Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...bought the publishing house of William Morrow for $25 million, he has closed three deals with individual authors that were each in excess of that amount. Naturally, the agents are fanning the bidding frenzy. Says Evans: "It used to be you would see if there was substance to a book. Now if you say, 'I'd like to meet the person,' or 'Can we have a conversation?', some agents impatiently go to someone else...
...their money. The major houses today have both hardcover and paperback imprints. To increase their chances of making a profit, they often insist, with authors ranging from Paul Kennedy to Stephen King, on acquiring the right to print properties in both forms. As another type of economic protection, book companies are taking advantage of their growing international reach by more often asking for foreign rights to a book...
...Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When longtime Farrar, Straus author Tom Wolfe scored a blockbuster in 1987-88 with his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (hard-cover copies sold: 750,000), rival publishing houses were rumored to be making offers of $15 million or more for his next book. Farrar, Straus, which had total revenues of only about $30 million last year, managed to assemble a deal with paperback publisher Bantam Books that paid Wolfe an estimated $5 million to $7 million. Says Roger Straus III, the publishing house's managing director: "It's a terrific strain...
...many editors, a major concern is that the chain-bookstore outlets, which give little space on their increasingly crowded shelves to titles without mass appeal, will eventually reduce the publishing industry's incentive to bring out worthy books if they don't seem headed for the best-seller lists. Random House editor Jason Epstein, for one, has undertaken on his own to produce a bookstore in the form of a mail-order catalog that will contain about 200 categories of books and more than 40,000 titles, each accompanied by a short explanation. The $24.95 catalog, the size...