(no subject)

[ksmith]

I haven't read The Time Traveler's Wife, but it did sell rather well. Well enough for Scribner to pay Audrey Niffenegger $4.8 million for her next book.

"It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world."

Just...wow. And for skiffy, yet.

By way of Mediabistro.

UPDATE: dip into the Times article. It's the "only" in front of the $100,000 (The amount that Niffenegger was paid for TTTW) that gets to me. Yes, I know--mainstream and genre are different worlds. I know.

Comments

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

This whole business does strike me as a bad plan, given the economy. Too many mainstream authors are indeed one-hit wonders.

The dynamic of genres is that of "building" authors. You drop their books into a modest ready market and try to gain new readers with each book. If they can eventually break out from their genre ghetto and into the mainstream, then the real cash starts rolling in.

The best statement I ever heard regarding auctions: "All that means is that you paid more for the book than your peers were willing to risk."

I certainly don't want to see Ms. Niffenegger get hurt by a tanking book, but a part of me always wishes for such a huge advance to not pay off, just to teach editors a lesson to stop behaving like addicts at the craps table.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Is the expectation that the advance would be earned back by hardcover sales only, or are mmpb, book clubs, audio included as well? Foreign sales? It may be a dumb question, but I wonder how quickly the publisher needs to earn back this investment.

I keep hearing that publishers have abandoned the midlist. No more nurturing. One book, two books, three at the most--if you haven't broken out by then, you're replaced with a new, baggage-free writer.

I will admit that I see it to some degree, but not across the board. There is still a midlist, at least in genreland. I don't know about mainstream.