ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (2/6/01)
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.)
