Where the Money Lies

For the hungry author, yesterday's get-rich-quick formula was to produce a popular success and then sell it to the movies. Today, Hollywood's supremacy as the fountainhead is under serious challenge by the paperbacks. Once little more than literary scavengers prospecting the bestseller lists for low-risk, high-return reprints, the paperback publishers have risen on soaring profits to the estate of a wealthy and indiscriminate buyer that no writer can afford to ignore.

This new bull market for writing talent is not concerned with literary values, and it is even less interested in giving a leg up to the worthy unknown. The paperbacks are magnetized by dollar success. The product they want is the writer who has already established himself at the far end of the slow, heavily edited and thoroughly disciplined route provided by hard-cover publishing houses. But once such a man has arrived, the paperbacks will buy him--and they are currently willing and able to pay nearly any price.

Paperback Loophole. Before John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold hit the bestseller lists and stuck, the right to reprint it was worth only $25,000 to Dell Publishing Co. Last month, with Le Carre's ability to sell no longer in doubt, Dell doled out a thumping $400,000 to republish his new spy story, The Looking-Glass War, which will come out in hard cover this fall.

Kathleen Winsor got $500,000 from Pocket Books for paperback rights to her next book, as yet unpublished. James Michener's next plot exists only in a rough draft, but that did not deter Fawcett from paying upwards of $700,000 in advance for the privilege of reprinting it.

Such generosity is supported by quick, mass-production reprint profits that the old established hard-cover houses cannot possibly match. Over the course of a year, Coward-McCann managed to peddle 250,000 hard-cover copies of Le Carre's Spy, at $4.50 a copy, for a very respectable gross of nearly $1,250,000. But Dell's 750 pocket edition sold 3,000,000 copies in just three weeks--for a gross of $2,250,000.

Some paperback concerns are now shrewdly buying writers instead of titles. No author really likes to split his reprint royalties with his publisher--a standard clause in most contracts--and the paperbacks have found him a loophole by entering the hard-cover field themselves. For the sake of the writer's pride, they first publish the edition that goes on the library shelf and commands the reviewer's eye, followed by the cheap edition for the nation's pockets--both under the same contract.

Missing Disciplines. Dell's new hardcover imprint, called Delacorte, lured James Jones away from Scribners, which had published his first four books. Jones's contract assures him $800,000 for rights to his next three books, despite the fact that Jones is only halfway through the first. Dell also signed Irwin Shaw by offering him 100% of the reprint royalties. Pocket Books created Trident Press for the sole purpose of encouraging Harold (The Carpetbaggers) Robbins to go AWOL from Knopf.

Understandably upset by the new trend, the hard-cover houses like to think that the defecting authors will soon miss the experienced editing that they left behind and will one day return to the fold. It is just as likely, however, that the new lords of the publishing domain will adjust to these authors' needs, meanwhile paving their lives with the kind of money that they could not get before. This thought has already occurred to Bennett Cerf, president of Random House. "I do think that the old standards may have to change," he said. "We are going to have to take a new look at publishing contracts and percentages."

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