Join our newsletter list

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Yearly Archives: 2013

The solution to your sex problem is that you don’t have one.

We just signed with Dr. Chris Donaghue is a licensed clinical therapist, nationally certified sex therapist and doctor of clinical sexology and human sexuality. His first book, tentatively titled The New Sex, turns conventional thinking on sexuality on its head.

Dr. Donaghue received his Doctoral degree in Clinical Sexology and best beard and mustache trimmer Human Sexuality, …

Continue Reading the post 

First, Kill All the Marriage Counselors

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve just signed with Laura Doyle, author of the blockbuster bestseller The Surrendered Wife. First, Kill All the Marriage Counselors is her latest book and it’s everything I look for in a book – insightful, controversial and marvelously written.

Andy Kaufman Lives! (Right?)

I had the great pleasure of meeting the awesome Bob Zmuda. If you don’t recall, Zmuda was Andy Kaufmann’s best friend (and was played by Paul Giamatti in the film Man on the Moon).

It will soon be thirty years since Kaufman’s death, and the facts of his life and death have yet to be revealed. …

Continue Reading the post 

The Video Vixen comes to BenBella

I’m delighted to announce that we just signed a deal with Karrine Steffans, three-time NYT bestselling author, to the BenBella roster. I had the pleasure of meeting Karrine for a face-to-face contract signing. Here she is right after signing the contract with the  pen (gifted to her by Bill Maher) that she uses for special occasions:

  …

Continue Reading the post 

Why you don’t want your book to earn out

I’ve always thought it unfair that the big name books, celebrity books in particular, get paid advances that are so high that even the publisher doesn’t expect them to earn out.  In effect, books that surprise the publisher by selling well subsidize the books that everyone assumes will sell well.

But Mike Shatzkin points out that it’s even worse than that:

Because books that publishers and agents know will be big in advance tend to have advances calculated to be too high to earn out, …

Continue Reading the post 

BenBella’s Success Secret

“The Market for Lemons” is a classic economics paper by George Akerlof (I rarely get to use my graduate training in economics, so please forgive me). It deals with information asymmetry, the fact that sellers of used cars know more about the car’s defects than buyers. It concludes that owners of used good used cars will tend to avoid the used car market, …

Continue Reading the post 

Can you pay authors more and still make money?

Let’s face it. Publishing is not a high margin business. In earlier posts, I mentioned that on profit-sharing deals, authors can make 50-100% more than traditional royalties. How is that possible?

These royalties don’t come at the cost of our margins (very nice, thank you) or our staff (we generally peg our salaries against New York standards, …

Continue Reading the post