Hyping the Demand for a James Frey Comeback

I've already said I found HarperCollins's claims about why it bought James Frey's novel unconvincing. Now it turns out Frey's agent, Eric Simonoff, was spinning when he described how he sold it, too.

Simonoff has said he offered Bright Shiny Morning to HarperCollins as an exclusive to prevent one of those unsavory bidding wars agents are always trying to avoid. Okay, so as spin goes, that was pretty feeble. But The New York Observer has some good dirt on Simonoff's campaign to make it look like every publisher in town was clamoring for a shot at the book.

It seems some of the editors who supposedly asked to see the manuscript simply didn't ask not to see it. "I get 5, 10, 20 submissions a day," one of them tells the Observer. "If it's from a legitimate agent I never say, 'No, don't send it! Save the postage!' No one ever says that."

After testing the waters, Simonoff appears to have opted for the exclusive rather than take a chance that a public auction would draw out the industry's underlying queasiness about giving an opportunistic fraud like Frey another bid payday. "If there'd been an auction there would have been peer pressure," says one publishing executive. "The immediate reaction would have been, 'You're gonna buy a book from that scumbag?'"