So it’s looking a lot more like the third day of BEA here in London as the hard-core continue their work (often with suitcases nearby for tonight’s getaway) and the rest have fallen away, lightening aisles and rights tables alike. Even many of the scouts aren’t crazed with appointments today, which should tell you something. But anecdotal reports continue to indicate that a smaller, less frenized show has still been a fine show for the basic renewing of relationships and presentation of books for translation and secondary sales, along with ancillary international business of all kinds. As always, actual deal […]
Deals
Dan Brown Ready to Save Fall
Knopf Doubleday has announced that Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL will publish September 15, with a first printing said to be five million copies. Featuring the protagonist from the Da Vinci Code, Brown’s editor Jason Kaufman says “this book’s narrative takes place in a twelve-hour period, and from the first page, Dan’s readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. The Lost Symbol is full of surprises.” Brown adds, “This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey. Weaving five years of research into the story’s twelve-hour timeframe was […]
Scott Turow Leaves FSG for Grand Central
Scott Turow is leaving behind his hardcover publisher since 1987 Farrar, Straus for his longtime paperback publisher Grand Central, starting with a sequel to PRESUMED INNOCENT for publication in May 2010. He told the NYT “in an interview that it no longer made sense to have one house publishing his books in hardcover and another releasing them in paperback. Such arrangements were common when he first sold the rights to Presumed Innocent in 1986 but are much rarer now, especially for a bestselling author.” Agent Gail Hochman says, “We’re not unhappy with anything we’ve gotten, but it stretches the boundaries […]
Partial DFW Novel Emerges
Agent Bonnie Nadell and David Foster Wallace’s widow Karen Green found a partial manuscript of THE PALE KING two months after the writer suicided. This week’s New Yorker carries a brief excerpt, and Little, Brown has what publisher Michael Piestch calls a tentative agreement to publish the work in 2010. “The characters are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of ‘mindfulness’ — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should […]
Condoleezza Rice to Crown
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has reached a three-book deal with Crown. The first book, for publication in 2011, will be a memoir in which “Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House and as America’s top diplomat, and her role in protecting American security and shaping foreign policy during the extraordinary period from 2001-2009,” according to a statement. A memoir about her family is scheduled for 2012 and it will be published at the same time in a separate YA version. The AP cites “two publishing officials […]
Crown Backpedals on Dodd Deal
Crown tells a Connecticut newspaper that an announcement of deal with Senator Chris Dodd to publish 13 DAYS: How the Financial Crisis Changed Washington this summer was “information prematurely sent by the publisher.” Executive director for publicity Katie Wainwright writes that “in fact, Senator Dodd and Crown do not yet have a signed agreement” (not unusual, of course) and adds that “if Crown and Senator Dodd reach agreement, Senator Dodd plans to donate his proceeds from this forthcoming book to charity.”Journal Inquirer