From today's Bookseller: https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/should-publishers-take-the-high-road-on-fact-checking
"A fictional tale in which two people take a walk across some of England’s most beautiful scenery has made it to the top of the charts,” wrote our charts editor – and indie bookseller – Alex Call this week, reporting, of course, that it was David Nicholls’ much-loved You Are Here (Hodder) that was top of the charts, its paperback having been released a week earlier. The reference – a cheeky one at that – was to Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, the veracity of which has been questioned by a piece in the Observer that delved deep into the author’s background.
The Sunday newspaper – recently bought by Tortoise Media – asserted that the story of redemption portrayed in the book, and its follow-ups, was false, that the author’s financial background was not as described, and that the partial recovery from illness of her partner, Moth, was overplayed. Winn has responded by describing the claims about her husband as “utterly vile, unfair and false”, and dismissing other charges as either mistakes she had already rectified, or simply misleading. Meanwhile, her publisher Penguin Michael Joseph has asserted that it “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence”. While it has not stopped selling the book, or dropped the author, it has delayed a fourth book. Perhaps in a hint towards a future rebrand, Winn now calls the story “a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope”, not a detailed transcript of “every event”. In turn, the Observer has posted a lengthy response to Winn’s counter claims, while its investigative reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou went on its News Meeting podcast to give more background to its report.
The piece has, as Hadjimatheou said on the podcast, scratched a nerve. Fact-checking across non-fiction has been under the microscope: back in February, my colleague Heloise Wood wrote about how editors felt compromised by the need to get the work out of the door, despite concerns over accuracy. “It’s a carelessness that I think is rife in publishing at the minute, because of the increased workload being given to already overworked staff,” said one editor. Past Penguin General communications director Amelia Fairney went a step further in an op-ed for the Observer that will have been a painful read for insiders in the 90th year of the founding of Penguin by Allen Lane. His mission, wrote Fairney, to bring quality information to a mass audience, was “now under threat from publishing processes that put profit before truth”.
Some of this feels a little heavy-handed. It took months for the Observer to pull its piece together, following a tip-off from a contact whose name and reasons for sparking the investigation have not been disclosed. Publishers are not journalists, and most must instead rely on common sense when dealing with stories that might appear, well, too good to be true. Agents are also hardly blameless either. In a conversation I had between a publisher and an agent about The Salt Path, neither side could quite agree on who should vouch for the author. Both wanted to pass the buck to the other. In the age of computer-written books, accountability is going to be a growing issue for everyone.
It is possible that some mistakes are not part of a wider fault-line and that some authors are just particularly adroit at spinning tales – true or not. However, the widespread reaction to the Observer’s investigation is worth reflecting on. If readers stop trusting us, we may not be able to walk it back.