Booksellers and industry insiders alike were astounded a few years ago when Elizabeth Kostova’s book The Historian went to auction and sold for $2 million to Time Warner, and the movie rights went to Sony for $1.5 million. What made Kostova’s accomplishment so remarkable was that The Historian was her first book, a 600-page, historical fiction tome. (And very good, if you’ve got the arm muscle tone.) It’s not uncommon to see a celebrity or established, mainstream author get a book published in a snap, but it is a surprise when a newcomer can sweep up the industry.
Still, seven-figure advances like Kostova’s aren’t common, for celebrity or debut authors, fiction or nonfiction. That’s why it is big news in the New York Times this week that Suzy Welch, the former HBR editor and the wife of Jack Welch, has agreed to sell the rights to her new book, “10-10-10,” to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for a seven-figure advance. The premise of the book is this:

“Based on an article Ms. Welch wrote for O, the Oprah Magazine, in 2006, the book offers strategies for making decisions in which people think about what the consequences of a decision will be in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years.”

The Historian was a run-away best seller; it’ll be exciting to see how Welch’s “10-10-10″ does.

All opinions on Kindle aside, have you seen its packaging? Pretty spiffy.

* Image from Bad Banana Blog.

It’s always interesting to go back and see what the publishing community predicted would do well in a given season. Last May, Publishers Weekly had a great piece about trends in business book publishing. Todd blogged about it in June. From the article:

Business book publishing is no different than what it purports to cover: it is all about either anticipating or (ideally) creating trends. As technology, market forces and consumer preferences change locally and globally, business must react and innovate to stay competitive. The management of people, of course, is key to keeping up, and that’s where business management titles come in. Our preview of some selected fall titles demonstrates that there is no handy consensus as to what the near future requires in terms of managing a business.

While you might argue fairly that business book publishing is about more than trends, we certainly do keep our eyes peeled for books that address the issues facing businesses today.
The article featured eight publishers who talked about trends they noticed in publishing, and the books that promised to be big this fall. Just browsing the list, I see that at least McGraw-Hill, Crown, Kaplan, and Portfolio (with Seth Godin’s book) were right on. I have a feeling AMACOM’s book, One Foot Out the Door, could be a sleeper success this winter.
Have you read any of these titles? What do you think?

With 66 bookstores in airports all over North America, you may know Hudson Booksellers from your travels. They have now decided that it is time to help busy travelers select the books they sell, announcing their picks of the best books of 2007. It’s a pretty long list, with selections in the fields of fiction, non-fiction, children’s, and–aha!–business! The business titles selected are:

* Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner
* Microtrends by Mark Penn
* The No Asshole Rule by Robb Sutton
* The Black Swan by Nasim Nicholas Taleb
* Wikinomics by Don Tapscott

You’ll notice two of the books, Wikinomics and The Black Swan, were also on the FT/Goldman Sachs Award shortlist, and The No Asshole Rule won The Quill Award in the business category. I think it’s a great idea to put this list out, and the categories here should cater well to different kinds of travelers. They even offer two additional categories to extend the list for more voracious readers. One is called “Books We Love”, and the other is “Newsworthy/Noteworthy”. If you’d like to see the titles in the other categories, you can find it on their website. You should also begin seeing the list posted in their stores beginning December 1st.

The Best-Seller List is one of the most fascinating and confusing aspects of the book publishing industry. Almost every time we work with a business book author, a conversation comes up about what being on the list means, and how a book can “hit” it. Having a best-seller can really make an author’s success and drive future sales of the book, and future sales of future books…while at the same time many truly wonderful books will never hit the list.
Sunday’s New York Times had a great article about the its Best-Seller List: “Books for the Ages, if Not for the Best-Seller List” by Clark Hoyt. One question we’re often asked is, How many books do I have to sell to make the list? It’s a tough question to answer because the list is such a complicated beast. Booksellers report their sales in different ways, long-standing best-sellers might be taken off the list to give new books a chance to shine, and even books with very high sales numbers might not make the list because of timing–especially when several big books hit the shelves at the same time. Hoyt explains some of these discrepancies:

There are usually differences between the Times list and others, often, apparently, because of timing or because different lists put books in different categories. USA Today, for example, combines all books — fiction, nonfiction, paperback and hardcover — into a single list. No book is ever banished as an “evergreen,” meaning “Night” can be found at No. 129 this week, nine spots below “The Official SAT Study Guide.” But “for what The New York Times is doing,” Sorensen said, “it’s very accurate.”
Why banish a book just because it has been around a long time? The Times wants a list “that’s lively and churns and affords new authors the opportunity to be recorded,” Hofmann said.

I encourage you to check out the article if you’re at all interested in how certain books end up on that list in Sunday’s book section of the newspaper. While the article doesn’t go deep into the science of the bestseller list, it does show it has been set up to generate an interesting list that is a reflection of real sales and consumers’ current interests.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/opinion/21pubed.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin