Publishing chequebooks
Book Notes loves the annual stories of the millions that publishers spend on book rights every year. The mixture of greed and grubby expectation is energising enough to make us think of dusting down that half-finished novel that's turning yellow on the top shelf.
If Alan Greenspan can command $8 million before writing a word, would our efforts not be worth a deposit for a small apartment? The problem is that the world always forgets the huge advance by the time the book arrives. Except we've been keeping notes. Charles Fraser was paid $8 million for the rights to his second book in 2002. His debut was Cold Mountain, a huge international success that sold over 4 million copies in the US. The new book, Thirteen Moons, like Cold Mountain is set in the nineteenth century Deep South and is keeping many executives very nervous, especially as it is arriving two years late. This side of the Atlantic the hunger for biographies continues unsated – over a million people have bought Jeremy Clarkson's The World According to Clarkson in the last year. The big effort of the summer will be keeping comedian Peter Kay's life story in stock. Even the universal disapproval for all things Mourinho will not diminish the arrival of Jose Mourinho's The Special One just in time for the new football season. The only trouble on the horizon is for Harper Collins who, due to a pair of thin boots, are left trying to fill the pages of Wayne Rooney's World Cup diaries after investing £5 million in them two months ago. They'll probably learn from the similar experiences in Ireland with Brian O'Driscoll's Rugby diaries in 2005. Some sports fans will buy just about anything…
View from the seven towers
Did Seven Towers publishing company, new to the Irish market, really take their name from the seven types of books they intend to publish and not, as Village mused, from U2's Running to Stand Still. They mark their arrival on the Irish book market with The Death of Finn by Oran Ryan, available now. For details contact info@seventowers.ie. The publishers are 'author's agents' which is presumably a cute way of suggesting that they have less people doing more work. Regardless, they have come up with some market innovations to help them stand out. The book covers are in a distinctive brown and orange pattern, evoking memories of vintage Penguin design before drawings and photography was introduced to colour the reader's expectations. They say they intend to focus on debut authors (surely great success might poison this intention?) and will issue their books in bound, numbered and signed editions which will excite the collectors amongst us who believe the concept of a first edition has long expired. The Death of Finn is the story of the sudden death of Joe Finn, a young monk and how this impacts on those around him, especially his best friend Frank. Extra marks to whoever had the great idea of issuing the miniature companion piece to the novel which features extracts from the work Joe Finn was finishing in the main novel. Such attention to detail will go far.
New books for summer
And with the summer comes new books from two of the gods of American literature, both consistently popular and reliable, neither finding their relevance ebbing through familiarity or the passage of years. Book Notes is so fond of Saint Maybe and The Accidental Tourist that the arrival of even a middling book from Pulitzer Prize winning Ann Tyler is a cause for celebration. Digging to America has more slightly sad 40 year old Americans, this time looking at foreign adoption. Like Tyler, Philip Roth is on a lengthy winning streak which includes modern classics like American Pastoral and The Plot Against America which was generally acknowledged as the book of 2004 and should go some way to getting him the Nobel Prize in the next few years. His new book, the short Everyman is a dead man's apology for a life full of errors which begins at his sparsely-attended burial. Both are out now.