Word: williame
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...construction work and humping freight on loading docks, but without graduating far beyond the minimum wage. So to nurse his bank account and a romantic ambition, Heath pulled out his typewriter and tapped out a novel based on his days as a helicopter pilot in Viet Nam. In March William Morrow and Avon Books paid Heath $300,000 for his novel, CW2 (after his former military rank, chief warrant officer, second grade). "Beats the brick business," says Heath. "But then, anything beats the brick business...
Less than four years ago, the publishing world gasped at the $5 million advance that William Morrow and Avon Books paid for hard-cover and soft-cover rights to James Clavell's Whirlwind. That record-breaking sum has since been equaled or topped repeatedly. Horror writer Stephen King was reportedly promised between $30 million and $40 million for his next four thrillers, to be published by Viking Penguin and New American Library. Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books shelled out $10.1 million for the next five novels from suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark. Warner Books paid Southern historical novelist Alexandra Ripley...
...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 by British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell ($2.7 billion). As early as 1987, Warner Books chairman William Sarnoff quipped at the booksellers' convention in Washington that soon "we'll all just meet at the office of the lone remaining publisher." At this point, according to James Milliot, editor of the industry newsletter BP Report, the top six publishing houses reap 60% of all adult-book revenues...
...deliver blockbusters is limited, literary agents have amassed unprecedented clout. One of the most powerful is Manhattan's Morton Janklow, whose literary agency represents such hugely commercial writers as Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins. Janklow boasts that since 1981, when the Hearst Corp. 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...
...Core philosophy has drawn harsh criticism from the academic right, including former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, who has tagged the program "Core lite...