Except for the very obvious one above, I'm not going to make any punny jokes about Rolling Stone Keith Richards's recent $7-million+ memoir deal with Little, Brown. I'm not going to suggest that you need to summon any sympathy for this devil (though to judge from his proposal, written with friend and author James Fox and recounted to me, it's not clear who's more demonic, Keith or Mick, or that anybody involved has sticky fingers). I'm not even going to opine that Richards, after a lifetime of drinking, drugging, womanizing and rocking, obviously—miraculously—still has time on his side.
No, I'm just going to look at the facts. To wit: last week, Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch made a deal with Richards's manager, Jane Rose, and literary agent Ed Victor, to commit to print Keith's memories. The proposal for such—which interested editors had to read in the presence of Richards's peeps (but not Richards himself)—was 10 pages long; according to Pietsch, it contained some “delicious” anecdotes. (He didn't cite this line: “If you sleep with a woman you earn the right to wear her clothes”—but it makes me tend to believe him.) The auction, which began at the London Book Fair last April (and was reported originally by PW), was long and in the end came down to three houses: Little, Brown, HarperCollins and Spiegel & Grau. The Hachette-owned imprint won out.
If, that is, you think paying more than $7 million for a book, even one by a very popular and probably interesting pop icon, can be characterized as winning. Again, some facts: Little, Brown bought world English rights (Weidenfeld & Nicolson will publish simultaneously in the U.K.), so Hachette will need to sell around one million copies, in hardcover, to cover its advance. This is possible, of course—Bill Clinton, arguably just as big a rock star, sold two million hardcover copies of his memoir in this country alone (and received an advance well over $10 million) But musicians' reminiscences don't have a great track record here. In 2002, for example, Riverhead paid several million for a scrapbook-type title, Journals, about the late and beloved Kurt Cobain; it sold less than half a million total, hardcover and paper, according to Nielsen BookScan. Sting's Broken Music (Dial), while successful and critically acclaimed, sold around 160,000. Bob Dylan's Chronicles (S&S) was a surprise (to some) hit: but even it sold “only” a little over half a million in both formats. Is Richards as or more popular than any of those three? Maybe. But it should also be noted that he has likely fried at least as many memoir-ready brain cells.
Still, in a world that barely blinks at $4 million for a memoir by retired tennis star Andre Agassi, this sale is not a surprise. Publishers might be right in assuming that Keith Richards, the ultimate Bad Boy, has a strong appeal to baby boomer women, a large segment of the book-buying population, and to the men, for whom Keith is the ultimate model of hedonism. Besides, Michael Pietsch is truly passionate about it, having told one reporter he'd been wanting to publish this book virtually all of his life.
In other words, I have to break my promise. Sometimes, it seems, with enough money and clout, you actually can get what you want.
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