A new fiction imprint, Landmark at Illinois-based Sourcebooks, has just scored a big paperback rights coup, selling the paperback of its debut title, Man and Boy by Tony Parsons, to editor Cherise Grant at Scribner's paperback fiction line in a deal valued at close to $1 million. There was no auction; Sourcebooks president Dominique Raccah said they were seeking a "partner" in Scribner to build the British bestselling author's career here; he begins a U.S. tour this week.... Denver-based agent Jody Rein made a substantial six-figure sale to Mitch Hoffman at Dutton of a book about Picasso's painting Guernica and the little Spanish town, bombed in the Civil War, that inspired it. The author is Russell Martin, who did last year's Beethoven's Hair (Broadway). The North American rights sale followed an auction; Agnes Krup is selling foreign rights.... That first novel by Britney Spears and her mom, A Mother's Gift, which Delacorte Books for Young Readers is bringing out next month, has made substantial sales to the U.K. (for six figures at auction) and Australia, and has sold first serial (to Teen People) and book club (to the magazine's club and to Doubleday Book Club for adult readers).... Also in the kids' arena, Marc Brown, creator of the popular aardvark Arthur, has signed a new seven-figure deal with his longtime publisher Maria Modugno at Little, Brown that will embrace three more Arthur books and three about his little sister D.W. The deal, which Brown negotiated himself, takes the relationship to 2004.... Two separate movie deals were made for Fire on the Mountain by John N. Maclean, a true story of a deadly forest fire, by Bill Contardi at William Morris, on behalf of the author's agent, Jennifer Lyons at Writers House. One was with LMNO, an option for dramatization, and one with A&E for documentary.
Baker can be reached at jobaker@cahners.com
