There’s a new prediction of the book industry’s collapse every financial quarter, it seems, and one recurring phenomenon that comes up when those premature obituaries are filed is the tendency of big houses to overpay for books with some possibility of commercial success, staking out the territory just in case. If the books tank, the publisher’s out the advance, but it could be “worse” if the books are a hit, because then the publisher has to keep shelling out exorbitant amounts of money just to hang on to the author while she’s hot—because if they don’t, somebody else surely will. Until, perhaps, a publisher wants to get out of the relationship while the getting’s still good, and let somebody else be on the hook if the author’s hot streak fades.
So when one predominantly commercial imprint at a major publishing company loses two franchise authors to another predominantly commercial imprint at a rival publishing company in less than a month, we start hearing whispers that the house that’s been abandoned isn’t too disappointed with the results. Unconfirmed rumors go so far as to suggest that comparatively lowball offers may have been made specifically to encourage agents to find their clients a new home—and that we should expect word of at least one more defection from a similarly-esteemed author soon.