‘Dublin Street’ Draws Seven Figures

In a major deal closed during the week of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Lauren E. Abramo at Dystel & Goderich sold the bestselling self-published romance by Samantha Young, On Dublin Street, to NAL for seven figures. Kerry Donovan acquired the title for the Penguin imprint in a two-book deal, which includes a currently untitled follow-up. The novel, which Abramo said has sold more than 150,000 copies (n digital) in one month, has appeared not only on the Amazon bestseller lists but also on the lists for the Wall Street Journal and Apple. In the book, which is set in Edinburgh, a woman is awakened (sexually and otherwise) when she meets the intense brother of her new flat mate.

Popular Picture Book Duo Lands at Chronicle

Chronicle’s Melissa Manlove bought world rights to a new picture book by the author/illustrator team of Sherri Duskey Rinker and Tom Lichtenheld from agent Amy Rennert at the Amy Rennert Agency. The pair, who wrote the bestseller Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, are penning Steam Train, Dream Train for Chronicle, which will follow, Rennert explained, “colorful characters loading dreamy cargo and chugging off into the night.” Steam Train, Dream Train is set for spring 2013.

Roberts Gets ‘Object’-ified at S&S

Sam Roberts, New York Times reporter and host of NY1’s weekend talk show The New York Times Close Up, sold a book called A History of New York in 100 Objects to Simon & Schuster’s Bob Bender, in a pre-empt. Agent Andrew Blauner at Blauner Books Literary represented Roberts in the world rights deal. The book is expanded from a Times piece by Roberts—it ran online on August 31 and in print on September 2—that offered a history of the Big Apple in what Blauner called “50 emblematic and transformative objects.” (The original article is called “A History of New York in 50 Objects.”) Roberts’s next book, Grand Central: How a Train Station Transformed America, is set to publish from Grand Central Publishing in January. S&S has History slated, “tentatively,” Blauner said, for 2014.

Crown’s Cook Gets Rorschach’d & Business-Like

In the first of two deals she closed last week, Crown’s Amanda Cook bought North American rights to Damion Searls’s nonfiction book, The Inkblot Experiment. The work examines the life of Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, focusing on his famous inkblot test (developed to draw out unconscious aspects of his patients), and its lasting significance. Crown said Searls delves into how the test “migrated from a Swiss sanitarium in the 1910s into Nazi war crime tribunals,” permeated into popular culture, and came to be used in everything from “child custody battles” to “the forefront of contemporary research on visual thinking.” Cook bought the book at auction from agent Edward Orloff at McCormick & Williams.

In the second deal, Cook nabbed North American rights to Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s Seeing Further. John Brockman at Brockman Inc., handled the deal for the authors. Tetlock, a Wharton professor and author of Expert Political Judgment, and Gardner (The Science of Fear), explore, Crown said, how “certain thinking styles can improve our ability to predict the future.” These styles, the publisher added, can help people become “better forecasters” and change readers’ perceptions of everything from business and national security to decision making in everyday life.