Is the Financial Meltdown Story Over-Published Already?

by Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 9/26/2008 12:30:00 PM

As first intimated yesterday in the New York Observer, New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin has inked a deal for his first book, to be called Too Big to Fail; Viking's Rick Kot took North American rights in a quick auction conducted by David McCormick, who had a number of publishers interested. The book will be an intimate, behind-the-scenes account of the personalities and policies that led to the current debacle in American finance.

Though the situation on Wall Street continues to unfold, there's already quite a crowded field of book proposals and sales stemming from the crisis--though oddly enough, several high-profile sales thus far have all ended up at Penguin imprints. Earlier this week, Roger Lowenstein sold a book called Six Days that Shook the World to Ann Godoff at Penguin Press, and yesterday Sorkin's colleague Joe Nocera sold world rights to a proposal co-written with Vanity Fair's Bethany McLean, co-author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, to Adrian Zackheim at Penguin's Portfolio imprint; agent Liz Darhansoff's asking price during the auction for Nocera's and McLean's chronicle of the crisis was said to be more than $1 million.

As McCormick points out, there is room for a lot of different takes on the story; an apt comparison might be the number of books spawned by September 11, many of which glutted the marketplace around the one-year anniversary of the attacks. But some publishers aren't bidding on Wall Street-related projects at the moment, thinking it's too early and preferring to wait and see how the story plays out. "We were worreid about how many subjects can be published on this subject in a successful way," said one publisher who said he was 'inundated" by Wall Street proposals last week. Another insider who saw both the Nocera/McLean and Sorkin proposals said, "Everyone is summarizing the last two weeks and saying they're the ones to nail the story." In any case, the fluid nature of events so far means there's no clear date for Sorkin's book's publication yet; a pub date for the Lowenstein hasn't been announced either. Whether or not more deals emerge from the crisis this week, some editors may be already weary of the topic; one who read several of them pronounced the potential offerings "plenty."