Strategy session III: managing successare negotiated into deals, some agents and authors these days are
choosing Publisher's Weekly over the Times.
None of the lists that I have just mentioned, however, poll spe-
cialty stores or book clubs. (Only one, the Times, polls price clubs.)
Genre novelists, whose sales can be the strongest in specialty
stores, are therefore at a bit of a disadvantage. Fortunately, the
monthly best-seller lists in trade magazines like Locus and Mystery
Scene make up for this lack since they are based entirely on sales in
selected specialty stores.
Genre editors and agents use these specialty lists as maps to
which authors are finding acceptance among a given genre's hard-
core fans. Look at these lists and you will know who is up-and-
coming.
Are you still hoping to learn a surefire way to climb aboard the
best-seller express? Sorry. No easy way exists. If you want to
improve your odds, however, I can offer a helpful hint. In 1993, 87
percent of the Publisher's Weekly hardcover best-sellers, and 81 per-
cent of its paperback best-sellers, were published by seven corpo-
rate groups (the "seven sisters"): Random House, Bantam
Doubleday Dell, Simon S- Schuster, Putnam-Berkley, HarperCollins,
Time Warner, and Penguin USA.
Lesson: if you want to be a best-seller, then you should probably
be published by one of the major media giants in New York City.
GETTING OUT OF OPTIONS
Ahem ... if you are an editor or a publisher kindly skip this section.
If you are an author with no backlist to keep together, and who is
convinced that the time has come to make a break from your current
publisher, read on. There are ways out of your option clause.
Sometimes, of course, trickery is not needed. That is especially
true if things are not going well. Your publisher may turn down your
option proposal. You might even have an honest talk with your edi-
tor and arrange an amicable parting of the ways.
The problem arises when you want to go, but your publisher
wants you to stay. Your option clause does not absolutely lock you
into selling your next book to your current publisher, but it may
grant them the right to acquire that novel on the same—or slightly