Weisbach Makes First Sale

By Matthew Thornton -- Publishers Weekly, 4/21/2009 1:11:00 PM

Rob Weisbach, who announced last month that he was starting his own management company, made his first book deal under the Rob Weisbach Creative Management aegis Friday; at the conclusion of a two-day auction, Jonathan Burnham and Gail Winston at Harper took world rights to Melissa Coleman’s memoir, This Life is in Your Hands, with a significant six-figure offer.

Coleman’s first book is the story of her childhood, beginning with that of her parents, an idealistic couple who abandon the trappings of their privileged New England backgrounds to forge a self-sustaining life on the Maine coast. They have three daughters, eat what they grow, and create a community that draws fellow seekers, students and even a reporter from The Wall Street Journal who visits their farm to tell the family’s unusual story. But their pursuit of a grand dream comes at the ultimate price, when one daughter, aged three, is drowned in the irrigation pond built to sustain the crops, and Coleman, the eldest of the three girls, must now ask who, if anyone, is to blame.

Last summer, Weisbach had a successful agenting test run with the sale of Norman Ollestad’s survival memoir, Crazy for the Storm, a highly sought-after project that ended up going to Ecco and is due out this June. Harper hasn't set a pub date for the Coleman book yet.