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1. Ted Kennedy gets $8-million-plus advance
for autobiography 1. Ted Kennedy gets $8-million-plus advance for autobiography Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the most prominent surviving member of the Kennedy family, has agreed to sell his memoirs for an advance of more than $8 million, people with knowledge of the negotiations say. After a six-day auction that concluded Nov. 19, Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA’s Grand Central Publishing, bought world rights for the autobiography. Before the deal can be completed, Kennedy must clear his publishing contract with the Senate Ethics Committee. Publishers reportedly paid $2 million just to get in the running to bid for the rights to the Massachusetts Senator’s autobiography, which was expected to go for $4 to $8 million, according to publishing sources. Neither Kennedy's office nor the publishing house would reveal the size of the successful offer, but a publishing figure familiar with the deal said Kennedy's payment was one of the largest in history, eclipsing the $8 million given to New York Senator Hillary Clinton. Former President Clinton and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair each got a reported $10 million for their memoirs. The book may be a winner, shedding new light on the triumphs and tragedies of Kennedy's life, from growing up and early political success to the heartbreak of his brothers' assassinations and the scandal of Chappaquiddick. But it might also turn out to be a dud, about his political views, which would appeal only to a narrow audience. Last year, Kennedy wrote My Senator and Me: A Dog's-Eye View of Washington, D.C, with Splash, his Portuguese Water Dog, and the book did well. Jonathan Karp, publisher and editor in chief of Twelve, said he hoped to publish the book in the fall of 2010, the year marking the 50th anniversary of the election of the senator's brother, President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, 75, was first elected as the Democratic senator from Massachusetts for a partial term in 1962 after his brother John F. Kennedy became president. He was then elected to eight full terms and ranks second only to Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, in length of service. For the past three years, Kennedy has been working with the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia on an oral history of his life, and those tapes will serve as source material for his autobiography. Kennedy, who will work with a collaborator and a researcher, is expected to write candidly about his personal history, including the 1969 Chappaquiddick accident in which he drove a car off a bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a former member of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy’s staff. The Kopechne incident is widely believed to have led to the failure of Ted Kennedy’s 1980 bid for the presidency. Robert B. Barnett, the lawyer who negotiated the deal for Kennedy, said foreign publishers had already expressed interest in the book. Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to Kennedy, said the senator would donate a “significant proportion of the proceeds” to charity. Kennedy plans to donate his private and public papers to the John F. Kennedy Library and will use a portion of the book's proceeds to pay for the processing, preservation, and digitalization of those papers, Cutter said.
2. Publisher says novel to be released in January written by a computer It used to be claimed that if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with plenty of typewriters, one of them would eventually write Shakespeare’s plays. So, could a single powerful computer programmed by some Russian software gurus and language specialists write a novel? Unlikely, according to most computer experts, but a Russian publisher says it’s been done. The basic story line of what the publisher claims is the first computer-generated novel, conditionally titled ‘[True love]*.wrt’, is the love story of Anna Karenina’s main characters. The action takes place on an unknown island in times similar to the present. The book is written in Haruki Murakami’s manner, while the style is based on the vocabulary, language and literary tools of 13 Russian and foreign authors of the 19th and 20th centuries. The chief editor of Russian publishing house Astrel SPb, Alexander Prokopovich, told CNews that, to write the novel, a group of software developers and philologists created a program dubbed PC Writer 2008. The philologists compiled dossiers on each novel character, which described the characters' appearance, vocabulary, psychological portrait and other characteristics. The initial situation to generate the novel was then developed over the course of three days. The first version of the novel did not seem interesting enough to the publishing house, so initial data was revised and the program then generated a second version in three days. After that, the manuscript, like any other novel to be published, went through editorial corrections. Astrel SPb’s chief editor says 10,000 copies of the novel will be issued. If the experiment proves a success, then other computer novels will be published. Alexander Prokopovich told CNews the aggregate cost for the novel creation was twice as low as the honorarium paid to Russian authors on the country’s top-10 list. Because the software to generate text has already been developed, future expenses are expected to be less. A St. Petersburg literary gaggle doubts the book was really written by a computer. “A computer might hardly write such a novel. All of us know quite well how the e-translators usually operate. The given programs are efficient only in the hands of an experienced specialist, but are not able to produce a coherent text themselves. And of course a computer is unlikely to write a novel,” says Anna Makarevich, chief editor of the magazine Prochteniye. If the book was not written by a computer, at least give the Russian publisher credit for coming up with a story that’s likely to attract global publicity. 3. Selling your book business? Prepare income/expense records for last three years This is another in a series of articles about selling publishing houses and other literary properties. If you’re thinking of selling a publishing business, buyers are going to want to see a statement of the revenues your business is generating, the expenses you’ve incurred and the profit your business is making. If the data is available for at least the last three fiscal years, that is much more impressive than data for one or two years only. Following is a statement of income and expenses for three years from a fictional publishing house where the owner does a considerable amount of consulting. Data in the table is not actual, but it comes very close to the performance reported by one of the publishing houses Anvil Brokers recently represented. The important thing is to note is how the table is crafted to make it easy for a potential buyer to evaluate the business. Note also that net profit after expenses has been increasing in each of the last few years. That’s something buyers like to see. A business that is growing, and showing a strong profit, has far more value in the marketplace than one where net income is sliding downhill. Typically, we would recommend listing such a business at 90 percent of most recent year gross income, and hope to sell it for 83 percent of that. However, we’ve seen businesses sell for up to three standard deviations on either side of the mean average we just cited.
If you’re in an acquisitive mode, and would like to buy a business with a similar track record, please contact us at 770-938-0289 or email custserv@anvilpub.com. We currently have listed or in the process of listing some four dozen properties ranging from a few thousand dollars to several millions of dollars. In aggregate, these properties have a price tag of over $16 million.
4. Tor Books partners with Seven Seas to form new manga imprint Tor Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, which claims to be the largest publisher of science fiction in the world, has formed a new manga imprint with Seven Seas Entertainment, LLC. Seven Seas, founded in 2004, publishes manga, manga-inspired novels and illustrated juvenile fiction, and is one of the only publishers that produces original manga content in the US. The new Tor/Seven Seas imprint will showcase the efforts of both companies working together to jointly acquire and co-publish some of Japan's best-selling and most exciting manga series, light novels, and other fiction. Beginning with books scheduled for publication in early 2008, Tor will also be distributing new Seven Seas titles every month, under the Seven Seas imprint. Manga (pronounced mahn-gah, with a hard “g”), the Japanese version of comic books, is a publishing phenomenon that, in 2006, represented a $4.4 billion market in Japan and a $175-200 million market in the U.S. In August 2008, Tor and Seven Seas will publish their first collaborative venture under the Tor/Seven Seas imprint, the manga Afro Samurai, written and illustrated by Takashi Okazaki. Afro Samurai, created in Japan but releasing here in the U.S. for the first time, was the basis for the popular Spike TV anime series that premiered in 2007 and featured the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Ron Perlman and Kelly Hu. The publication of Afro Samurai will kick off a multi-platform promotional campaign, including an Afro Samurai video game by Namco and the launch of Spike TV's second Afro Samurai season, both slated for fall 2008. In an interview with the Associated Press, Afro Samurai's author, Takashi Okazaki, explained that Afro's character was inspired by musicians he saw on old episodes of the television program "Soul Train," which aired in the 1990s in Japan, and that "I also loved Japanese samurai flicks. So one day, I combined the two." Jason DeAngelis, founder and chief creative officer at Seven Seas, lived, worked, and studied martial arts in Japan for six years. His fluency in Japanese brought him work translating such prominent manga titles as Berserk and Gundam Seed. Jason oversees the production of Seven Seas' original projects. 5. Breaking news from the book barons The third book by stock market guru Jim Cramer was released in December. Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life ($26) is likely to enjoy hefty sales as he promotes it on his popular CNBC television show. According to Ed Nawotka, writing for Bloomberg, Cramer’s two previous books, Jim Cramer's Real Money (2005) and Jim Cramer's Mad Money (2006), sold 476,000 copies and 258,000 copies respectively, based on Nielsen BookScan data. Simon & Schuster printed 350,000 copies for the initial December bookstore release of the new Cramer book... While Cramer has a national television audience for his platform, prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen not only has that but a devoted Christian following as well for his platform. So while Cramer’s book had a piddling first printing of 350,000 copies, Osteen’s recently released second book had an initial printing of three million copies, nearly 10 times that. Osteen’s Become a Better You recently debuted at No. 1 on major bestseller lists. In a confidential deal with Free Press reported to be worth as much as $13 million, Lakewood Church of Houston Pastor Osteen delivered a guaranteed audience. The nondenominational church he pastors is America's largest congregation with 45,000 members. Broadcasts of Osteen's weekly services are shown on seven networks in the United States and reach more than 100 countries. His church also has e-mail lists of 750,000 people, and his first book, Your Best Life Now, has sold nearly five million copies since 2004. Chain bookstores began taking advance orders for Become a Better You from customers two months prior to publication… Hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management has been slowly increasing its ownership of Borders Group. In November, it reported that it owns 17.1 percent of the company, up from 11.7 percent in October. Usually when an investor takes a large position in a stock, its price goes up. But Borders stock has been steadily declining in value as Barnes & Noble takes away market share from it… According to The Times of London, Guiness World Records has been put up for sale by its owner, Hit Entertainment, with a price tag close to £60m (over $120 million). The company wants to concentrate on developing kids’ characters such as Bob the Builder and Barney the Dinosaur. Hit hopes buyers will recognize Guiness’s valuable intellectual property and recurring revenues. First published in 1955, GWR has sold 110 million books worldwide and has been translated into 37 languages. GWR was sold to Hit by Diageo, owner of Guinness stout, in 1997… Alibris, a much maligned book marketplace that has long played fourth fiddle to Abebooks, Amazon Marketplace and eBay, has announced that founder Marty Manley is stepping down after 10 years to start a new company. Alibris President and COO Brian Elliott will become CEO of the online book, music, and movie exchange as of 2008…
6. Mosley writing new series featuring African-American PI in New York Walter Mosley, the award-winning New York Times best-selling author, has agreed to a three-book deal with Riverhead Books. The books will be edited by Sean McDonald of Riverhead, who acquired world hardcover, paperback and audio rights to the works from literary agent Gloria Loomis of Watkins Loomis. Two of the books will be part of a new mystery series Mosley is launching that will feature Leonid McGill, an African-American private investigator based in contemporary New York City. The character was first introduced by Mosley in one of his short stories, "Karma," which was included in the Best American Mystery Stories of 2006 anthology. The first book in Mosley's new series will be published in hardcover by Riverhead in 2009, with NAL publishing the title in paperback the following year. Mosley will also be writing a literary novel for Riverhead. On Dec. 26, not part of the Riverhead deal, Bloomsbury will release 60,000 copies of Mosley's third book this year into stores: Diablerie is an erotic thriller about a philandering computer programmer for a New York City bank. Mosley is the author of 27 critically acclaimed books and his work has been translated into 23 languages. His popular mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins began with Devil in a Blue Dress in 1990, later made into a movie starring Denzel Washington. Others in the series include Black Betty, A Little Yellow Dog and the current New York Times bestseller, Blonde Faith. Mosley has also written novels outside of his two mystery series including literary fiction (Killing Johnny Fry, Fortunate Son, The Man in My Basement, RL's Dream, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, and Walkin' the Dog), science fiction (The Wave, Blue Light and Futureland), works of nonfiction (This Year You Write Your Novel, Life Out of Context, Workin' on the Chain Gang and What Next) and a young adult novel, 47. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Mosley now lives in New York City.
7. This time it’s Jezebel: books focus on Bible’s bad girls Few historical characters rival Jezebel for negative stereotypes. Today, “she’s a household word for badness,” one scholar says. Culturally, she’s portrayed as a brash, sexually provocative woman wearing too much make-up, another observes. So in her new book, author Lesley Hazleton strives to set aside stereotypes and cultural images and show whom Jezebel, one of history’s most infamous women, really was. “She was a magnificent, proud, powerful queen of Israel,” said Hazleton, author of the recently released Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen. “She was anything but the harlot and the slut of legend.” Jezebel was a Phoenician princess whose marriage to Israel’s King Ahab was one of political convenience. She ran into trouble with the prophet Elijah when she brought her many gods to monotheistic Israel. After a 31-year reign, she died a gruesome death, pushed out of a window and trampled by horses, then eaten by dogs. In today’s society, Jezebel means prostitute, an association Hazleton said springs from the “dismaying literalism” with which people have read an Old Testament metaphor. Biblical authors, not unlike modern writers, knew they could get their readers’ attention by sexualizing their material, Hazleton said. And so, they used the term “harlot” to describe people who abandoned Israel’s God to pursue foreign gods. Jehu, the man who killed Jezebel, forever linked the word “harlot” with her name when he asked her son: “What peace, so long as the harlotries of your mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?” (2 Kings 9:22). Alice Ogden Bellis, a professor at Howard University School of Divinity and author of Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes, a book about Old Testament women, agreed the writer’s metaphor has been dangerously misconstrued. “The narrator is not accusing her (Jezebel) of any sexual impropriety,” she said. Hazleton’s book is the latest installment in a continuing trend of books focusing on the overlooked stories of biblical women. Liz Curtis Higgs wrote Bad Girls of the Bible in 1999, focusing on some of the not-so-nice women in the Bible. She agreed Jezebel had a powerful personality and strong leadership abilities, but does not put the queen in such a good light in her book. “Hers is a tragic story when you get right down to it, because she had so much potential,” Higgs said. “But she was working for the wrong God.” Bellis wrote her book when she couldn’t find a textbook to use in her graduate school class on Hebrew women. Her work surveys the literature - academic, creative and sermonic - written about biblical women. In the last 30 years, “most of the books written about women in the Bible have been written by women,” Bellis observed. And while some women wrote on this subject before the 1970s, she said most treatments were nonacademic. The advent of birth control, though, combined with increased accessibility to higher education, launched women from the home into careers that allowed them to write scholarly works. “Basically, the profusion of books on women in the Bible... has coincided with the women’s movement and the increasing numbers of academically trained female biblical scholars,” Bellis said. Recent years have brought an “increased interest in historical women, period,” Higgs said. Women are interested in stories that have stood the test of time, she said. As a Christian, Higgs finds herself inspired by stories of virtuous women. But as a human, the stories of the Bible’s “bad girls” intrigue her. “They’re the ones I’m most like,” she said. (Source: news release by Heather Donckels, Religion News Service) 8. There be sharks: Be careful of where you’re swimming in the book biz Where should you look for a publisher if you’re a fledgling romance writer? One place where you might find it helpful to start is at the Web site of Brenda_Hiatt. She’s done extensive research on romance publishers and what they pay for books published in conventional and digital formats. She has information on the solid romance publishers and what they pay. You might be cautious of publishers who are on list but don’t pay at least a $1,000 advance against royalties. You won’t likely sell many books with the ones who don’t pay advances – and publishing with one that doesn’t pay at least a $1,000 advance will likely exclude you from participating as a panelist at the annual convention of the Romance Writers of America… Many writers who have trouble finding a conventional publisher turn to self-publishing or to e-book publishers. The latter, while they usually pay royalties but not advances, are more likely to publish material that would never see the light of day at the conventional houses. The problem with them is, as you might guess if you’ve been reading back issues of the Southern Review, is that not all the e-book publishers, especially those who specialize in erotica, are financially solid. Look at Triskelion and Mardi Gras for examples. Some of the less solvent ones promise to pay royalties but don’t. If you publish with one of the marginal fly-by-nighters, you could easily end up with your copyright tied up in a future bankruptcy action. Before commiting, you might check the Web site of Piers Anthony, who tracks the fortunes of digital publishers. The reason e-book publishers are more likely to accept marginal material is that the cost of entry into e-book publishing is even less than the cost of print on demand or POD publishing of ink and paper books. In part because of the low cost of entry, the e-book industry is growing at double-digit rates, compared to the conventional book industry, where sales are stagnant. But the e-book industry is still miniscule compared to the conventional book publishing industry. The Association of American Publishers puts 2006 e-book sales at $54 million, representing 0.02 percent of total book sales of $24.2 billion. Romances are one of the more popular e-book genres. Harlequin Enterprises Ltd. publishes 120 to 140 romantic novels per month, all of which are also sold as e-books. It has also started selling short stories exclusively as e-books, selling them for 89 cents. But even at Harlequin, e-books still make up less than one percent of sales, according to Malle Vallik, the company's director of digital content…
9. Oklahoma couple prosper by publishing local, regional history titles
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