QUITE A PAYDAY…. Reader B.G. sent me an item the other day on Jonah Goldberg’s new book deal. Publishers Lunch, which follows developments inside the publishing industry, reported, “Author of Liberal Fascism and syndicated conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny Of Cliches, to Sentinel, at auction, by Jay Mandel at William Morris Endeavor.”
What I didn’t realize was how lucrative the deal was.
Following blockbuster books by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, publishers are chasing conservative scribes. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has scored a reported one million dollar deal for his next book.
Goldberg riled the blogosphere with his first book, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.” The new book has a temporary title: “The Tyranny of Cliches.”
Here’s more about the deal, from Crain’s New York: “Penguin’s conservative imprint Sentinel won the bidding in an auction conducted by William Morris Endeavor agent Jay Mandel that involved at least four publishers … ‘Conservative books are doing incredibly well,’ says an executive who dropped out of the bidding.”
I clearly picked the less-lucrative ideology.
As for the basis for the book, “The Tyranny of Cliches” will presumably be based on this National Review column of the same name. Steve M.’s take sounds about right: “[E]ven with the current popularity of righty screeds, I’m struggling to see how it will earn back its advance if it doesn’t trumpet the notion ‘liberals are the embodiment of pure evil’ somewhere in its title…. I think Sentinel just paid a million smackers for 400 pages of really bad amateur Seinfeld, with no actual humor, just endless self-satisfied kvetching.”
