Penguin Australia spends like a drunken sailor
The Sydney Morning Herald has a story about Penguin Australia publisher Ben Ball’s eyebrow-raising acquisitions. It’s not the books Ball has signed on that have raised those eyebrows, but the suitcase-loads of cash he is paying for them.
It was almost a year before Ball announced his first piece of literary fiction: a 700-page first novel by Steve Toltz, a Sydney screenwriter. Most first-time novelists are happy to get an advance of $5,000 to $10,000, so eyebrows were raised by Toltz’s advance, which was said to be more than $100,000.
Since then Ball has really been “splashing the cash,” to quote one rival. Kristin Williamson, wife of the playwright David Williamson, has apparently been given $150,000 to write about their lives together.
But what has the industry agog is the rumoured $300,000-plus advance given to the Melbourne author Chloe Hooper for a two-book deal: a novel and a non-fiction account of the recent troubles on Palm Island.
Hooper won a Walkley Award last year for a magazine article about the Palm Island inquest. Other publishers were keen to publish her book but did not expect it to sell more than 10,000 copies, a fifth of what would be needed to recoup the rumoured advance.
Obviously, whenever a publisher starts spending this kind of money for anything less than a tell-all memoir from a famous figure, the amounts are the message, a naked publicity ploy, an expensive attention-grabbing scheme.
Well, it won’t work this time, Ball! We’re on to you, so good luck getting any publicity out of this… oh, hang on.
We’re also betting that literary agents around the world are right now practising their best “G’day mate!”
