It's
been a dramatic couple of weeks for Talk
Miramax Books, which, after a shaky start,
seems to be finding itself as a nonfiction publisher
of high-profile books. Last month the house bought super-lawyer
David Boies's memoirs,
and last week it paid $3 million for a memoir and a
business advice title from New York mayor Rudolph
Giuliani. Today, Talk executives are holding
what will probably be the final meeting with Madeleine
Albright, to convince the former Secretary
of State that she should take their $1 million instead
of Scribner's. Whether
these high-priced books will earn out -- something other
publishers doubt -- hardly seems to matter. What Talk
seems to be after -- and seems to be getting -- is a
lot of buzz. That and some fodder for its much-vaunted
synergy.
''These
books,'' says Jonathan Burnham, president and
publisher of Talk Miramax Books, ''don't define the
list but announce that we're in the business of doing
major nonfiction books. We're a small publisher with
big muscle.''
Talk
is also a publisher with a built-in publicity arm, in
the form of its monthly magazine, which has run an excerpt
from every nonfiction book the house has published so
far. Jerri Nielsen's Icebound, for example,
which is No. 2 on the New York Times bestsellers list,
is excerpted in this month's issue. ''We usually acquire
serial rights,'' says Burnham. ''On most occasions the
serial will run in Talk magazine, but if we felt that
the extract would better suit another publication we
would certainly do a deal, and would sub-licence serial
rights in the conventional way.''
Until
recently, Talk Miramax Books, which launched last summer,
seemed not to have found its way. Its first nonfiction
title, Martin Amis's Experience, while
widely read and reviewed in literary circles (and excerpted
in the magazine), sold only 3,700 copies* in hardcover.
Simon Schama's History of Britain -- for
which the house paid $250,000 -- sold just over 6,000
copies. An upcoming excerpt from Stolen Lives: 20
Years in a Desert Jail, by the Moroccan princess
Malika Oufkir, who tunneled her way out of prison
with a teaspoon, will appear when the book does. The
plan now is to publish about 20 books a year in hardcover,
plus some paperbacks, Burnham said.
The new
political acquisitions will also make obviously valuable
contributions to the magazine. If Tina Brown's
Talk has never quite landed on the grand stage to which
it has aspired, the book division may help it get there.
Put another way: the company may be acknowledging the
wobbliness of the magazine, and attempting to shore
up its image through books. A former employee comments
that it's easier to turn around a books division by
throwing a bit of financial weight behind acquisitions
and marketing than it is to right a magazine, which
could reasonably expect to take 5-7 years to see decent
profits.
The breakthrough
appears to be Icebound,
the tale of a doctor at the South Pole who discovered
and treated her own breast cancer. The house was said
to pay about $1 million for the nonfiction title, by
Nielsen with Maryanne Vollers.
''Talk Books is doing a really great job fulfilling
the mandate set out for them: getting attention with
high-profile books, making a splash, making some money,''
says a former Miramax employee. But others within the
industry gripe that Talk Miramax's focus on buzz-generating,
one-shot authors ignores the whole notion of a backlist,
on which the success of a publishing house ultimately
rests.
''They're
paying ridiculously high prices to be zeitgeisty, which
makes noise now but doesn't lay foundations for the
future,'' says one agent. Burnham, who was named publisher
in 1999 after a brief stint at Penguin Putnam, is a
much-liked editor among agents (it's not unhelpful that
his coffers run deep), and generally thought of as an
intelligent buyer. But there is increasing talk about
the type of purchases he's making. ''There's a certain
amount of bafflement about what they're trying to do
with the books list,'' says one agent. ''It does seem
to be a bit of a puppet for the magazine.'' That close
association with the magazine -- which some consider
''confused and silly'' -- may hurt the reputation of
the book division.
And while
the original objective of Talk Miramax seemed to be
to publish articles that could become books, as well
as vice versa, the magazine's focus on celebrity and
Hollywood would appear to inhibit that kind of synergy.
Vicky Ward, the magazine's executive editor,
disagrees, saying, ''If you look back over the past
issues, there's a very deliberate mix of business politics,
celebrity, culture, fashion and literature.'' And Burnham
insists there are several magazine-to-book projects
currently in gestation -- but declines to detail them.
Burnham
concedes that recent acquisitions have been pretty expensive.
''We've laid out a lot of money in the last two weeks,''
he says. He adds, however, that his overhead is not
massive and so the risks are not that big, especially
for a film company used to taking big risks. While the
latest signings have been commandeered by Harvey
Weinstein and Brown -- which raises the question
of how much pressure Burnham and the books division
is under to perform -- Burnham insists that he has absolute
freedom to publish as he chooses. ''Every division makes
its own creative decisions,'' he says.
(*All sales figures are total sales through Jan. 28
at Barnes and Noble and B. Dalton stores and at Barnesandnoble.com.
These numbers are thought to equal 20 percent of the
total number of trade books sold nationwide.)
