Pitch perfect

Pubs make big-buck play for one-liners

Publishers, who are increasingly emulating the ways of Hollywood, are making multimillion-dollar buys on the basis of one-liners and pitches.

Publishers have long bought new novels by commerical titans like Tom Clancy or Stephen King, or major nonfiction books, without seeing much advance material. Now they're buying literary fiction, even books that won't be completed for years, sight unseen.

Last week "Cold Mountain" author Charles Frazier made waves by selling an as-yet unwritten book, on the basis of a pitch and a one-page proposal, for $11 million to Random House and producer Scott Rudin. Random House plans to publish the book in 2005.

Frazier's is the second such deal in a month, coming just weeks after Michael Chabon sold an unwritten novel and short story collection to HarperCollins and producer Scott Rudin for close to $3 million.

Thanks to the success of "Cold Mountain," Frazier is a publishing star with a star salary from Random House -- close to $8.5 for North American rights only. That advance is so high, the book will have to be a major hit -- selling close to a million copies -- before it's profitable.

That gamble was based in part on a pitch meeting with Frazier, a ritual that's become increasingly common as agents rely on showmanship to sell projects to publishers. Hence David Blaine did magic tricks for editors in a hotel room before selling his memoir for $1 million last year, and Sting recently invited a few lucky editors to his Manhattan apartment, before selling his memoir for something north of that.

Frazier's meetings with editors were a lot more low-key. In fact, such meetings can be as valuable for an author as for an editor, says AMG manager Joel Gotler. "You can tell in a meeting if you're going to work with a lemon or not."

But it's part of a trend some editors find dispiriting.

"Most people I know involved in any of these things find it depressing," one said. "With literary properties, one would like to feel in a Utopian way the high-stakes activity had to do with what had been written, rather than a brief treatment."

ALSO ALARMING TO SOME PUBLISHERS is that Frazier seems to have put the indie publishing biz behind him.

"Cold Mountain" was a great indie publishing story. It was shepherded by boutique shops Darhansoff Verrill (now Darhansoff Verrill Feldman) and the Lynn Pleshette Agency and published by indie press Grove Atlantic.

Frazier, who turned down Grove Atlantic's bid for his new novel, is now repped by ICM.

Even if Frazier had remained at Grove Atlantic, however, his career would still be swept up in the vortex of corporate publishing trends that are changing the way manuscripts are shopped and traded.

Thanks to a huge network of book spies and the power of the Internet, it's virtually impossible to keep a hotly sought-after title under wraps. With leaked proposals and manuscripts traveling rapidly from coast to coast, editors are under heightened pressure to take a potential hit off the market -- at any price.

It's also virtually impossible to keep these deals out of the press. The Frazier deal was covered by dozens of news outlets around the globe, despite the fact that ICM and Random House remained mum about the details.

AS THE GOSSIP MILLS WERE CHURNING last week with news of Frazier's deal, Fox 2000 quietly optioned another epic Civil War love story, "Enemy Women" by Paulette Jiles for producers Ed Saxon and Peter Saraf ("The Truth About Charlie").

Jiles has drawn widespread comparison to Frazier, but "Enemy Women," by contrast, has been an under-the-radar phenomenon in Hollywood.

Upon publication in February, the novel was immediately compared to "Cold Mountain." It, too, is a first novel and it has a similar plot.

It's the story of a Missouri woman who escapes from a Federal jail and journeys home across a blighted landscape to reunite her ruptured family. The book received stellar reviews and has been selected by the Book of the Month Club.

Jiles is also repped by DVF and the Lynn Pleshette Agency, but since Jiles isn't a publishing name brand like Frazier, they sold the book after it was published, riding the buzz of early reviews to find a Hollywood buyer.

There are several Civil War films in development around town, and "Cold Mountain" will roll into production in July.

But Saxon, who credits creative exec Krista Parris with bringing the book into his Gotham-based shingle, Magnet Entertainment, isn't troubled by competing projects.

"I think the Civil War is arguably the greatest single event in American history, he said. "To think there can be only movie about that is surprising to me. There've been countless movies about World War II. There could be more eight more pictures about the Civil War and there'd still be an appetite if they were good movies."

Creative exec Rodney Ferrell brought the project to Fox 2000 and will develop it under production prexy Elizabeth Gabler.