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 […]
Deals
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 […]
Frankfurt Deal Trends Show Strong Sales, with Fiction and Debuts Rising
Recently we reported strong third-quarter dealmaking trends in the US, with near-record overall deal volumes, driven by continued strength in adult fiction, and balanced by some weakness in children’s book sales. Now it’s time for our usual look at the “pre-Frankfurt” dealmaking window in particular. Like last year, the Frankfurt Book Fair falls a week later than usual, so for the second year in a row the counts include one extra day of deal reports. (Often, FBF comes five weeks after Labor Day, so the count usually covers five weeks plus one day. When FBF falls late, starting from the […]
Third Quarter Deal Trends Show Continued Strength
So far this year, we’ve seen a record first quarter in domestic dealmaking, followed by a correction in the second quarter — which still was the second-best level in five years — and across both periods there was some weakness among the biggest deals, as well as a decline in total volume of deals from the Big Five on their own. Now, the third quarter of 2022 shows a mix of factors. Total deal volume rose again, up slightly (by 1.5 percent) and close to the record level from 2020. Non-fiction deals rebounded after a sharp falloff a year ago […]
Expanding Deals
As some of you may have noticed, we are finishing up another expansion and revision of Deals/Dealmakers categories, this time with an emphasis on our sprawling nonfiction section. Long overdue (someone finally asked), we have created a Body, Mind & Spirit category, so those projects will no longer be scattered among multiple ill-fitting tags. We have also split the rather unwieldy History/Politics/Current Affairs into two separate groups: History, on its own, and Politics/Current Affairs (which still holds a wide spectrum of topics, including climate, race, feminism, gender, legal & justice, urban studies, education and more, often broadly related to social […]
Second Quarter Deals
After a strong first quarter — perhaps buoyed by relatively early calendar returns for live versions of the Bologna (March 21) and London (April 5) book fairs — deal reports in the US for the second quarter hewed more closely to the sales pattern for print books as measured by NPD Bookscan. In other words, deal volume was down compared to a record-smashing second quarter in 2021, declining 9.1 percent, but was still well ahead of previous years (and 8 percent better than in 2019, which had been a peak period). And even though total deal volume fell, reported six-figure […]