Word: randomization
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Take Joni Evans, publisher of adult trade books at Random House. Two years ago, when she worked in a top editing job at rival Simon & Schuster, Evans was so determined to keep author Mario Puzo in her literary camp that she offered him a $3 million advance for his next book, sight unseen. A competitor outbid her by $1 million, so she matched the offer. "When I have to have it, I have to have it," she explains. The Godfather author, who jumped to Random House when Evans moved there in late 1987, is expected to deliver his pricey manuscript...
...those who would have been considered hopelessly academic not long ago. Sometimes these eye-popping deals are based on a one-page proposal sent over a fax machine, or even on no proposal at all. Yale history professor Paul Kennedy, who received an advance of about $20,000 from Random House for his surprise 1988 best seller, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, got $600,000 from the same publisher to write a second book that will take years to finish. Carolyn Heilbrun, whose nonfiction books have never sold more than 20,000 copies, just walked away with...
...many editors, a major concern is that the chain-bookstore outlets, which give little space on their increasingly crowded shelves to titles without mass appeal, will eventually reduce the publishing industry's incentive to bring out worthy books if they don't seem headed for the best-seller lists. Random House editor Jason Epstein, for one, has undertaken on his own to produce a bookstore in the form of a mail-order catalog that will contain about 200 categories of books and more than 40,000 titles, each accompanied by a short explanation. The $24.95 catalog, the size...
...hoping the bull market for writers will reverse itself, making authors and their agents humble again. Most of all, they talk nostalgically of the days when writers remained faithful and when publishers were not obsessed with best sellers and did not have to worry, in the words of Random House's Epstein, about "getting Faulkner on TV." Pointing to a promising first novel on his desk, he muses, "This just turned up the way these things do. But if the book is a success, we may never publish him again. His price may be too high...
...grounds for masters and the College dean to propose in November the greatest change in residential housing assignment since the early 1970s. Alarmed by stereotypes of the houses and concerned that the houses no longer represented the educational microcosm of the University's diversity, officials moved to introduce partially random assignment of rising sophomores...