Texas Love Story a Big Deal

Executive editor Carrie Feron at HarperCollins's Morrow/Avon imprint won a lively auction for two novels by a new Texas author, Marsha Moyer, that follow a recently widowed farmwife who discovers a new sense of herself as a woman in a passionate affair with a dashing country music singer. The first book is tentatively titled Texas River Song, and Feron, who confessed that it brought her to unaccustomed tears, put in an early floor. When the books came to auction, and offers from S&S/Pocket and Ballantine drove the bidding up to a significant six figures, she held on and exercised her topping privilege to get them. She bought North American rights from agent Barbara Braun at Barbara Braun Associates and plans to publish the first novel next summer. Foreign sales are being handled for Braun by Danny Baror of Baror International.