A year after scrapping a 500-page followup, Elizabeth Gilbert went back to the drawing board and in January Viking will publish Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage, a memoir of the “tumultuous year” that came after the mega-success of Eat, Pray, Love (with 4 million copies sold as per Bookscan’s report) and “meditation on wedlock” to her Brazilian-Australian husband. Viking has announced a first printing of 1 million copies, but the NYT helpfully points out that while “such numbers are known to be widely exaggerated, they indicate the publisher’s ambitions.”NYT
New Releases/Forthcoming
Amazon Guarantees Release Day Delivery of THE LOST SYMBOL for hardcover, Kindle
Clearing up what few questions remained about how Amazon would approach the September 15 release day of Dan Brown’s THE LOST SYMBOL, the retailer announced this morning that the book would be available for “guaranteed delivery” via UPS (for the hardcover edition) and via wireless (for the Kindle edition.) The hardcover will be priced at $16.17, while the Kindle edition will bear the $9.99 pricetag.Release
Book Tour Experimentation: Margaret Atwood's Road Show, Twitter Book Tours
Margaret Atwood may have promoted previous books remotely via the LongPen, but for her upcoming novel THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD she’ll be a little more ever-present. The Toronto Star reports Atwood will tour the U.S., Europe and Canada “using a live performance with original music, local actors and the author herself as narrator.” Toronto Star Atwood is also starting a tour blog and using Twitter, as is Joseph Finder, who launches a Twitter Book Tour today for his new thriller VANISHED, running for the next three days. Finder website And Simon & Schuster’s worldwide publication of Philippa Gregory’s THE […]
Dan Brown Will Have A Simultaneous eBook
Suzanne Herz at Knopf Doubleday said this morning, “Now that all of our security and logistical issues surrounding the e-book of THE LOST SYMBOL have been resolved, the e-book will be released simultaneously with the hardcover on September 15th. We will not be issuing any further comment on this.”
Colleagues Say Cheney's Book Will Air His Disagreements with Bush
The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman runs a high-profile story based on friends and colleagues of former Vice President Dick Cheney who indicate his forthcoming memoir (not expected for publication until 2011) will have plenty of tales to tell. One story has Cheney upset that President Bush developed a mind of his own in his second term: “Cheney’s disappointment with the former president surfaced recently in one of the informal conversations he is holding to discuss the book with authors, diplomats, policy experts and past colleagues. “‘In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,’ said a participant […]
Proposed or Forthcoming
The WSJ reports that recently-free journalist Laura Ling is teaming with her sister, Oprah Winfrey Show correspondent Lisa Ling, for a book proposal “hat will examine the meaning of sisterhood and journalistic ideals. The issue of Laura Ling’s captivity will be discussed, but in a larger context.” They are represented by Suzanne Gluck at William Morris Endeavor.WSJ blog Separately, USA Today has more details on the Michael Jackson coffee table book deal approved the judge overseeing the pop star’s estate. High-end publisher Kraken Opus says they had been negotiating a book deal with Jackson prior to his death and Jackson’s […]