Reading Copy Book Blog

The art of presenting the celebrity novel was badly misjudged by the publisher William Heinemann in 1994 when it signed up supermodel Naomi Campbell for a glitzy novel about the fashion industry. Caroline Upcher, then an editor at Heinemann and also a novelist in her own right, was contracted to write Swan and the publisher made a press statement to this effect. “The idea was to buy the name,” says Upcher, who now lives in the US, where she runs an online editorial service for first-time authors. “It was announced that this novel would happen and that I would write it, and before I’d written a word I was being doorstepped by journalists asking what kind of story it would be.”