Financial journalist Felix Salmon has considered Tom Wolfe's move from FSG to Little, Brown, and as he sees it in his Portfolio blog, "this deal makes sense for all three parties." Wolfe gets something like $7 million for a book he hasn't finished yet, Michael Pietsch and Pat Strachan get the prestige of publishing the novel when it's ready, and Jonathan Galassi hangs on to the Wolfe backlist without having to spend another dime—and, the way Salmon cites Hachette Book Group CEO David Young's declaration that the company is dedicated to "helping Tom Wolfe find the biggest readership of his already extraordinary career," it seems pretty clear that they will spend a lot of marketing money on Back to Blood, creating a promotional aura that will undoubtedly have some marginal benefit for FSG down the line.

Some observers think Galassi cut Wolfe loose not a moment too soon, like Gawker managing editor Nick Denton, who cited Nielsen Bookscan numbers quoted in Motoko Rich's summation of the deal, putting the 70% mark for sales on I Am Charlotte Simmons at "293,000 copies in hardcover and 138,000 copies in paperback." (And apparently the reported numbers on the first printing were, get this, exaggerated!) "Book publishers are no different from their counterparts in the magazine and newspaper industries," Denton claims after sifting through the tea leaves. "As print declines, so the claims, whether of print runs or circulation figures, become ever more inflated and ever more desperate." Maybe; Gawker readers didn't seem particularly impressed by the analysis, though: "Isn't this the kind of conclusion that the Times makes, and Gawker mocks?" one commenter asked. Adds another, "As opposed to being an indicator of decline in publishing perhaps there is something positive to be said for an overblown, overrated writer not selling the books that his publisher expected him to sell." Obviously, Little, Brown doesn't agree with that literary assessment, and is crossing their fingers that whatever went wrong with Charlotte Simmons doesn't happen again this time...

(Speaking of Back to Blood, I was struck by Pietsch's comment to the Times that "it's Tom Wolfe writing the kind of novel that only Tom Wolfe among the living American writers can do... He's looking at a society in huge flux and the combinations of ambition and class and all the different human drives that make cities fascinating places." Maybe I'm just a science fiction geek, but I still think William Gibson beat Wolfe to it with last year's Spook Country. And then there's Northern Ireland's Ian McDonald, who plunged forty years into India's future in River of Gods...)

photo: Bruce Gilbert