Matt McCarthy’s recently-published ODD MAN OUT, his “his salacious memoir of his summer as an obscure minor league pitcher,” is full of “wide-ranging errors and misquotations” according to the NYT. “Statistics from that season, transaction listings and interviews with his former teammates indicate that many portions of the book are incorrect, embellished or impossible.” Are they minor chronological errors and the complaints of those who are depicted in an unflattering light, or indications of a seriously flawed or even invented narrative? The newspaper clearly implies the latter–but would they have treated Ball Four the same way if it were published […]
Graphic Novel App From Hachette/Patterson/ScrollMotion
ScrollMotion’s Iceberg Reader fell into the background the last couple of months but a new app shows what makes this technology different from popular text readers from Stanza, eReader and Shortcovers: the graphics. They have adapted James Patterson’s graphic novel DANIEL X into a paid iTunes app that “plays” the book more like a video (and gets around the lack of Flash for iPhone/iPod Touch). Or, as the company puts it, they allow “users to move the story forward or backward with a swipe of the finger, and engage the graphic novel in several other ways never before seen.” Hachette […]
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 […]
Lunch Weekly for Monday, March 2
Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up FICTION Debut Washington Post contributor Terence Shine’s NOTHING HAPPENS UNTIL IT HAPPENS TO […]
People
Agent Brendan Deneen has joined FinePrint Literary Management. He had been at Objective Entertainment. Robert Riger will join Simon & Schuster Audio as director of the Pimsleur Language Program, taking over from Whit Waterbury. Most recently Riger had been vp, publisher of SparkNotes before leaving last year. In France, Vianney de la Boulaye has joined Hachette Livre as vp, legal affairs, replacing Christine Auffray, who has left the company. Fred Kaplan, author of Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer was named as biographer of the year by online publication The Biographer’s Craft. The BISG is conducting an online survey of […]
Currency Drives Strong Year for Penguin and Pearson
As expected, Penguin rode the big swing in dollar/pound exchange rates to sales for the year of 903 pounds, a 6.7 percent increase, as adjusted operating profit rose 26 percent, to 93 million pounds, exceeding the company’s long-discussed target margin of 10 percent a year. (On a “constant exchange rate basis,” though, the company says sales were flat, and profits rose 4 percent; on an underlying basis, after accounting for the sale of a small wholesaling business in 2007, sales grew 3 percent.) Those profit gains came in spite of a charge in the “the small units of millions of […]