plans for ‘Michael Jackson – Legend, Hero, Icon: A Tribute to the King of Pop’ a rather clumsily sounding title that was to be completed by the author James Aldis.
For HarperCollins’ plans to come together, Aldis was expected to produce around 10,000 words of copy in 48 hours, while the picture editors were given just three days to select 250 images. The HarperCollins publisher for non-fiction, Carole Tomkinson, described the timetable as the tightest in the history of the company. By 13 July she was holding a completed copy of the book triumphantly in her hand.
‘We’re really proud of it,’ she said. ‘To be competitive we have to be able to move quickly. In a way we reacted like a magazine or a newspaper, putting together something beautiful and enduring – at speed.’
It’s a curious story which raises various questions. Is it distasteful to see the publishing industry so keen to exploit the death of a celebrity so quickly? And while the industry might be under assault from the Internet, shouldn’t the genre of biography be more careful not to risk its reputation for reasoned thought by carting out a book in less time than it takes to walk the Camino de Santiago? But then maybe we shouldn’t consider these books as anything to do with biography at all. Perhaps they form a new genre of trash literature that is just masquerading as something more sophisticated.
I imagine that in Spain, where efficiency is hardly the most prized component of the national skill set, that this sudden splurge of Jacko biographies will seem even more puzzling than it does to those in the UK. And, on this account, I’d say they have reason. English speaking countries in the western world seem to be transfixed with new information. All the emphasis in on breaking news, hurried tribute albums and rushed biographies, each of which appeals to a sense of anxiousness or false desire for fresh information that can never be quenched. It’s a feature of modern life, and a distinctive part of the capitalist machine which doesn’t always rewards those which do things best, but always rewards those who do things first.
Filed under: Books | Tagged: biography, michael jackson
