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A Million Little Dollars, and Then Some
The publisher of James Frey's new novel tries to resuscitate the writer's career.
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Would you let James Frey hold your wallet? That is effectively what Jonathan Burnham, a high-profile publisher at HarperCollins, is doing.
Best known as the disgraced author of the 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, Frey was berated publicly after parts of his story turned out to be fabricated. His then-publisher, Random House, offered to refund disgruntled readers, while Frey lost a two-book contract, was shamed by Oprah Winfrey on national television, and went into hiding.
Yet Burnham is now in the process of exhuming Frey, or trying to, with the May release of Bright Shiny Morning, Frey’s first novel. Burnham is counting on the writer’s notoriety to spark sales, and he paid a generous $1.5 million for the privilege. Whether the strategy will work is unclear, but it isn’t the first time that Burnham has bid himself out on a limb. The publishing industry holds little love for Frey—even his agent abandoned him, in 2006—but A Million Little Pieces sold 4.5 million copies and kept selling even after the scandal petered out. Burnham, who has run HarperCollins’ flagship Harper imprint since 2005, has ordered up a confident initial print run of 300,000. “I don’t think I’m taking a huge risk, because James’ other books have sold so spectacularly well,” he says. “We’re paying a handsome advance, but it’s not crazy.”
Over the past few years, as the book industry has contracted, publishers have come under increasing pressure to publish blockbusters to improve their bottom lines. Competitions for manuscripts that are perceived to have commercial potential can turn into feeding frenzies, and advances for the most desirable books have ballooned. While a first-time novelist might get just $5,000, authors with literary cachet routinely get six figures, and proven sellers score millions. Increasingly, agents are turning to auctions to sell hot properties, and the battles are ferociously fought.
It’s an environment that seems to suit Burnham, an aggressive buyer of newsy nonfiction titles as well as less commercial ones. While many factors, such as movie and foreign rights, affect a publisher’s bottom line, a rough guideline is that a book is doing well when it has sold one copy for every $4 of advance. By that definition, the $1 million Burnham paid for CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s memoir, Dispatches From the Edge—which sold 230,000 copies in hardcover—was well worth it. (That sales number and the others quoted here are from Nielsen BookScan, whose figures account for about 70 percent of the market.)
Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Miramax Books, October 2002, $26. Giuliani received a $3 million advance and the book sold 732,000 copies.
Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes, Miramax Books, April 2005, $24. Sykes received a $625,000 advance and the book sold 379,000 copies.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West by Benazir Bhutto, HarperCollins, February 2008, $28. Bhutto received a $75,000 advance and the book sold 28,000 copies.
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey, HarperCollins, May 2008, $27. Frey received a $1.5 million advance.
Best known as the disgraced author of the 2003 memoir A Million Little Pieces, Frey was berated publicly after parts of his story turned out to be fabricated. His then-publisher, Random House, offered to refund disgruntled readers, while Frey lost a two-book contract, was shamed by Oprah Winfrey on national television, and went into hiding.
Yet Burnham is now in the process of exhuming Frey, or trying to, with the May release of Bright Shiny Morning, Frey’s first novel. Burnham is counting on the writer’s notoriety to spark sales, and he paid a generous $1.5 million for the privilege. Whether the strategy will work is unclear, but it isn’t the first time that Burnham has bid himself out on a limb. The publishing industry holds little love for Frey—even his agent abandoned him, in 2006—but A Million Little Pieces sold 4.5 million copies and kept selling even after the scandal petered out. Burnham, who has run HarperCollins’ flagship Harper imprint since 2005, has ordered up a confident initial print run of 300,000. “I don’t think I’m taking a huge risk, because James’ other books have sold so spectacularly well,” he says. “We’re paying a handsome advance, but it’s not crazy.”
Over the past few years, as the book industry has contracted, publishers have come under increasing pressure to publish blockbusters to improve their bottom lines. Competitions for manuscripts that are perceived to have commercial potential can turn into feeding frenzies, and advances for the most desirable books have ballooned. While a first-time novelist might get just $5,000, authors with literary cachet routinely get six figures, and proven sellers score millions. Increasingly, agents are turning to auctions to sell hot properties, and the battles are ferociously fought.
It’s an environment that seems to suit Burnham, an aggressive buyer of newsy nonfiction titles as well as less commercial ones. While many factors, such as movie and foreign rights, affect a publisher’s bottom line, a rough guideline is that a book is doing well when it has sold one copy for every $4 of advance. By that definition, the $1 million Burnham paid for CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s memoir, Dispatches From the Edge—which sold 230,000 copies in hardcover—was well worth it. (That sales number and the others quoted here are from Nielsen BookScan, whose figures account for about 70 percent of the market.)
Literature by the Numbers
Four Burnham books and how they've done.Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Miramax Books, October 2002, $26. Giuliani received a $3 million advance and the book sold 732,000 copies.
Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes, Miramax Books, April 2005, $24. Sykes received a $625,000 advance and the book sold 379,000 copies.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West by Benazir Bhutto, HarperCollins, February 2008, $28. Bhutto received a $75,000 advance and the book sold 28,000 copies.
Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey, HarperCollins, May 2008, $27. Frey received a $1.5 million advance.
But Burnham has also overpaid: In 2005, he acquired Sacred Games, Vikram Chandra’s sprawling 1,200-page saga about the Mumbai underworld, for $1 million. It sold just 34,000 copies in hardcover. To be considered a hit, Bright Shiny Morning will have to sell about 375,000 copies in hardcover, a quarter more than the initial print run. (It is common for publishers to have multiple print runs; Bright Shiny Morning will also be released in paperback.)
Whether such high-profile deals make money or not, Burnham believes they can serve a valuable marketing purpose. “The advance establishes the book as a phenomenon,” Burnham says. “It catches the interest of the trade and, sometimes, the general media.”
Burnham and Frey met at a party the publisher hosted at his Manhattan apartment—it was one of the first mediacentric social events Frey had attended since his public chastisement—and the two became friendly. When it came time for Frey’s new agent to float the author’s comeback project, he approached Burnham exclusively, and Burnham liked what he read. “It’s a big, ambitious novel, written in that James Frey, button-pushing, visceral style,” Burnham says of Bright Shiny Morning, which intertwines the lives of dozens of characters who live in Los Angeles. Burnham moved quickly to sign a deal before other publishers had the opportunity to bid on the book.
Yet as the reviver of Frey’s career, the British-born Burnham cuts an unlikely figure. Before arriving in the U.S. in 1998, Burnham, now 47, ran the British publishing house Chatto & Windus. There, he put out books by American authors such as Toni Morrison, in addition to the first cookbook by Nigella Lawson, one of his college roommates. He had a brief stint at Penguin before being recruited by another British import, editor Tina Brown, to run Talk Miramax Books. The buzzy publishing house was eventually folded into Hyperion.
“He was the one part of that crazy Talk era that was really going well,” Brown says. (Among the authors he recruited were former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Manhattan “it” girl Plum Sykes.) Burnham and his partner, Joe Dolce, a freelance writer and former editor of Star magazine, are one of New York’s A-list media couples, written about in gossip and publishing columns. Burnham is also a classically trained pianist who can occasionally be glimpsed playing cabaret shows around the city.
At Harper, where he moved in the months after Talk closed, Burnham says he has made money for the company, even as HarperCollins has struggled, recently registering double-digit drops in sales. But his boss, HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman, admits they are taking a chance with Bright Shiny Morning. “James Frey is a brilliant novelist. Whatever came before, I place no judgment on it,” Friedman says. Still, “the rule of thumb is, the more you pay, the harder it is to make it back.”
Whether such high-profile deals make money or not, Burnham believes they can serve a valuable marketing purpose. “The advance establishes the book as a phenomenon,” Burnham says. “It catches the interest of the trade and, sometimes, the general media.”
Burnham and Frey met at a party the publisher hosted at his Manhattan apartment—it was one of the first mediacentric social events Frey had attended since his public chastisement—and the two became friendly. When it came time for Frey’s new agent to float the author’s comeback project, he approached Burnham exclusively, and Burnham liked what he read. “It’s a big, ambitious novel, written in that James Frey, button-pushing, visceral style,” Burnham says of Bright Shiny Morning, which intertwines the lives of dozens of characters who live in Los Angeles. Burnham moved quickly to sign a deal before other publishers had the opportunity to bid on the book.
Yet as the reviver of Frey’s career, the British-born Burnham cuts an unlikely figure. Before arriving in the U.S. in 1998, Burnham, now 47, ran the British publishing house Chatto & Windus. There, he put out books by American authors such as Toni Morrison, in addition to the first cookbook by Nigella Lawson, one of his college roommates. He had a brief stint at Penguin before being recruited by another British import, editor Tina Brown, to run Talk Miramax Books. The buzzy publishing house was eventually folded into Hyperion.
“He was the one part of that crazy Talk era that was really going well,” Brown says. (Among the authors he recruited were former secretary of state Madeleine Albright and Manhattan “it” girl Plum Sykes.) Burnham and his partner, Joe Dolce, a freelance writer and former editor of Star magazine, are one of New York’s A-list media couples, written about in gossip and publishing columns. Burnham is also a classically trained pianist who can occasionally be glimpsed playing cabaret shows around the city.
At Harper, where he moved in the months after Talk closed, Burnham says he has made money for the company, even as HarperCollins has struggled, recently registering double-digit drops in sales. But his boss, HarperCollins C.E.O. Jane Friedman, admits they are taking a chance with Bright Shiny Morning. “James Frey is a brilliant novelist. Whatever came before, I place no judgment on it,” Friedman says. Still, “the rule of thumb is, the more you pay, the harder it is to make it back.”
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