While reporters still guess at George Bush’s advance, the NYT totals up President Obama’s earnings to date from his books: $8,605,429, and counting, based on disclosure forms. To clarify the CQ article we cited yesterday, which contained some errors (as did reports elsewhere), President Obama agreed in early January to a license of an abridged version of DREAMS OF OUR FATHERS for young readers, for a $500,000 advance. (Presidential aides indicate he will split the proceeds with Crown). Crown will create the abridgment, which President Obama will approve. A White House spokesperson told the NYT the president has not decided […]
New Releases/Forthcoming
Obama Signs Deal For Additional Nonfiction Work After He Leaves Office
Meanwhile, Congressional Quarterly reports that Barack Obama has signed a deal, again with Crown Books, for a youth-oriented version of DREAMS WITH MY FATHER as well as a nonfiction book after he leaves office. Obama reported $2.5 million in book royalties in 2008. CQ
George W. Bush to Write About 'Decision Points' for Crown
Former president George W. Bush is writing a book about decisions, reports the Associated Press. Robert Barnett negotiated world rights with Random House evp and publisher-at-large Steve Rubin, who will publish the tentatively titled DECISION POINTS with Crown in 2010. Instead of telling his life story, Bush “will concentrate on about a dozen personal and presidential choices” such as his choice of Dick Cheney as VP and sending troops to Iraq, his religious faith and his highly criticized response to Hurricane Katrina. “I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get […]
Patterson's Latest Collaborator
James Patterson is reaching across the ocean for his latest writing partner, working on a new thriller set primarily in Stockholm with Scandinavian crime writer Liza Marklund, best known for her Annika Bengtzon series. The book will be published in Sweden in 2010 with Marklund’s regular publisher Piratförlaget (of which she is a part owner), but that is the only territory sold so far. Robert Barnett at Williams & Connolly is representing rights for the US and the UK and has “a great deal of interest” from Patterson’s existing publishers in both territories. Linda Michaels, who was the “driving force […]
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 […]
Starbucks to Feature Actress's Memoir
Actress Isabel Gillies’s HAPPENS EVERY DAY: An All-Too-True Story, will be the next book featured in 7,000 Starbucks locations across the US. Known for playing Detective Stabler’s wife on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Gillies memoir is about “coming to terms with the collapse of her marriage.’ Starbucks will carry the book as of March 24, Scribner’s publication date. Thus far, after seven titles so far, the “Starbucks effect” remains vague. The coffee chain certainly sells plenty of copies through it own outlets, but that does not always correlate to broader trade sales. Their most successful “discovery” was clearly […]