MATH FOR PUBLISHERS

By Chris Daly

In today's Times, there's fresh evidence of the insanity in the trade-book publishing world. 

On page A26, there's a full-page, color advertisement for Ted Turner's new ghost-written autobiography. (If you don't write it yourself, is it still an auto-biography?)

Inside the Business section is a story about how the book came to be "written." Bad enough that we have to read that the ghost-writer, a former Turner employee, Bill Burke, in order to do his work on the  book, "skipped between Mr. Turner's ranches, three in Montana and one in the Patagonia region of Argentina." Not only that, but the ranch-skipping writer also had to put in a couple of hours a day fishing with his subjects. Phew!

In any case, the most objectionable part of the whole enterprise is this: Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette, paid a $5 million advance. 

For what, I wonder? 

Surely, Mr. Turner did not need $5 million to sustain him during the "writing" of the book. In the latest Forbes magazine listing of the "400 Richest Americans," Mr. Turner checks in at No. 190, with a net worth estimated at $2.3 billion. To him, $5 million represents less than a quarter of 1 percent of his net worth. That hardly seems like enough money to motivate Turner to do something (as if he needed motivation anyway -- he is hardly the retiring type).

Neither, presumably, did Mr. Burke need the money. He made a bundle working for Turner as head of Turner Classic Movies, then got, according to the Times, a "high-level digital job at Time Warner," then bugged out to Maine.

Here's my gripe with the $5 million advance: Instead of throwing money at already-rich pseudo-authors, Hachette could have used the same $5 million to award 50 advances of $100,000 each to 50 real writers. To most writers, $100,000 would make an enormous difference in whether they can consider a project or take it to completion.

Not only that, but consider this: There is a good likelihood that a book like Turner's -- which is essentially a vanity project about a guy most people feel they know all too well already -- will never "earn back" a $5 million advance. So, Hachette will end up losing money on the deal.

By contrast, if a publisher places 50 bets on promising projects by real writers, the likelihood is that at least a handful will turn out to be spectacularly successful, and earn back their advances multiple times. 

Am I missing something here? Please let me know.