Some of the biggest books from the London Book Fair are still on submission with U.S. and international editors. But as the fair closed last week, a number of manuscripts were starting to get picked up.
David Gernert racked up German and Finnish deals (at Wilhelm Heyne and Otava, respectively) by the end of the week for James Othmer's The Futurist. (Before the fair, Doubleday's Bill Thomas had preempted the title, about a futurist sent to the world's trouble spots.) Offers are also on the table from publishers in the Netherlands and Sweden.
There's still no U.S. or U.K. deal for The Saffron Kitchen, one of the hottest literary novels at the show, but both are expected imminently. Also on the imminent front: Raphael Sagalyn is expected to sell international rights for Kremlin Rising, about Putin's Russia, by Peter Blake and Susan Glasser, recently the Russian co-bureau chiefs for the Washington Post. Lisa Drew had bought the book for Scribner pre-fair; the house is moving the book up from early 2006 to June 2005.
Princeton UP's On Bulls***, a philosophical title by Harry Frankfurt that's been getting some big play in the U.S., has been ringing in international offers, including Germany and Italy; it has already sold in Brazil. And at the show, Chandler Crawford sold The Shadow Man, a serial-killer thriller by a first-timer named Cody McFadyen to Hodder, Lubbe and others, after Bantam bought it before the fair.
Speaking of first-timers, it should be at least another few weeks before the much-rumored Morrissey memoir had any action, Matthew Guma at Inkwell Management said; the book from the Smiths icon has not sold in any country yet but is expected to command a high price—in the opinion of some editors we spoke to, too high—from interested publishers.
Perhaps the most entangled deal, at last in terms of the players involved, had Virgin Books, the publishing arm of the mega-conglomerate, soliciting international buyers for Chasing the Wind, a memoir by the record-breaking aviator Steve Fossett. Fossett happens to be the former adventure rival of Virgin CEO Richard Branson—who will have a revised edition of his own memoir, Losing My Virginity, come out from Virgin Books in June.
