After announcing a couple of book deals with himself via Deadline.com, writer/director Michael Mann is reported to have made a deal for his eponymous imprint with HarperCollins. David Highfill is said to be overseeing the books for the publisher, acquiring world rights to three Mann-co-authored books, sold by Shane Salerno at The Story Factory and attorney Harold Brown. The first title is by Mann and fellow Salerno client Don Winslow, a novel about the complex relationship between organized crime figures Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana for publication in 2017. The second will be a prequel to Mann’s Heat. Separately, Spiegel & Grau executive editor Chris Jackson […]
Deals
Scribner Acquires Majority of Stephen King Backlist
After 20 years of publishing new works by Stephen King, Scribner announced that it has print, ebook, and audio rights to “almost the entirety of the bestselling author’s body of work,” comprising 27 titles. (They have North American and open market rights for the licensed titles.) Nan Graham negotiated the deal for Scribner — as well as Gallery/Pocket and Simon & Schuster Audio — with Chuck Verrill at Darhansoff & Verrill. The agreement covers works including IT, Misery, Dolores Claiborne, Christine, Cujo, The Dead Zone, and Firestarter, and the first four volumes of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. The company will start issuing ebook and […]
Will Frankfurt Deals Pick Up?
Every year we check in on deal volume and pricing a couple of times ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair. This season is a little unusual in that the Fair is a week later than usual this year, and Labor Day was late — perhaps delaying the beginning of the fall selling period. But for the month of September, which has been our consistent “first measure” for years, US deal volume lagged measurably. Last year we recorded 603 US deals in September, compared to 593 deals in 2013 — but this year, we posted only 506 deals during the month. US […]
For the Record: Clinton Got Over $8.5 Million for Latest Book
A few days ago Hillary Rodham Clinton released her tax returns for the years 2007 through 2014 (and when she had run for president in 2007, she had made public the Clintons’ tax returns for the years 2000 through 2006). The returns show that Clinton was paid over $8.5 million by Simon & Schuster for her 2014 book HARD CHOICES. She received $3 million after agreeing to the book deal in 2013, and reported another $5,563,867 from S&S in 2014 (figure the balance of the advance, and maybe some pass-through rights income). (Added later: Clinton’s 2015 tax return showed an […]
People, Etc.
Sara Sargent will return to Harper Children’s on July 13, in the new position of executive editor, reporting to Kate Jackson. She will acquire teen, middle grade and picture book fiction and nonfiction titles “created from or around digital and social media content. Sargent was most recently at Simon & Schuster, Robert Bolick is joining the International Baccalaureate (IB) as head of digital publishing & language services. After many years at McGraw-Hill Education, most recently he has been director of digital business transformation at the British Standards Institution. Awards The ALA presented their Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence to Anthony Doerr for All the Light We Cannot See for fiction, and […]
In London, Everything Old Is New Again
In a year of transitions for three of the world’s major book fairs, the London Book Fair opened Tuesday in a return to its historical home at the Olympia Exhibition Center. You can go home again, but usually by the time you do, someone has redecorated, and today LBF veterans went through multiple stages of soothing the cognitive dissonance of the return to Olympia. While there is a vague familiarity to the scene, everything is very different as well, and many fairgoers spent much of the opening morning getting situated. First there was the transportation, since the special above-ground train […]