So who’s behind this $7 million Warren Buffett book deal?
The Editor: Irwyn Applebaum of Bantam Dell is no stranger to major deals. Last year he signed mystery writer Karin Slaughter away from Morrow with “high seven figures” for her next three books, which led to a big push for Faithless at this summer’s BookExpo. His fiction roster also includes Dean Koontz, lee Child and Thomas Harris, which makes it creepily funny (or funnily creepy?) that he’s also the author of the “official Leave It to Beaver book,” The World According to Beaver. On the nonfiction front, he’s acquired books from Sting and champion bass fisher Mike Iaconelli.
The Agent: David Black started out in the ICM mailroom, but he’s been running his own agency for more than 15 years. He handles a number of big names, from A-list journos Mitch Albom and Jimmy Breslin to chef Sara Jenkins and Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin, but he’s also got a taste for quirky nonfiction like Pope Brock’s American Huckster, described in the Publishers Lunch deal announcement as “the story of John Brinkley, an audacious and successful medical charlatan, who in the 1920s and 30s surrounded himself with the famous and powerful while revolutionizing the worlds of corporate advertising, political campaigning, radio broadcasting and country music.” He’s also good at pairing people with interesting lives up with authors who can distill their stories; in addition to the aforementioned Coughlin deal, he’s also repped books where Greta van Susteren, Rabbi Irwin Kula, and Katrina Witt had collaborators sharing the workload.
The Author: A September 2001 interview with Alice Schroeder describes her as “Wall Street’s top insurance analyst” and “the only analyst with whom Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet confides.” In a March 2002 interview for Risk & Insurance, she explained how their relationship emerged out of a request to attend a Berkshire shareholders meeting back in the late ’90s after Buffett acquired a company she’d been tracking.
The Star: Warren Buffett is the second richest man in the world; Forbes estimates his worth at $36 billion, while Berkshire Hathaway has about $116 billion in investment holdings. So, yeah, people will probably be interested in reading a “biography of Warren’s ideas,” as Schroeder refers to the book in Bantam Dell’s official release.