Another author hits the big one

Rico says he should do so well, but Motoko Rich has an article about a successful author in The New York Times:

Seven years after winning the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, the global best seller about a shipwrecked Indian boy sharing a boat with a tiger, Yann Martel has sold a manuscript for his follow-up for around $3 million, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
After a monthlong auction, Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, one of the world’s largest publishers, bought the rights to publish Mr. Martel’s third novel, as yet untitled, in the United States sometime next year. Like Life of Pi, the new book is an allegory— this time about the Holocaust— involving animals. It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt.
“I’ve noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it’s always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism,” Mr. Martel, 46, said in a telephone interview from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “I was thinking that it was interesting that you don’t have many imaginative takes on it like George Orwell’s Animal Farm and its take on Stalinism.” Mr. Martel said that although there had been a few works— like Life Is Beautiful in film or the Maus books by Art Spiegelman— that had been more metaphorical, artists were generally “fearful of letting the imagination loose on the Holocaust. So my novel is an attempt to get a distillation on it,” Mr. Martel said, “and see if there is a way of talking about the Holocaust without talking about it literally.”
Publishers were inevitably interested to read this latest manuscript because of the blockbuster success of Life of Pi, which soared onto best-seller lists after it was published in the United States in 2002 and sold more than 185,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks 70 percent of sales. In paperback it sold nearly two million copies. It won the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, in November of that year.
The original publisher of Life of Pi in the United States, Harcourt, now a unit of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, offered a seven-figure advance in early June. But Jackie Kaiser, Mr. Martel’s Toronto-based agent at Westwood Creative Artists, said she wanted to shop the manuscript with other publishers, partly because she and Mr. Martel were worried about Houghton Mifflin’s recent financial troubles and the fact that Ann Patty, the editor of Life of Pi, had been laid off in December. Lori Glazer, a spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin, wrote in an email message that the publishing house “really did want it and made a serious, substantial offer.”
Ms. Kaiser submitted the manuscript to editors at a handful of large New York publishing houses. At least four decided not to bid, because they were hesitant about the book’s complicated structure and high price. But according to Mr. Martel, three others, including Spiegel & Grau, submitted bids. Cindy Spiegel, publisher of Spiegel & Grau, said that when she read the manuscript she “had the feeling of reading a classic. It feels like you are reading Beckett or Nabokov now,” she continued. “It’s a book that addresses a topic that’s been written about many, many times but feels profoundly original.” Spiegel & Grau has shown its taste for whimsical novels about animals already: three years ago it paid $5 million to acquire two forthcoming novels from Sara Gruen, the author of Water for Elephants. Ms. Gruen is working on Ape House, a novel about bonobo apes who star in a reality television show.
With publishers struggling to find breakout hits, known names are earning big advances for follow-ups. But a writer who has one phenomenal success often struggles to repeat it. Mr. Martel acknowledged that the sensational success of Life of Pi was a “freak,” and said that he doubted that his next novel would do as well initially. “First of all, people say, ‘Holocaust, not interested, been there done that,’ so I don’t expect that it will have a fraction of the success that Life of Pi did,” he said. He added, “So therefore I’m not really feeling the pressure.”
Ms. Spiegel, who declined to give a figure for Mr. Martel’s advance, said she believed many of the fans of Life of Pi would be drawn to his next work, and that it would “become part of the canon of books about the Holocaust” and “sell over time.” Mr. Martel also declined to discuss his advance, but said, “Frankly, with all the years it took to write this book, if you amortize it out, it’s not as much as one would like it to be.”
Ms. Kaiser said she had sold British rights to Canongate Books and Canadian rights to Alfred A. Knopf Canada, as well as rights to publishers in Australia, New Zealand, and Germany.

Rico says, lessee, he needs to write a book about the Holocaust and some animals... How about Swimming from Cambodia, about a river dolphin that flees the Khmer Rouge?