Writing for Dollars

Book Marks

JAMES ATLAS

Didn't you read about it in the papers?" a man on the Fifth Avenue bus addresses his fellow pasenger pointing to the newnovelist in Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound. "He just made a million bucks and he's taking a bus."

A million? Nobody on the bus would even look up these days. Ever since Bantam paid E. L. Doctorow $1.85 million for the reprint rights to Ragtime back in 1975, a handful of big-name authors have been able to command the kind of advance Don King gets for prizefighters. John Irving receives maybe a million a book. Norman Mailer's latest contract calls for a payout of $4 million or so for his next four books. And these are the literary writers. Think what James Michener must be getting. Or Sidney Sheldon. Or Judith Krantz.

"It's cuckoo time in the business in terms of money," admits Stephen Rubin, the Bantam editor who in a heated auction last year paid just over a million dollars for a half-written novel by the British journalist Sally Beauman. James Clavell got five million for his forthcoming novel. Edmund Morris, Reagan's biographer, got three. Harper & Row paid David Stockman two million for his memoirs. The high-flying Texas financier .T. Boone Pickens Jr. got a million and a half. Geraldine Ferraro, Tip O'Neill, and Jeane Kirkpatrick each received in the neighborhood of a million dollars for mere outlines. "It's a real crapshoot, no doubt about it," says Joni Evans, president of the trade division of Simon & Schuster.

Some attribute the improbable sums thrown around lately to inflation; others to the prevalence of auctions. But no one denies that the business is changing fast. The harbinger just about everyone cites is the eponymous Iacocca, of which there are more than 2.6 million copies in print. ''That book would have been unthinkable five years ago," declares Lawrence Hughes, president of the Hearst Trade Book Group and the man who plunked down $5 million for the new Clavell. Books that would have sold a hundred thousand copies in the sixties and two or three hundred thousand in the seventies can sell millions in the eighties. ''We're witnessing the birth of a hardcover mass market," says Rubin. Old-fashioned folk may bemoan the death of the quaint little bookstore owned by a curmudgeonly lapsed classics professor from Bard, but the chains that have proliferated in shopping centers all over the country—notably B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Crown— have made it possible to sell books in larger numbers than ever before. They can ignore the daunting cover prices (a first novel that's 237 pages long can set you back $17.95) and discount like Crazy Eddie. ''Price wars" have had the same effect on the book industry that deregulation had on the airline business: you can shop around for a bargain.

O.K., so discount houses have changed the game. But there is also the phenomenon of ''auction fever." It used to be that an agent would submit a manuscript to an editor who was thought to be ''right for the book" and then wait for a call: This is great and we're publishing it or This isn't for us. Now more and more books are being sent out on ''multiple submission"— that is, offered to several houses at once. There were at least thirty houses in pursuit of Pickens. "It's like any auction," says Robert Lescher, Pickens's agent. "The more high bids there are, the more it confirms your own good judgment."

How do agents determine what to ask? Often they don't. Publishers are invited to bid. "Have you ever played poker?" says Lescher. "There are ways of suggesting a figure without naming it." If a figure is named, it's generally negotiable. Georges Borchardt put Edmund Morris's Reagan biography on the block for $2 million because "we knew that's what Stockman got and we felt we had a more important book." Morris would have daunting expenses, his agent reminded publishers: a fulltime research assistant, a projected delivery date of 1991, and a huge travel bill. The government makes journalists pay for rides on Air Force One. Still, nobody pretends it wasn't a lot of money. "You ask what you think you can get," says Lescher simply.

Publishers claim to be more scientific. "Let's do a little math," says Stephen Rubin, pulling a copy of Geraldine Ferraro's memoirs off the shelf and reaching for his calculator. The cover price was $17.95. ("Too low," clucks Rubin. "We could have gotten more.") Figure a 15 percent royalty—the standard formula. That's roughly $2.69 a copy to the author and—once you've calculated production, distribution, and promotion costs—roughly (very roughly) the same amount to the publisher. Sell a mere 371,747 copies and you've earned back your advance. Right?

Of course, it's not really that simple. Publishers figure in escalators and origination costs and indirect variable overheads, etc. But the bottom line is that they're trying to make money. "We really do our figures," insists Joni Evans. "We don't want to shoot our wad." (Like I said, the business has changed.) "When we sit down at the table, I'm always amazed at the way you can say, 'Well, how much do you think it's worth?' and these people will know," says Rubin, a relative newcomer to the business. "It's possible to have a very intelligent conversation about how much a book is actually worth."

Look at the Clavell deal, for instance. Five million dollars for a book? Actually, it turned out to be somewhat more. Lawrence Hughes was reluctant to discuss the exact details—trade secrets— but Thomas McCormack, president of St. Martin's Press, who had offered $6 million, "with a longer payoff stretch," did some math for Publishers Weekly, the main journal of the industry. "The correct arithmetic shows that you could pay more than $5 million to Mr. Clavell and still break even if you sold 400,000 copies of the hardcover (at $25) and 800,000 of the paperback," he explained in the magazine's "My Say" column. The hardcover would bring in $5.2 million, the paperback—this is what's known as a "hard-soft" deal, meaning that Morrow bought both the hardcover and paperback rights for its $5 million—another $2.8 million. That's $8 million right there, not including book-club revenues or, to quote McCormack, "the 'positive interest' on cash flow."

In the case of the Clavell book, there were other inducements. "This was a unique deal," explains Hughes. "For one thing, he was a proven author with a terrific track record who happened to become free." Clavell's previous publisher, Delacorte, had no option on his next book, and he made it known to a number of publishers that he was available. For another thing, he had a completed manuscript. Morrow was buying a product in January that it could publish in September, instead of waiting years to recover its advance.

Then there were the "intangibles"— benefits without a price tag. Random House didn't even bid on the Clavell; it had enough big books on its list. A house like St. Martin's, reasoned McCormack, is less established, and thus willing to simply break even on a book that would be sure to get attention. "I want big agents and big authors to think of St. Martin's when they have a big book, so I must wave a big flag, green, with a huge dollar sign in the middle."

TT^or a while everyone was predicting _F that hardcover books would become obsolete. In fact, they're selling better than ever. Books that used to have a shelf life of a few weeks linger in the stores for months, even years. The tradition of bringing out the paperback edition a year after the hardcover publication is increasingly ignored; Bantam intends to wait at least two years before publishing its paperback Iacocca. Harper & Row, noting the steady sale of In Search of Excellence, paid Warner Books an undisclosed sum not to publish the paperback for six months after the stipulated date. More and more hardcover houses are becoming "vertical publishers"—that is, buyers of both hardcover and softcover rights. That way they can decide for themselves how to market their books. And they can pay authors a full royalty on the paperback, which means bigger advances up front.

It makes sense. Or does it? For all the talk of sales figures and book-club money and best-seller lists, it's still a lottery. "No one really knows how much these things are worth,'' claims Georges Borchardt. You hear an awful lot about "scenarios" and "best guesstimates" in this business. "Ever since the Ragtime sale, publishers have collaborated with the press in cartooning the industry as made up of fume domes who get high on the smell of burning money," complained McCormack. Well, not quite. But there is a certain enthusiasm for big bucks. "There've been times when we didn't get a book, came in the next morning, and said, 'Thank God!' " admits Rubin. "It's like any auction. Things get out of hand."

Word has gotten around. Authors are busily hustling their own wares. Pickens set up shop in the Helmsley Palace to visit with publishers once he'd narrowed down the field. Clavell settled in at the office of Helen Meyer, his former publisher and now a consultant for him, and took bids over the phone. The big boys are open for business. □