If you are lucky enough to be travelling by air or train this summer, you could be fooled while browsing the station and airport bookshops that there are only a dozen or so people writing books these days, many of them celebrities you’ll know from other fields.

The shelves are rammed with current and back copies of the few best sellers who have the heftiest commercial backing.

It costs publishers a substantial sum to secure shelf space, particularly at eye level position.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of those who actually write those ubiquitous best-selling novels and I aspire to their talent.

But by imagining they are the only ones writing books not only deprives readers of 95 per cent of the work in their chosen genre but also the authors in that overwhelming hidden majority.

I have just returned from the hugely popular Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate.

This celebration of crime writing brings together the glitterati we see on the bookshelves with those lesser known writers in an environment where you could literally find yourself holding the door for then chatting to people like Lee Child, Richard Osman or, strangely this year, Nicola Sturgeon.

There are literally hundreds of immensely talented authors who rarely get a look in at bookshops, some are self-published and most earn a pittance for their work.

I was lucky that my publisher secured airport shelf space for one of my books this Easter but few manage that.

A book takes on average a year to write when you consider the first draft can take even the most diligent author four months.

Then there is all the editing, re-drafting, cover design, marketing and eventually publication.

That last stage should be a major celebration but, in most cases, only those most prominent authors get the backing for big media splashes so the rest rely on their own networks and internet profiles to plead with people to choose their book over the latest blockbuster.

To further dampen down the low-profile, high-talented authors there is the explosion of “celebrity written” fiction jumping the queue.

I have absolutely no issue with high profile people from other walks of life finding they can write and carving out the time to pen a novel (and as I mentioned him already, Cuckfield educated Richard Osman is such a person – that man is just too clever).

What I do object to is those who use ghost writers yet hoodwink readers that what bears their name is their own work.

If a household name feels they have a story in them but realises they haven’t the ability or time to write it themselves, be honest.

They should credit the work to the actual writer with their own name in smaller font below.

But such candour is not good marketing so the purported writer perpetuates the myth that they have found yet another God-given talent and genuine struggling authors are pushed further down the pecking order.

I was a police officer for 30 years and while writing books is nowhere near as important as that, in different ways, it is as hard.

It is a lonely slog with no guarantee that anyone will like, let alone publish, what you’ve spent months mining from your imagination.

But it is addictive and we all plough on regardless, sometimes just satisfied that we have created something for its own sake or simply developed our writing skills.

As an adviser to scores of authors I receive dozens of books from people even I have never heard of, to either consult on or to provide a quote for.

The overwhelming majority are stunning, yet bob along unnoticed beneath the surface come publication day and beyond.

Next time you are browsing your local independent bookshop or one of the chains and see the latest bestseller in pride of place, go online or ask a knowledgeable bookseller to help you find something written by someone you have yet to discover, someone who has sweated blood to bring you a brilliant story, then buy their book too.

If you broaden your reading you’ll find worlds you never imagined, while at the same time nurturing a craft that risks being subsumed by the few and hijacked by those

whose wealth to employ others to write for them makes talent unnecessary.

l Former Brighton and Hove police chief Graham Bartlett writes the Brighton based Jo Howe crime novels