Making a million from Jordan

Whatever it says about this country, Jordan's £17 book is flying off the shelves.

"Ooh, you cheeky thing," Blake says when I ask how much money he's making from Jordan. He won't tell me except to say that he makes a " similar amount" as the author. He will be surprised if Jordan makes less than £1 million from the book.

"A book like this is going to make us a lot of money," he says. "It's what you dream of in publishing." Blake, 55, can barely contain his glee that he picked up the book deal for a relative pittance (Jordan was paid a reported £10,000 advance) after every other publisher turned it down.

One person I spoke to who works for a big publishing company said: "When Jordan's agent was touting it around, nobody was interested. They all thought she was too tacky. There are a lot of people in publishing who are gutted they got it wrong."

Blake signed her up towards the end of last year. He was nervous about it - Jordan had failed to show up to two previous meetings. "The third time, she showed up. She seemed really wholesome and sweet, not like I was expecting.

She wasn't wearing much make-up and I really liked her. She loves money but I respect her most for the way she is with her son. She really loves him and she takes him everywhere."

Did he fancy her? "No, not my type at all," he laughs. "Not even a little bit, she's far too young for me. I doubt she'll mind, I'm sure she doesn't fancy me either." He's charming and still has his hair, but I agree he's not exactly her type.

What nobody had foreseen when they were finalising that deal was that Jordan's appearance in I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! would endear her to a wider slice of the population than her usual fans, presumably more used to looking at page three than a 277-page book.

Suddenly she wasn't just Jordan any more, she was Katie Price: devoted single mother of a disabled son, funny, honest, with a string of failed relationships. So what if she took her top off for money - it seemed to be on her terms and she was making a fortune.

"The whole country began to fall in love with her and I thought, hang on, this book is going to do all right." It's now been at the top of the bestseller list for four weeks. "We did a first print run of 90,000 copies," says Blake.

"It was the biggest we've ever done and they sold out within two days. We just couldn't print enough - it got so desperate, we ran out of paper so I was buying paper from other publishers at premium prices just to keep the presses rolling. We're already at 350,000 and they're still rolling."

The son of a soldier (his father fought in both the First and Second World Wars) and a nurse, Blake always wanted to be a journalist and when he left school, Westminster Grammar, at 17 - this was the Sixties and his teachers disapproved of his long hair and kept sending him home to get it cut - he wrote to every newspaper he could find in the Yellow Pages and eventually got a job on the Hackney Gazette.

After subsequent jobs on an evening paper in Luton and a news agency, he joined the Evening News, where he started the successful pop culture column Ad Lib (Blake and his column came to this newspaper when the Evening News merged with the Standard).

He worked at The Sun, where he started the Bizarre column, then Robert Maxwell poached him for the Mirror and he eventually became editor of The People in 1989.

"I hated it," he says. "I had to wear a suit and I was stuck in an office on my own with a secretary outside. I loved the money and I had a chauffeur but I didn't like all the executive thing. It wasn't me at all."

He still doesn't do the "executive thing" - today he's wearing a shirt and jacket (no tie) with black combat-style trousers, and he likes the word "groovy". When Maxwell tried to buy the National Enquirer in America, he put Blake in charge of operations.

"That was my career gone," he says. "Maxwell just winked at me and said: 'Don't worry, you'll be a millionaire.' It was ridiculous, I had no idea what I was doing.

The bid failed and Maxwell hid from me, I never saw him again. Suddenly I had no job and didn't know what to do." In the end, he was given a pay-off worth two years of his salary and started John Blake Publishing.

"British publishers wanted to print books that got good reviews and didn't care much about sales," he says. "There were too many people with trust funds treating publishing as a hobby. Publishing is all middle-class people producing books for other middle-class people.

There's not a lot aimed at ordinary folk. If you hit that market, there's not much competition. If we could see a book making it in the top 10, we'd publish it."

Which, with his tabloid instinct, is what Blake did. His first four books - his own book on the Rolling Stones, one about women murderers, a biography of David Jason and a book by Piers Morgan about celebrities - "all stormed off and sold by the lorry load, except Piers's book, which bombed. I thought this publishing stuff was dead easy".

He couldn't care less about reviews, he wanted to print books that would sell. His first big success was The Guv'nor, Lenny McLean's autobiography, which other publishers had also turned down. The bare-knuckle fighter and his ghostwriter got an advance of just £500 each but the book stayed at the top of the bestseller list for three months.

"When we published that book, every gangster in London couldn't believe their luck because they were all being offered book deals. The publishing companies aren't as snobby as they were and they watch us now."

There's no doubt he invents popular genres (he is the master of the " hardman biographies") but, Jordan and a few others aside, can the big publishers really be envious of his signings?

There was the author who had claimed to be a member of the SAS murder squad in Northern Ireland whose authenticity was questioned not only by the press but the Royal Ulster Constabulary; the memoirs of Darius Guppy; then there are the pets books, including the intriguinglytitled What Cats Want and How to Talk to Your Dog.

Ingrid Tarrant, wife of television presenter Chris, is currently writing a book about rabbits. "She's got writer's block," says Blake, laughing. "A bloody book about rabbits!" I offer to write him a book about guinea pigs and he laughs, politely, and fails to answer.

One book he has high hopes for is by James Hewitt about his life after Princess Diana, which comes out in the autumn. He hopes it will be more successful than the last time they did a book together and Hewitt was savaged by the press for cashing in on her name.

"He was a single chap, she was the married woman with children. A lot of people now realise Diana wasn't as fabulous as they used to think she was."

He says last year's book which claimed to have found Lord Lucan - the man turned out to be "Jungly Barry", a hippy who lived and died in Goa instead - was his biggest disaster. "Oh my God, that was a nightmare," he says. He can laugh about it now but at the time, he says he felt like his world had ended.

"I'd never felt so sick. A friend of mine took me to lunch with this top Scotland Yard detective and they had photographs of this man. This guy was the spitting image of Lord Lucan.

In journalism, I'd learned that the most improbable things were often true and you have to keep an open mind. We had a forensic expert look at the pictures, who said the bone structure was the same. I totally believed it. We printed 60,000 copies and I went round the country personally selling it to shops."

Within days, the book was rubbished. He says he sold 20,000 copies, the rest had to be pulped (but not one to ruin a good tale, on Blake's website, it still says of the book: "The biggest mystery of all has finally been solved").

"They're still coming back from shops even now. It was a total disaster. But it's all karma. I suffered so much then, I think Jordan is my reward."