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PW: 'Meg' Author Sues Doubleday

Judy Quinn -- Publishers Weekly, 2/9/1998

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'Meg' Author Sues Doubleday
Judy Quinn -- 2/9/98


Steve Alten, author of the "Jurassic Shark" thriller Meg, published last summer, has filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit for "in excess" of $1 million in damages against the house for deciding to drop Fathom, the second book in his deal, which was expected to be published in July, just around the time of Bantam's mass market release of Meg. BDD v-p Stuart Applebaum told PW that the suit is "legally dubious and professionally self-defeating. Very simply, the book was cancelled for being unacceptable." Alten's lawyer J l McKuin told PW that the cancellation is "an abuse of the creative process," and that his client had been willing to undergo rewrites and a new outline had been approved. "He got caught in the confusion of corporate politics" with a "new bottom-line agenda" emerging to cancel the book, said McKuin. Applebaum wouldn't comment on the financials involved in this case, but Alten's original contract with Doubleday was rumored to have been for a $2.1-million, two-book world rights deal. Meg, despite some terrible reviews (it even got a "worst of" nod in Entertainment Weekly's year-end roundup), is rumored to have sold more than 100,000 hardcover copies from the house's scaled-back 200,000 first printing, and more importantly, earned more than $1 million in foreign rights sales. Sources say that latter windfall was unlikely, however, to be duplicated the second time around.

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