(2 of 10)
Weeks before the Puzo sale, competing publishers had laid intricate game plans that many would scrap to stay in the race. Final offers from runners-up Ballantine and Pocket Books were both $2.5 million, only $50,000 short of N.A.L. That seems a relatively small gap, but it is a chasm to the bidder already hundreds of thousands of dollars over his limit. In such cases, terms of the sale tip the balance.
In the Puzo case, the hard-cover publisher, Putnam, will receive only 40% of the advance; Puzo gets the rest. Most authors settle for a 50-50 arrangement. The novelist expects to take his $1.5 million share in chunks spread over five years. With 10% going to his agent and approximately half of the rest for taxes, he should eventually pocket at least $500,000 from the record $2,550,000 auction.
An unwritten publishing rule stipulates that authors stay away from the point sale. That suited Puzo, 57, fine. He spent the big payday in his studio and on his backyard tennis court in Bay Shore, L.I. "To me this was a business matter," he says. "I had nothing to do with it. I told my agent Candida Donadio: 'Get it done and tell me when it's finished.' "
Nevertheless, the ever watchful godfather of The Godfather never missed a shuffle of the paperback poker game: "While I was playing tennis it was up to 1.6, something like that. Then after dinner it was 1.8. It was Ballantine, N.A.L., and up to 1.5 Bantam was in it. The last three were Pocket Books, Ballantine, N.A.L. Then at 9 o'clock I got a phone call. Ballantine and N.A.L. were up to 2.4. Then I got a final call saying that Ballantine and N.A.L. were at 2.5 and 2.55, and if it was O.K. with me, we'd take it. They had to get my O.K."
Such fast action was unheard of 40 years ago when the modern paperback business was born. Potboiler westerns, mysteries and a few novels were sold mainly in drugstores and on newsstands. The 1950s saw the emergence of "trade" or "quality" paperbacks. They were the inexpensive, soft-covered reprints of classics, serious novels and texts that heralded the so-called paperback revolution. Readership climbed steadily with the growth of the college-educated population. Last year's industry figures indicate that more than 530 million paperbacks were sold, between 60% and 80% bought by women mainly in the 18-to-34 age range.
In the years before high-powered auctions, hard-cover houses would circulate manuscripts to their friends in the paperback business. Back would come sealed bids, with the rights going to the highest offer in a one-round competition. In 1957, for example, Fawcett paid $100,000 for rights to James Gould Cozzens' novel of emotional middle-age spread, By Love Possessed. Four years later the same house paid $400,000 for William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.