cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leverage Oh wait, there was more. I fell asleep at about 7 am this morning after being awake for something like 25 or 26 hours straight. Working. I woke up at about 3 pm and had an email from my agent telling me that my current publisher for my first book professes great interest in my new book and that they are now reading the sample chapters with excitement. Um. This is very flattering and all, but we only gave them a look at it to be polite. The new book is completely inappropriate for them. They do how-to books and this is a travel/adventure/ecology/weird food book. What I wanted was for them to instantly say 'thanks but no thanks' so that we can move on to pitching the book to publishers that would actually make sense. Now we are obligated to sit around twiddling our thumbs while they chew it over, before we send it to other publishers. Including Sim0n and Schuster, who wanted to see it 2 days ago. Great. Ok, I guess that it is possible that they will make a serious effort to sign me for this book. They know that I can deliver a well-written book and they have seen how fast I work and they know that I'm really good at promotion. There are 2 questions, if the make an offer. First is whether they have the money to offer what I'm really looking to get here. Anything less than $40k and I'm not even going to entertain it. Not given the amount of work and expense involved in writing this book. Second is whether they even know what the fuck to do with it. Do their editors even have the experience to do a good job at editing it? Can they competently distribute and market a book like this? I think that they would have to offer an especially good contract in order for me to take the risk of giving them this book, given their inexperience with this kind of book. More money, and I'm retaining all film and TV rights. There are worse problems to have than this situation. OH! I almost forgot: I finally responded to the publicist at my publisher who pissed me off so much the other day. After booking this 2 day class with me months ago, basically as a junket for their big buyers and marketing people, she sent me this email a few days ago asking me to drastically cut the price. Um, tell you what lady: How about you go and fuck yourself, ok? I didn't even have the time to reply to her until today, which turned out to be perfect. I sent her a very polite email explaining that I have a lot of fixed costs and have been very busy these last few days giving interviews and getting the new book ready to sell, but that I'll try to look over the cost structure this weekend. And of course by the way if she'd like to have a sneak peek at the new book, the Publisher is reading it right now and I'm sure she can get a copy. Hint, hint. The subtext being - and I fucking well mean it - that if they are going to try to fuck me over for a few hundred dollars at the last minute before a class at a time when I can't even get my car inspected - they can take whatever offer they have in mind for my new book and shove it right up their asses. Literally, if they insist on being assholes about this then I will cancel the class and refuse whatever offer they make for the new book. Hell, I'd like a trip to the Frankfurt B00k fair while they're at it. 8:58 p.m. - 2011-01-07 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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