Live From Frankfurt:
Phobias, Math and Zoos Among The Hot Topics
by Matthew Thornton and Karen Holt -- Publishers Weekly, 10/12/2007 7:27:00 AM
Day three in Frankfurt saw a number of new deals struck. Among them: Gitty Daneshvari´s School of Fear was preempted by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in a deal negotiated by Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company, who sold North American rights for two books for a very significant advance. Rights to the proposed YA series were sold in Spain and France prior to the fair, and today German and Italian rights were preempted. A U.K. deal is forthcoming.
Burnes just took on the debut author one week ago; the L.A.-based Daneshvari traveled to New York last week to find a literary agent after CAA´s Shari Smiley negotiated film rights to the series with Academy Award winning producer Graham King and Warner Brothers. Burnes made the subsequent book deals on the strength of a partial manuscript and a synopsis of the rest of the series.
Daneshvari´s four-part series focuses on four 12-year-olds, all of whom suffer a different crippling phobia, who find themselves thrown together in a mountaintop mansion--where they´ve been sent by their parents to defeat their phobias. Once there, the children find that it´s not just their fears they will have to face.
A quirky nonfiction book by Guardian journalist Benjamin Mee called We Bought a Zoo is attracting a lot of attention. Weinstein Books has preempted U.S. rights, and rights have also been sold to HarperCollins in the U.K (beating four other publishers at auction), Random House in Germany, Doubleday in Canada and Arena in Holland. The book follows Mee´s family as it tries to make a go of a down and out zoo; it also explores Mee´s struggle following his wife´s death from cancer shortly after the family acquires the zoo.
Two hot titles have yet to make U.S. deals, but something could get done soon. The first, a book by British journalist Alex Bellos with the working title The Book of Numbers: Everything You Need to Know About Simple Maths, was not due to be sent out by Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit until next week, but apparently two U.S. publishers have already made offers on it. Bloomsbury bought U.K. rights yesterday and several Italian offers are on the table, with a German offer said to be forthcoming.
The book, which is part narrative, part primer and part polemic, will cover elementary arithmetic, geometry, algebra and statistics and put their development into historical context, showing the general reader how math is important, interesting and relevant to all other disciplines in life. Aiming to do for math what Lynne Truss did for grammar, Bellos will steer a path through the jargon of modern mathematics and help people come to grips with the basics.
And Laleh Khadivi´s The Age of Orphans, a debut novel and the first volume in what will be a Kurdish trilogy, is currently out on submission in the U.S. via Trident´s Ellen Levine. Rizzoli preempted Italian rights with a six-figure offer for three books, and more than one Italian publisher tried to preempt rights. The novel presents a view of Iran under military rule as well as life in a Kurdish village through the story of a Kurdish boy who grows up to become a captain in the Shah´s army in Iran. Khadivi was born in Iran in 1977; she is a fiction fellow at Emory.
Publishers looking to tap into the Indian market may be interested to know how the U.K. agency Mulcahy and Viney is leveraging its relationship with the Red Ink Agency. The India-based Red Ink just brokered a rights deal for the nonfiction book Victoria and Abdul, for which the Indian house Rupa & Co. paid $16,000, an unusually large amount for Indian rights. Sharadani Basu´s book, which tells the story of Queen Victoria and her closest confidante, is currently on submission in the U.K.
