The Guardian 4/10 Nicholas Clee on the latest news from the publishing industry

[Tom Roche]

The Bookseller 

Nicholas Clee on the latest news from the publishing industry 

Saturday April 5, 2003
The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>  

· One can guess the reaction of the publishers (Andersen and Puffin) of Melvin Burgess's Doing It to Anne Fine's attack on the novel in this paper last week. In part, they were no doubt mortified to read lines such as: "All the publishers who have touched this novel should be deeply ashamed of themselves"; and, in a more opportunistic part of their natures, they would have spotted a marketing opportunity. Doing It, which was to have been published on May 22, has been brought forward to take advantage of the publicity that the lambasting from the children's laureate has generated, and will be dispatched to booksellers in the next few weeks. 

· John Peel, who spent five days choosing between offers from HarperCollins and Transworld for his memoirs, finally picked Transworld on Wednesday. The company paid £1.6m, a sum that was widely reported but, as is the case in most stories involving advances to authors, unexplained. Does he get it all at once? Is that the sum total he will receive for the book? How can the publisher hope to justify it? Here is a rough outline of what the deal might involve. 

Peel's £1.6m is an advance payment of the royalties his book might earn. He will get the money in three or four portions: a tranche on signature of the contract, another on delivery of the manuscript, another on publication in 2005, and possibly a further one on publication of a paperback edition. 

The initial payments will appear as assets rather than costs in Transworld's accounts. Transworld will sell serial rights, for, let us say, £100,000, and will offset that sum against the advance - Peel will get his share (90%) of it as part of his advance payments. Then the publisher will set about trying to sell a lot of copies of the book. Its most pessimistic projection is for sales of 300,000 copies in hardcover. 

Working out the royalties due from these sales is complicated; an average of £2 per copy is a rough guess. That would leave the publisher with a lot of ground to make up with the paperback edition. Transworld, though, reckons that Peel's book will have the appeal of Pamela Stephenson's Billy - and that sold more than one million copies in hardcover alone. On my rough figures, Peel will have "earned out", even before his paperback appears, if he passes 755,000 copies (taking the serial into account); after that, he will receive a royalty on each sale. 

But Transworld might have a profit even if it never gets to this total, because any title that sells hundreds of thousands of copies will have a high profit margin, having paid for many of its overheads. In conclusion: Peel's book is a gamble worth taking; but it is no surprise that the only firms that felt they could afford to take it were two of the three biggest publishers in the UK.