Word: bookings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Heath's big score seems as unlikely as breaking the bank at Monte Carlo, it isn't. Like a gambler 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...
Take Joni Evans, publisher of adult trade books at Random House. Two years ago, when she worked in a top editing job at rival Simon & Schuster, Evans was so determined to keep author Mario Puzo in her literary camp that she offered him a $3 million advance for his next book, sight unseen. A competitor outbid her by $1 million, so she matched the offer. "When I have to have it, I have to have it," she explains. The Godfather author, who jumped to Random House when Evans moved there in late 1987, is expected to deliver his pricey manuscript...
Publishers are profligate these days partly because the competition forces them to be. The book industry's long march toward consolidation has left it dominated by about six major houses, each infused with capital, each run by managers whose favored reading is the bottom line, and each part of, or with ambitions to be, an international publishing conglomerate. In the past three years alone, the adult general-interest book trade has been transformed by at . least 16 major acquisitions, from the 1986 purchase of Doubleday by West Germany's Bertelsmann (price: $500 million) to last year's takeover of Macmillan...
...book bids escalate, so does the publishers' anxiety that they may be setting 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...
While the books of story spinners like Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz are usually reliable bets, a more striking measure of the risky bidding war is the six-figure contracts that publishers are dangling in front of unknown authors or those who would have been considered 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...