Jamie Oliver and Geri Halliwell-Horner change into the newest celebrities to announce youngsters’s books | Books

Chef Jamie Oliver and former Spice Lady Geri Halliwell-Horner have change into the newest celebrities to announce new youngsters’s books, with specialists saying there isn’t a signal the celebrity-authored children’s book trend will decelerate.

Oliver’s e-book is titled Billy and the Big Journey and relies on a narrative he used to inform his youngsters. It follows the title character and his mates, who determine to discover the out of bounds Waterfall Woods. Billy and the Big Journey will probably be printed in April by Penguin Random Home UK, which additionally publishes Oliver’s cookbooks, with a sequel already scheduled for spring 2024.

Oliver mentioned that “rising up with dyslexia meant studying and writing didn’t come simply”, however required him to “have a look at issues in a different way, which has meant an overactive creativeness – sensible for being artistic and arising with nice tales for the youngsters at bedtime”.

Halliwell-Horner, who shot to fame alongside her fellow woman band members as Ginger Spice in 1996, has signed a two-book cope with Scholastic UK. Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen, due in autumn 2023, is described as an journey story about an orphaned woman who is shipped to the mysterious Bloodstone Island – dwelling not solely to a faculty for extraordinary teenagers, but in addition a sanctuary for endangered species. The e-book follows the previous pop star’s earlier youngsters’s e-book collection, concerning the adventures of nine-year-old Ugenia Lavender.

Oliver and Halliwell-Horner are amongst a string of well-known figures who’ve written youngsters’s books, together with David Walliams, Alesha Dixon, Lenny Henry, Tom Fletcher, Marcus Rashford and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

Literary agent Alice Sutherland-Hawes, who represents Rashford’s co-writer Alex Falase-Koya, mentioned the celebrity-authored youngsters’s e-book pattern would proceed because it’s “usually seen as a simple promote due to large social media followings and nostalgia”.

In response to the Bookseller’s chart, Spaceboy by David Walliams and Adam Stower is the No 1 bestselling e-book within the UK this week, for the second week operating.

Publishers have beforehand argued that cash constituted of celebrity-authored books can then be used to accumulate and publicise books by non-celebrity writers. However there was scepticism about this declare, with writer Piers Torday telling the Guardian: “If publishers are worthwhile, then, after all, they’ll maybe take extra dangers on new authors and creating careers, however I don’t know if the function superstar acquisitions play in that is vital.”

Sutherland-Hawes mentioned there was additionally a query about time and alternative: “The time the group put into [celebrity-authored books] takes away from non-celeb books. You’ll be able to’t get away from the time suck, except you rent somebody to solely do these tasks and the identical goes for the advertising and marketing/publicity. It is rather irritating seeing celebrities rolled on to TV exhibits to speak about their books whereas precise youngsters’s writers aren’t given these slots.”

However warning is required, Sutherland-Hawes added. “I feel there’s a place for superstar publishing however provided that it’s achieved rigorously and with somebody who actively engages with the neighborhood,” she mentioned. “I feel we’re reaching saturation and publishers ought to have a great take into consideration what a few of these books are including (if something) to cabinets.”

Torday mentioned that for “stars of a sure profile, a youngsters’s e-book can broaden and prolong their attain in the identical method a magnificence vary or product endorsement can, and whereas publishers stay able to shell out for such offers, there will probably be an increasing number of”.