The late Paul Reubens’ publicist Kelly Bush Novak told WIAT CBS 42 in Alabama that the actor had “finished a first draft” of a memoir about his life and career before he died of cancer on Monday. “We are hoping it will be published posthumously,” Novack told the station.
Deals
Dealmaking Rebounded In the Second Quarter
The year opened with a weak first quarter of dealmaking, following two record years, but the market appeared to have been held back by the strike at Harper Collins, along with later dates for the spring book fairs. Now, we can see with more clarity that deal reports rose modestly in the second quarter, up 2.7 percent overall. The main weakness was in children’s books, which has looked overbought for a while. Indeed, children’s sales fell 9.8 percent, back to their level from 2020. Adult fiction continued its strong run — matched by consumer sales — rising 7.1 percent in […]
Deals Fell In the First Quarter, As Big Publishers Invested Less
Deal reports took a discernible step back in the first quarter, after setting significant records in 2021 and then again in 2022. (Last year, the first quarter was the strongest period the whole year, with total US deal volume ending up down by 1.5 percent.) Total deals registered 4.4 percent lower than in the big Q1 2022, but “core” deals (excluding our digital deals category) declined 8 percent. Similarly, deals from the five largest trade publishers on their own also declined 8.5 percent, leading the market down, primarily due to the two biggest players. Digital deals rose sharply for the […]
Fourth Quarter Deals
Today we report on dealmaking statistics for both the fourth quarter of 2022 as well as the full year — which means that most of our focus is on the annual trends. To recap: The first quarter continued the boom from 2021, setting a new record for overall deal volume, as reported six-figure transactions softened a little to the second-best quarter in years. The second quarter hewed more closely to the sales pattern for print books, with deal volume declining 9.1 percent, but still well ahead of previous years, as reported six-figure deals held flat with 2021, still at record […]
Forthcoming: Patterson to Co-Author Unfinished Crichton Novel
James Patterson will complete an unfinished manuscript by Michael Crichton, who died in 2008, the WSJ reports. The as-yet-untitled novel was sold to Little, Brown by Shane Salerno for production company CrichtonSun and Robert Barnett for Patterson, and is about “a mega-eruption of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano that can destroy not just the island but the entire world” due to a secret cache of chemical weapons. It’s scheduled to be published in 2024. Crichton’s widow (and chief executive of CrichtonSun) Sherri Crichton said the existing manuscript was over 100 pages. “Michael had been working on this book for years, it […]
Book Musk
Ben Mezrich‘s BREAKING TWITTER is in the works already for a planned fall 2023 release, edited by Karyn Marcus at Grand Central, the WSJ reports. Mezrich will look at “the culture clash between the right and the left, but also about what free speech means.” The publisher confirmed the release, and said it is part of their earlier multi-book deal with Mezrich that included THE ANTIOSOCIAL NETWORK and his novel THE MIDNIGHT RIDE. They say the book “will capture the incredibly public and darkly comic battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, and influential men of our time—Elon Musk—and […]