Knopf Buys 4 Great Pages For $2.5 Million

deadline.com:

The deals are popping this week, and publishing is not immune. On the basis of a 4-page proposal, Alfred Knopf's Sonny Mehta has paid $2.5 million for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, the new novel by Kiran Desai.

Read the whole story: deadline.com

Comments

[markdf]

10:36 PM on 10/01/2010

This article is a bit misleading. Knopf didn't pay 2.5M for four pages. It paid for a book by a known writer. Not unusual. They would pay at least that for a five WORD pitch if it was "Next Book by Stephen King." They're publishing a book, not a proposal.

That 2.5M can pay for itself. It sends a single to foreign publishers (UK/France/Germany in particular) to pony up money for territory/language. If one assumes the UK pays 1M on an 80/20 split, Germany 1M on a 50/50 and France 0.5M on 50/50, Knopf makes $200,000 + $500,000 + $250,000 =about $1M in three (probably low) sales, earning back over a third of outlay.

Still too much? That remaining $1.3M is written off as a cost of doing business which thru accounting magic doesn't mean the same thing as throwing dollar bills out of the window. At an author royalty of 10% on 25.00 per hardcover, on the first 100K sold + 12% thereafter (not great rates at this level of sale, btw), that advance will earn out on the sale of 800K copies. And that's assuming only three foreign sales, no paperback and no ebook. That's high for literary fiction, but probably doable when you factor in trade paperback and ebooks. I doubt Knopf got film rights, btw. Not with Andrew Wylie in the room.

Of course, this is all predicated on Kiran Desai writing a good book.

[Lev Raphael]

04:04 PM on 09/30/2010

Insanity. How do they expect the book to earn out, even with foreign rights sales and a movie deal, if they get it?

[Lisa Solod Warren]

04:38 PM on 09/30/2010

I agree. They could have given 250,000 to many writers...... that would have been something.

[Lev Raphael]

09:39 AM on 10/01/2010

Even 25K to more writers each would make a difference. But not generate enough PR for Knopf. It's all about buzz.

BTW, I checked out her previous book and found the writing starchy, trying too hard. That's just at a first pass, but it didn't invite me in.

[SF TKF]

10:49 AM on 10/01/2010

They don't expect it to earn out (most lit fic doesn’t). This is a "marquee" title because she's a Booker winner. It’s about prestige. That huge advance will simply put more pressure on the titles in genre fiction that ARE expected to earn out (and then some).