Market for biz books turns bearish

Sales of business books have fallen along with the markets

LONDON, England (CNN) -- In the heady days of the late 1990s when the markets were soaring, business books were popular -- from the get-rich-quick schemes to the thoughts of celebrity CEOs.

But along with the markets, the business-book bubble burst -- and sales have crumbled.

Now the bottom seems to have gone out of the market for management books. The simple reason -- there are just to many of them.

"There's only so much you can say about managing people (and) running a business that is worth saying," says Martin Waller, deputy City editor of The (London) Times.

"After a while there's a sense of desperation when a book crosses my desk and I think, 'What's his new idea?'"

Waller quotes a random passage from one of the books: "The traditional definition of management has focussed on control and decision-making activities, but more broadly management's real mission is to assemble the ingredients needed for organisational success."

Adds Waller: "Word count, 29. Information count, zero."

Former GE boss Jack Welch's autobiography may be recession-proof

While biographies of corporate giants such as legendary ex-GE boss Jack Welch may prove recession-proof, the recent spate of corporate scandals means the business-publishing industry may have to refocus.

"Business publishing has been struggling in the last year, so commissioning editors are being forced to be pretty conservative in their commissioning strategy," says Richard Burton of Capstone Publishing.

"The books we'll see coming out next year will contain fewer wacky, groundbreaking books than up to now. There'll be some pretty risk-adverse publishing going on."

With the shadow of the Enron scandal and the WorldCom bankruptcy filing still hanging over the business world, readers should not expect too many more CEO success stories for a while.

Instead, the current hot topics in the publishing world are ethics and financial shenanigans.