Anatomy of a six-figure book deal
Fascinating look at the making of Lenore Skenazy's six-figure book deal for Free Range Kids: Giving Our Kids the Freedom We Enjoyed Without Going Nuts With Worry (click through for her site/blog) based on this New York Sun article on letting her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone, up now at Alan Rinzler's The Book Deal. This is all in keeping with a book I'm going to post about soon, David Seaman's Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz - as in, getting people angry is good.
At this point it was a Wednesday afternoon in our San Francisco offices, and the end of day in NYC. My heart beat accelerated, a small vein in my temple began to pulse, and the situation escalated immediately to code red, taking control of my life. I stopped doing anything else, made some urgent calls to my immediate team, and emailed the proposal to my boss the publisher, his boss the President, and our team marketing manager, sales director, publicity guy, and many others, including big sales honchos and national account reps at our parent company John Wiley & Son’s corporate offices in Hoboken.
To justify paying a competitive six-figure advance, I’d need to persuade literally dozens of people throughout the company that we could sell enough copies to earn out in the first year enough royalties to equal or surpass whatever other companies were going to bid.
Labels: book blogs, book deal, Free Range Kids, Lenore Skenazy, publishing
1 Comments:
Thanks for the link! I wish I was clever enough/controversial enough to do that. I'm obviously not trying hard enough :)
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