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Which is not to suggest that everything about misery lit is grim. The books have broken taboos, made some readers appreciate that their lives are not so bad, conveyed brutal truths. And there is good writing: Angela's Ashes; Andrea Ashworth's Once in a House on Fire and Lorna Sage's Bad Blood are fantastic works of literature. But too often the intentions of publishers and authors are cynical, the content pornographic, and the bubble has tainted the entire genre of biography. I certainly won't be shedding any tears over its hopefully imminent demise.

Sathnam Sanghera's If You Don't Know Me By Now: a Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton has been shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Biography Award.

Books follow fashions, so what's next?

If, as the figures suggest and some observers hope, enthusiasm for misery memoirs is in decline, the credit crunch may not be entirely to blame. Misery has been for several years the golden-egg-laying goose - and, in the book trade, this species has a 100 per cent casualty rate.

Publishing trends have at least three causes. The most obvious is the sociological. For example, the 1980s was a decade of conspicuous consumption, of Dallas and Dynasty on TV, and of sex-and-shopping blockbusters by the likes of Judith Krantz. Then there is the reactionary. Once publishers had brought out far too many glitzy blockbusters, readers began to long for realism. Joanna Trollope, who had been writing for years with limited success, caught the public mood with her stories of the predicaments of middle-class people in market towns - and that is an example of the third cause, the appearance of an author who starts a new fashion. A few years later, every new paperback (it seemed) featured a pastel image of a vase of flowers in front of French windows. It took Marian Keyes and her chick-lit colleagues to bring some Day-Glo into bookshops.

A fourth cause of trends is technological. The development of cheap colour printing, and the ability of publishers to sell books worldwide, facilitated the production, from the 1960s onwards, of coffee-table books such as Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World. In Japan, a craze for reading on mobile phones has brought about a genre of fiction created specially for the medium. The growth of electronic delivery systems may influence writers in ways we cannot yet foresee.

What next? Books about frugality, perhaps. But, just as publishers have a 100 per cent success rate in killing geese that lay golden eggs, so they have a 100 per cent failure rate in predicting the next trend. So it's anybody's guess.

Nicholas Clee

The writer is a former editor of The Bookseller

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