Spencer Takes ‘Dead Moms’ to Seal
In a world rights deal, Stephanie Knapp at Seal Press bought Kate Spencer’s memoir, The Dead Moms Club. Holly Root at Waxman Leavell Literary, who brokered the sale, said the book is an “honest” and “irreverent” take on the author’s experience losing her mother to pancreatic cancer. Root said that in the book Spencer, a journalist and comedian, offers “tips for readers also going through the ‘mother of all losses.’ ” Root added that she pitched the project as “Motherless Daughters for the BuzzFeed generation.”
Ragan Re-upped at Thomas & Mercer
T.R. Ragan closed a mid-six-figure four-book deal with Thomas & Mercer for a new thriller series. Amy Tannenbaum at the Jane Rotrosen Agency brokered the agreement with Liz Pearsons, selling world English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish rights. Ragan has published a number of books with the Amazon Publishing imprint, including the Lizzy Gardner series and the Faith McMann trilogy. Amazon said her books have, to date, sold more than 1.2 million copies. The first book in Ragan’s new series is set for summer 2017 and, Amazon said, follows a female private investigator “whose sister mysteriously disappeared 10 years ago, and a crime reporter suffering from amnesia who joins her efforts to solve the case.”
Avery Goes on the “Mend” with Bredesen
Dale Bredesen, an M.D. and the director of UCLA’s Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, sold a book called MEND to Caroline Sutton at Avery Books. Sutton took world rights (excluding U.K./Commonwealth) to the title from John Maas and Celeste Fine at Sterling Lord Literistic. The book lays out the author’s MEND (Metabolic Enhancement for Neurodegenerative Disorders) program, which details how to halt the mental decline brought on by Alzheimer’s disease. Avery said the program is “based on the first peer-reviewed published research describing the reversal of Alzheimer’s” and “offers new hope grounded in science.”
Brown Gets Close to “Earth” at Custom House
For HarperCollins’s Custom House imprint, Geoff Chandler preempted world rights to David W. Brown’s One Inch from the Earth. Brown is a correspondent for the Atlantic and the book, which Dunow, Carlson & Lerner’s Stacia Decker represented, is about NASA’s Europa mission (established to launch a spacecraft into the orbit of Jupiter). Custom House said the book features “persevering scientists as its heroes, the planet Mars as the villain, and an unlikely savior in the form of a Tea Party congressman who believes he’s on a mission from God to find a second Garden of Eden on Jupiter’s sixth moon.”
Skyhorse Lands a Lennon
Bethany Buck, at Skyhorse Publishing’s Sky Pony Press, took North American rights to three children’s books by Julian Lennon. The bedtime titles, written with bestselling author Bart Davis (The Midnight Partner), were sold by Robert Gottlieb and Alyssa Eisner Henkin at Trident Media Group. The first book in the series, Touch the Earth, is inspired by Lennon’s 2007 documentary, Whaledreamers, and is aimed at children ages three to six; it’s set for April 2017, to coincide with Earth Day. The second and third books in the series are scheduled, respectively, for 2018 and 2019. An illustrator for the project is yet to be chosen.
