Oops!  Three Cups of Tea:

Hold the Sugar

NEW YORK – A "60 Minutes" investigation alleges that the inspirational multimillion seller "Three Cups of Tea" is filled with inaccuracies and that co-author Greg Mortenson's charitable organization has taken credit for building schools that don't exist.

The report, which airs Sunday night on CBS television, cites "Into the Wild" author Jon Krakauer as among the doubters of Mortenson's story of being lost in 1993 while mountain climbing in rural Pakistan and stumbling upon the village of Korphe, where the kindness of local residents inspired him to build a school. The "60 Minutes" story draws upon observations from the porters who joined Mortenson on his mountain trip in Pakistan and dispute his being lost. They say he only visited Korphe a year later.

The "60 Minutes" report alleges that numerous schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan that Mortenson's Central Asia Institute is said to have established either don't exist or were built by others. According to the CAI's website, the institute has "successfully established over 170 schools" and helped educate over 68,000 students, with an emphasis on girls' education."

In a statement issued Friday through the institute, Mortenson defended the book he co-authored with David Oliver Relinhis, and his humanitarian work.

"Afghanistan and Pakistan are fascinating, inspiring countries, full of wonderful people. They are also complex places, torn by conflicting loyalties, and some who do not want our mission of educating girls to succeed," Mortenson said.

"I stand by the information conveyed in my book and by the value of CAI's work in empowering local communities to build and operate schools that have educated more than 60,000 students. I continue to be heartened by the many messages of support I receive from our local partners in cities and villages across Afghanistan and Pakistan, who are determined not to let unjustified attacks stop the important work being done to create a better future for their children."

"Three Cups of Tea" was released by Penguin in 2006. Spokeswoman Carolyn Coleburn declined comment, saying the publisher had not seen the "60 Minutes" story. The book sold moderately in hardcover, but was a word-of-mouth hit as a paperback and became an international sensation, selling more than 3 million copies.

AP

Eisler Walks from

Lucrative Deal

Two months after thriller writer Barry Eisler moved houses to St. Martin's Press crime imprint Minotaur Books for his next John Rain novel, The Detachment, he reveals in a lengthy online conversation with his friend and fellow writer Joe Konrath that the deal is off. Instead, Eisler will publish the book on his own around mid-June, far sooner than the Spring 2012 publication date scheduled by Minotaur. "I know it'll seem crazy to a lot of people," Eisler states, "but based on what's happening in the industry, and based on the kind of experience writers...are having in self-publishing, I think I can do better in the long term on my own."

Eisler, whose previous standalone novels Fault Line and Inside Out were published by Ballantine, wound up at Minotaur after his agent, Dan Conaway of Writers House, conducted an auction last fall. Eisler agreed to a deal worth $500,000 for two books with executive editor Kelley Ragland "in part because all else being equal, the terms they offered were the most attractive, but in larger part because all else wasn't equal, and the SMP people struck me as exceptionally smart and capable," Eisler told us in a follow-up interview. "Plus from everything I've heard and seen, I think Kelley Ragland is a terrific editor."

Three months passed from the initial "handshake deal" agreed to by Eisler and when Minotaur sent the paperwork (our database reported the deal on January 20.) The delay was "not at all an unusual lag in the publishing industry, but still, the industry is changing faster than ever, and during those three months a lot happened," Eisler said, specifically citing Borders' bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble's declining inventory and stock prices, the e-publishing success of various writers, and Kindle book sales surprising print sales from the retailer. "So what looked like a good deal at the beginning of November with the industry in a certain state was looking less attractive amidst a changed industry landscape three months later, thinking more and more, 'Do I want to do another deal with a legacy publisher, even one that seems as good as SMP?""

All told, Eisler said, "it wasn't just that the 17.5% ebook royalty publishers are offering was looking less and less attractive compared to the 70% I can make on my own. It was that, combined with the way I saw the industry changing, along with my growing understanding of the overall long-term value of a legacy publishing deal vs. the overall long-term value of going it alone."

In his conversation with Konrath, Eisler said his agent was "surprised and disappointed," but that his decision "led to a lot of terrific conversations about where the industry is going, and how agents will be changing their business models accordingly." We wondered what changes, if any, there might be with respect to the agent's commission: by walking away from St. Martin's, Eisler not only walked away from $500,000 up front, but Conaway would lose out on 15% of the total. Would his decision to e-publish mean the commission still stood?

Eisler didn't answer this question directly, but did say that "agents have been able to justify their commissions based primarily on two things: (i) the deals they did on behalf of the author upfront; and (ii) managing the author/publisher relationship after. But neither of those functions is really on offer for self-published authors, so the question is, how do agents morph their business models so they can continue to add enough value to justify a commission? That question was the basis for the conversations I mentioned, which are ongoing."

Ultimately, as Eisler told Konrath, his decision to e-publish is based on what he feels he can earn in the future on his own versus the potential earnings from being allied with a large publishing house. For his earlier John Rain novels, which remain in print through Putnam, keeping the digital rights "wasn't an option." But, he said, "today it is, and I don't want to be kicking myself eight years from now when The Detachment would be making me only pennies through a legacy publisher when it could have been making me a mint through the rights I refused to sell cheap."

It remains to be seen whether Eisler will be able to sell enough copies to earn as much as he would have from Minotaur up front, as a senior publishing executive wonders. "Can [Eisler] get the word out, does he have the fan base, and will people go looking for a new John Rain/Barry Eisler novel, to make [e-publishing] at least as financially successful? He'll have to sell a hell of a lot more copies than he has ever before." One person notes that Nielsen Bookscan figures show Eisler's print book sales, which have always been driven by mass market editions, declining steadily from book to book.

When reached for comment Minotaur publisher Andy Martin told us, "At the final stages of this deal, Barry made a considered personal decision to self-publish. While we are disappointed, as we would have loved to be the publisher of his terrific John Rain series, we certainly wish him well in his endeavor."

Sequel to Ian Fleming's

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

In 1964 it was a fictional Paragon Panther; in 2011 the all-new Chitty Chitty Bang Bang will be a souped-up VW camper van.

It was announced recently that the family of Ian Fleming, creator of the original Chitty, had asked author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce to write a sequel, to be titled Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again, the first of three new titles.

Cottrell Boyce, whose first book, Millions, was made into a film by Danny Boyle, said he had "no idea" why he had been asked: "I haven't asked them in case it's all a case of mistaken identity."

Boyce has gone back to Fleming's book for the first time since he was a child and was delighted, he said, to conclude that it is crying out for a sequel. "I've had a lot of fun writing these books, but somewhere among all the fun I found it strangely emotional to revisit myself as a boy and ask if he could help me restore an old-fashioned contraption and make it fly again."

Fleming originally made up the Chitty tale, about a family whose car develops unusual powers, as a bedtime story for his son Caspar. When the writer had a heart attack and his wife banned him from his typewriter, he wrote the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stories out in longhand instead of working on his next Bond novel.

The book was published in 1964 and became even more famous when it was made into a 1968 film with Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts.

The new novel, to be illustrated by Joe Berger, will be published on 4 November. It follows the new Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks, Devil May Care.

St. Martin's Pays $2M for

Four Books by Amanda Hocking

This year every week in publishing could be considered eventful, but the last week in March had a special kind of symmetry, as the very publishing house Barry Eisler (story above) walked away from to publish on his own brought Amanda Hocking into the fold. Despite sources indicating otherwise a few days ago, St. Martin's emerged the victor of the auction for Hocking's new Watersong YA paranormal series, reportedly paying more than $2 million for World English rights (which, of course, includes digital rights, too.)

"I've done as much with self-publishing as any person can do," Hocking told the NYT recently. "People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don't have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer."

Her comments echoed a blog post Tuesday where she addressed and explained the then-ongoing auction: "I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation." But in a follow-up post, Hocking reiterated that the deal doesn't mean she will stop self-publishing: "I have a few titles lined up this year [to self-publish] and I'll have more in the future."

SMP publisher Matthew Shear evidently wanted to win the auction "pretty badly," having first heard of Hocking six months before from her eventual acquiring editor, Rose Hilliard. Shear looks at self-publishing as a way for authors "to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later" but a publisher "provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda's books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before."

The first Watersong book won't be out until Fall 2012, by which time it may become apparent whether Hocking can continue to sell her self-published books at the same rapid clip of the last few months (monthly sales reports she provided to the AP showed more than 333,000 copies sold of her nine titles available, with another 300,000 sales in February, which roughly dovetail with her claimed total earnings of between $1.4m and $2m.) Her current readership may also use that time to adjust to the eventual price increase from the 99 cents to $2.99 her e-published titles cost to whatever higher agency price Macmillan decides upon.

And Hocking, while obviously excited by her new and parallel career direction, is bemused by the reaction: "It is crazy that we live in a time that I have to justify taking a seven-figure a publishing deal with St. Martin's," she wrote. "Ten years ago, nobody would question this. Now everybody is."

NYT

Clark Legacy

To Continue?

Mary Higgins Clark is 83 years old, and next month she will publish another bestselling suspense novel with Simon & Schuster, as she's done for decades. This year the new book should sell about 3.7 million copies around the world. But in a lengthy piece the WSJ asks the question many people secretly want to know, but don't necessarily want to voice aloud: how can her brand, so carefully maintained for so long, endure as she nears the twilight of her career and persist even after she's gone? Clark, it turns out, is open to having other writers continue her books; her children, however are opposed, "wary of diluting her legacy."

"They don't want 'From the Mary Higgins Clark tradition,' " Clark said. "I say, 'I think you're foolish.' " Her children object on the grounds that the brand would be degraded, even if there's more money to be made. . "Either she wrote it, or she didn't," son Warren Clark said, with daughter and fellow bestselling author Carol Higgins Clark adding "Her readers have a certain kind of attachment to her. You couldn't have someone else writing them." S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy didn't want to talk about the subject at all: "We don't even want to think about a time when we're not publishing Mary."

WSJ

How Book Publishing

Has Changed Since 1984

by Peter Osnos

In April 1984, I arrived at Random House as a senior editor after nearly two decades at the Washington Post. Publishing is now undergoing the most significant transformation in the way books are distributed and read since development of high-speed printing presses and transcontinental rail and highway systems. Looking back at the industry in the 1980s may help to explain how much has changed and what has not.

On my first day at Random House, I encountered the fundamental difference between the news business and the book business. In newsrooms, you got the story, it was printed in the paper, and then you went home. In publishing, you acquired the story, got it written, had it printed, and then—crucially—figured out how it should be sold. Because books have no advertising or subscriptions to provide revenue, the combined mission of obtaining the story and selling it was and is the essence of the art of publishing. For all that today's technology and marketing methods have evolved, the basic task remains the same: to define and find the audience for which the book was written.

The rise of the chains had the greatest impact on department stores such as Macy's and Marshall Fields, which in their heyday were centers of bookselling. By 1984, that era was ending.

To help me recollect the retail scene of the 1980s, I called Carl Lennertz, who was then a young Random House sales representative and now coordinates HarperCollins's relationships with independent booksellers. I remembered Carl as especially wise about how books were sold, and he was generous in educating me, who despite my fancy title and extensive background in news-gathering was very much an ingénue when it came to publishing. So with Carl's help, here is where books were sold in 1984: The biggest names in retailing were Walden, Dalton, and Crown, still relatively new as national chains. They made books available in malls as populations moved to the suburbs. Led by Crown, which was mainly in the Washington, D.C. area, the chains adopted discounting as a strategy and limited their selections to put greater emphasis on bestsellers and "category" books such as self-help, diet, and romance. Barnes & Noble and Borders, which became dominant in the 1990s with superstores (absorbing Dalton and Walden, respectively; Crown went out of business), were still in their early stages. The rise of the chains had the greatest impact on department stores such as Macy's and Marshall Fields, which in their heyday were centers of bookselling alongside housewares and clothing. By 1984, that era was ending.

TheAtlantic.com

Bits & Bytes

Thousands More Listings for AmSAW PROFESSIONAL MEMBERS Today

FICTION

Debut

Grace McCleen's debut THE LAND OF DECORATION, about a ten-year-old girl raised by her father (who belongs to a small religious movement in an industrial town in England) and bullied at school, so she creates a model world in her room made from things nobody else wanted -- one day she creates a snow storm in her tiny world and then it snows outside, and she believes that she can make miracles, but each miracle only seems to make things worse, to Stephen Rubin and Sarah Bowlin at Holt (US), by Sally Riley at Aitken Alexander; for publication in spring 2012; to Clara Farmer at Chatto & Windus in the UK, on an exclusive submission.

clare@aitkenalexander.co.uk

Mystery/Crime

Edgar Award-winning author David Handler's THE SNOW WHITE CHRISTMAS COOKIE, the next in the series featuring "odd couple" crime fighters, to Toni Plummer at Thomas Dunne Books, by Dominick Abel at Dominick Abel Associates (NA).

General/Other

Beverly Swerling's BRISTOL HOUSE, a novel of intrigue set in London in the sixteenth century and today, in which a thirty-something American architectural historian rents a flat she comes to believe is haunted by a monk from Tudor times fleeing the rage of Thomas Cromwell, their duel stories told with flashbacks between 1536 and a present-day search for ancient Judaica lost during Cromwell's day, further complicated by her meeting a modern Englishman who is the monk's exact double, in a drama involving betrayal and atonement that spans the centuries, to Clare Ferraro for Viking, with Carole DeSanti editing, in a significant deal, in a pre-empt, for publication in early 2013, by Marly Rusoff at Marly Rusoff & Associates (world English).

Children's: Young Adult

Barry Lyga's I HUNT KILLERS: Books Two and Three, in Book Two, having captured the man impersonating his father, a boy now turns his sights to bigger game -- the streets of New York City -- and learns a shocking secret from his own past that could change everything he's ever believed, which is followed up in Book Three as he works his way up the serial killer "hierarchy" by infiltrating a conspiracy of murderers called The Collective, to Alvina Ling at Little, Brown Children's, for publication in 2013 and 2014, by Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary Management (World).

kathleen@andersonliterary.com

NONFICTION

Cooking

Shauna James Ahern and Danny Ahern's GLUTEN-FREE GIRL EVERYDAY, the second cookbook from the food blogger, and the follow-up to GLUTEN-FREE GIRL AND THE CHEF, which was chosen by the NY Times as a top cookbook of 2010, this collection will offer more accessible gluten-free recipes, to Justin Schwartz at Wiley, in a very nice deal, for publication in Fall 2012, by Stacey Glick at Dystel & Goderich Literary Management (World).

Memoir

Jermaine Jackson's memoir of his brother, the late Michael Jackson, YOUR ARE NOT ALONE: MICHAEL: Through a Brother's Eyes, promising a "frank but sophisticated examination of the human, not the legend, with revealing insights and no subject off limits," from Michael's "true confidant," dubbed "an expert witness to history from the inside," to Stacy Creamer at Touchstone, for publication in fall 2011, and to Natalie Jerome at Harper Nonfiction in the UK, by Gordon Wise at Curtis Brown UK.

Narrative

SCENT OF THE MISSING author Susannah Charleson's THE POSSIBILITY DOGS, the story of Charleson's entrée into the emerging world of psychiatric service dogs, as she works as an evaluator in shelters, plucking unwanted dogs, big and small, training them for this unique kind of service, and matching them with people suffering from disabilities that are unseen but no less felt, again to Susan Canavan at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, by Jim Hornfischer at Hornfischer Literary Management (NA).

Lori.Glazer@hmhpub.com

Science

David Sibley's THE SIBLEY GUIDE TO BIRDS, rev. ed., a major update of the respected and successful nature guide, to Ken Schneider at Knopf, in a major deal, for publication in 2014, by Russell Galen at Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency (NA).

Sports

NYT, Washington Post, The Atlantic journalist Sridhar Pappu's THE LAST OCTOBER, about the great pitching duel of 1968 between Bob Gibson and the Cardinals and Denny McLain and the Tigers, pitched against backdrop of great civil and political unrest in America, to Susan Canavan at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, by Gail Ross and Howard Yoon at the Ross Yoon Agency.