The Book Deal That Began Halfway Around the World

Two weeks ago, Henry Holt announced that it had acquired the North American rights to The Good Psychologist, a debut novel by Ohio-based psychology professor Noam Shpancer (1), described as a literary version of the HBO series In Treatment, focused on “a psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders[,] treats a dancer for stage fright, teaches a night course in psychotherapy at a local college, and revisits an unresolved situation from his own past.”

The backstory behind the deal, though, is a classic example of the role book festivals can play in the literary community. You see, although Shpancer lives in Columbus, the Israeli native wrote his novel in Hebrew and sold it to Rana Werbin (2), an editor Yedioth Aharonot, where it was first published this spring. Werbin was an Editorial Fellow at this year’s Jerusalem Book Fair, where she ran into ICM‘s Jennifer Joel (3), who was at the fair as an Agent Fellow. Joel was intrigued enough by the novel to see if she could interest an American publisher—and eventually placed it with Holt’s Helen Atsma (4), who (as it turns out) had also just been to Jerusalem as a guest of the book fair, where she had met Werbin.

(photos courtesy of Holt except [3] from nysocialdiary.com)

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