Credit: CHRISTIAN DARKIN

Stephen Hawking may have taken science to the bedside table, but the phenomenon is over. The attitude of publishers and booksellers towards popular science writing has changed, and the market is not as buoyant as it was a decade ago. Gone are the days when publishers were falling over themselves to acquire the next Brief History of Time or Longitude, and were happy to pay big bucks to fend off the competition.

Whereas authors could once command six-figure advances for books on cutting-edge science or narrative-driven histories of the subject, most today struggle to get a deal, let alone shift several thousand copies of their books. This is not to say that the audience for serious popular science has evaporated: there are still plenty of readers hungry for authoritative, well-written, interesting books. But the ‘trade’ — the commercial sector of the publishing market — has raised the bar for what kinds of book find their way on to the bookstands.

Why has this big bang turned out to be a whimper? Part of the problem is that the trade has decided that popular science as a genre is not what it was cracked up to be. So many people — academics and journalists, as well as publishers and agents — jumped on the bandwagon that the market became saturated and publishers got their fingers burnt. The public is spoilt for choice when it comes to books on genetics or cosmology, mathematics or neuroscience. Just how many books do they really need on the impending threat from asteroids and comets, the sequencing of the human genome, or the challenge of the Riemann hypothesis?

The pace of popular science publishing has outstripped that of scientific advance — even popular-science aficionados would be hard pressed to name one scientific leap in our understanding of human consciousness, despite the vast number of books on the subject. Big ideas simply don't come along very often, and when they do, several books on the same idea often get signed up simultaneously. Witness for instance the recent spate of titles on network theory by Mark Buchanan, Duncan Watts, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Philip Ball and Steven Strogatz. Despite the impeccable credentials of the authors, none of these has taken off, because there is a limit to how many similar titles the market can sustain.

This means that publishers today must be absolutely sure that every science book they commission has what it takes to stand out from the crowd. They are placing ever greater store on works that are original, topical and important — and written with verve and style by authors who are in full command of their subjects. And with publishing success nowadays so dependent on marketing and publicity, it is an advantage if authors have some kind of public profile. That is how Bill Bryson's funny but otherwise pedestrian overview of science, A Short History of Nearly Everything, managed to reach the parts that many established science writers couldn't reach — the bestseller lists.

But as well as a lack of public demand, there is a more pernicious force conspiring to keep popular science at bay: the handful of buyers in the head offices of the key bookshop chains, who decide which titles their stores should stock. This is in stark contrast to a few years ago, when most buying was done by the branch staff, and has altered the complexion of publishing as a whole.

A publisher at a major UK trade house, for example, was recently told that the ‘key accounts’ had decided that scientific microhistories were ‘over’, and he was thus finding it increasingly difficult to take anything on at all in this genre. This is despite a lack of real evidence that the public's appetite for books such as Simon Singh's Fermat's Last Theorem or Mark Kurlansky's Cod is satiated.

The upside to all this is that there has been a move back towards traditional history — epics such as Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters or Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men. This trend is hardly surprising. In an increasingly weighty world, there is an increasing demand for weighty books, including agenda-driven titles such as Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, and even aspirational titles, such as Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality, which offers nothing less than a complete advanced course in modern physics.

The market for popular science is still there — but as an echo of the original big bang. Publishers are increasingly sophisticated and discerning, and there has been a shakedown in the number of commercial houses who know, like and succeed with science. Ironically for an agent, I happen to think this is good news. It means that authors are taken on only by genuinely committed editors, and this in turn means that when their books do appear, people are more likely to buy, read and talk about them — more a case of Hawking radiation than the Hawking phenomenon.