The literary publishing world possibly made history this week when Audrey Niffenegger, the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, scored a "close to" $5 million advance for her next book, "Her Fearful Symmetry." (Why is one title italicized, the other in quotes? According to the "rules," ital after publication, quotes before, yes?)
Before I get into the historic nature of the sale, this: The Time Traveler's Wife is an inventive novel whose "scenes" (the book's structural trope) have stayed with me years after consuming it, nearly in one sitting. A visual artist first, Niffenegger's pictorial skill translated so well into her writing that the novel's vignettes, strung together out of sequence (and thus causing the reader to really have to think) were so carefully "drawn" that many left me not only with pictures but with scents. Above all, the aroma of coffee, the emotional aphrodisiac that holds the two literally out-of-synch lovers together.
Audrey Niffenegger (there's more info at this Wikipedia link right now than at her site) teaches at Columbia College Chicago (not the one that's part of the famed New York university), which is its own miraculous story in education, having nearly died in the early 1960s, then revived, in part because of educating returning Vietnam War veterans, but that's not the point of this post...
...Which is that it's possible Niffenegger's advance is the largest ever paid to a woman for literary fiction.
There's no easy way to prove this. I've done my usual googling around and learned that Mary Higgins Clark, the mystery writer, received a $64 million advance for five books in 2001. And of course spy novelists like Tom Clancy get the multi-millions (same article).
But for a fine writer of literary fiction, which is where I'd place Niffenegger, I'm wagering that she's the first woman in that category to get such a capital commitment from a publisher, in this case Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster.
In the small world of writers and publishing aficionados that I frequent (where people care intensely about such things), I've seen mixed response--from jealousy (endearing because of its honesty) to anger (if she gets so much, the rest of us get less) to good business thinking (she sold 4 million copies of her last book so she's likely to earn out this advance).
Her own agent, Joe Regal, posted a comment on another agent's site where people were discussing whether news of the sale was deliberately leaked or not, explaining why he wanted to keep the auction under wraps. Publishing can be its own brutal world (not his words, just a little hard-won experience) and what's truly important, Regal does in fact say, is the quality of the work. He believes in the new novel, as he did in Niffenegger's first. Notably, she'd finished the manuscript before selling it--and foreign rights were already picked up in five markets, according to Publishers Weekly. The NY Times' Motoko Rich ran a short piece with the news hinting of the auction's results; countless other sites picked up on it.
Beyond the possible historic nature of the sale (someone prove me wrong), the transaction is noteworthy, of course, because of our precarious economic times. Publishers are retrenching; the death of the literary novel is a regular feature assigned out to the few remaining reporters on the book beat; Kindle; shrinking ad revenues; book stores closing like blooms in the night; the downers go on (or down).
Against all this, something miraculous has happened. A very good imaginative writer has sold what appears to be another excellent book. That she is given her reward in advance (writers don't have to pay back advances if they deliver completed manuscripts in accord with contract terms) is spectacular and for this I hereby deliver this virtual bouquet of admiration and congratulations, rendered, naturally, in words.
