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.)

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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.

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