Even by today's standards, Hodder & Stoughton's £409,000 advance to new Irish crime novelist John Connolly takes some beating. Yes, I know that everyone was absolutely agog a couple of years back when Martin Amis pocketed a similar sum merely for changing publishers, but the difference there was that Amis was already a commercially successful celebrity and was being offered such largesse precisely because of that. John Connolly, by contrast, is unknown - or was up to last week, anyway.
No one, of course, is begrudging him his good fortune - if publishers see fit to fling lottery-sized advances at writers, whether famous or not, all one can say is: good luck to the recipients, and why can't it be me? But it does make one wonder what exactly is going on in publishing these days to warrant such staggering advances.
What's going on, I think, is much the same as what's been going on for a long time in Hollywood, where huge conglomerates have taken over the studios and have hired accountants to run them. Their concern is money rather than movies, but as they know nothing about movies and care even less (they refer to them as "product"), they therefore don't know what movies are likely to make them money.
Instead, they channel all their energies into the one thing they do know about, which is marketing. Indeed, they pour so much money into marketing (that is, hyping) the selected product that the product can't afford to fail. But, of course, sometimes it does fail. Audiences, composed of fickle creatures as they are, have minds of their own, and there are occasions when no amount of hype will persuade them to pay good money to see something they simply don't want to see - a latter-day Kevin Costner movie, for instance. But as hype is all the studios know about, the hype will continue.
The same is true of the publishing industry, which nowadays is largely run by huge conglomerates with no real interest in books. Instead, they're all looking for the new Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Danielle Steele - writers who will make mindboggling amounts of money for them - and they're prepared to pay mind-boggling amounts of money in order to find or create them.
This may be good in the short term for the chosen few writers, but it's not good for the other writers on the publishers' lists who, because of this focus on the few, receive scant or no attention or backing, and it's not good in the long term that an industry equates merit solely with sales figures. How would all the writers we cherish from the past have fared if such publishing standards had been applied to them? Quite simply, we wouldn't have heard of most of them.
But, as I say, good luck to John Connolly, who may well turn out to be one of the great literary discoveries of our day. However, I was a bit bemused by the encomium he received from Hodder & Stoughton's Sue Fletcher. "Such is Connolly's skill," she declared, "that he writes exactly as if he were American." Here we have an English publisher praising an Irish author for writing like a US crime writer. It's a funny old world.
Staying with spectacular advances, I see that Nicholas Evans, who in 1994 was paid £357,500 by Bantam Press for the rights to The Horse Whisperer, has just delivered the manuscript of his second novel. This is called The Loop and is another tale of Man versus Nature, though wolves rather than geegees are the non-humans this time around.
Like its predecessor, it is also, of course, set in America because, though Mr Evans is English, he knows, as John Connolly does, that America is where the real market is.
Meanwhile, Robert Redford's movie of The Horse Whisperer is currently in post-production and is being scheduled for a summer release.
I see that Zoe Heller is fed up with what she terms the FFPN - the feminine first-person narrative that has proved so successful for such writers as Marian Keyes and Helen Fielding, whose heroines are almost invariably youngish, single, middle-class women living messy personal lives while dreaming of fulfilment.
Writing in the current issue of the London Review of Books, Ms Heller suggests that the success of the FFPN, "with its candid admissions of female silliness and vanity, lay partly in its subversion of the expectations created by all those Virago paperbacks . . . To have women confessing, for example, that they longed to be sexually objectified, was resoundingly incorrect, but undeniably interesting after years in which the mandatory line had been Amazonian declarations of independence."
However, after reading Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, Arabella Weir's Does My Bum Look Big in This? and Laura Zigman's Animal Husbandry, and being struck by their "grim sameness", she thinks that the fad has "already hardened into a new literary orthodoxy", and a not very interesting one: "There is nothing left to tell about messy periods or greying M&S underwear that has not already been amply told."
IF you wander into the ground floor of Eason's in O'Connell Street these days, you'll find Alan Bennett's Writing Home marked down to an astonishing £1.99. That's one-ninth of what the book cost when first published four years ago, so if you didn't get round to reading Bennett's splendid ragbag of musings and memoirs then, you have absolutely no excuse not to redress that situation now.
And while you're there you can pick up The School Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, first published last year at £20 and now marked down to £7.99. Personally, I didn't think this anthology as beguilingly quirky as the same editors' earlier venture, 1982's The Rattle Bag, but at the price it's a steal.