Word: best
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hooked on high-stakes roulette, the general-interest segment of the $15 billion book-publishing industry is on a binge. In this go- go market, which represents one-third of an industry that includes books ranging from college texts to Bibles, editors are frantically putting bets on any potential best sellers. In recent months, the spin of the wheel has made not only a construction worker but also a Yale history professor and several fresh college graduates richer than they ever could have imagined. Publishers say the bull market for manuscripts has become "hysterical," "desperate" and even "silly." Still, most...
...themselves up for major pratfalls. Says Evans: "Every day somebody gives us a time bomb. They look very pretty, and they're only costing you $2 million, but they're going to go off." Among last year's crop of six-figure books that failed to make the national best-seller lists: Jay McInerney's third novel, Story of My Life (Atlantic Monthly Press); George Bernau's first novel, Promises to Keep (Warner Books); and Studs Terkel's The Great Divide (Pantheon Books...
...hopelessly academic not long ago. Sometimes these eye-popping deals are based on a one-page proposal sent over a fax machine, or even on no proposal at all. Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, who received an advance of about $20,000 from Random House for his surprise 1988 best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, got $600,000 from the same publisher to write a second book that will take years to finish. Carolyn Heilbrun, whose nonfiction books have never sold more than 20,000 copies, just walked away with $350,000 from W.W. Norton...
What has increased the publishing industry's appetite for fresh manuscripts is a steady, decade-long expansion in the market for hard-cover best sellers. With their combined 2,100 outlets, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton have created a vast distribution system for general-interest hardcovers. The Book Industry Study Group estimates that retailers sold 286 million such books last year, up 33% from 1983, while publishers' revenues from those volumes nearly doubled, to an estimated $2.2 billion...
...While the heavy advances for potential best sellers have prompted some authors to fear publishers will neglect books of lesser commercial potential, the demand for new books has actually produced a greater variety at many firms. Doubleday plans to publish 18 literary novels this year by first- or second-time authors, in contrast to only two in 1986. Says literary agent Virginia Barber: "We used to get as little as $5,000 for a literary novel. Now it might sell...