Doubleday

The first response letter arrived.

It was from a senior editor at Doubleday.

You may remember the publisher Doubleday from another one of our stories, an important story, the first story we ever released, Rejecting Stephen King.

In 1974, Doubleday took a chance on an unknown King and published his manuscript for Carrie.

13 years later, Doubleday rejected A Time to Kill.

But the senior editor did include a complimentary note about Grisham's storytelling.

He immediately ran home to show his wife, Renee.

The imprint had no bestsellers to its name.

They brought it, they were the ones to bring it out as fans to bring it out.

And then later on, Doubleday and all of them, you know, took it over.

But so those, those guys had the same, the same problem.

They, they, they get three or four guys together.

I did help Lorna get a publisher in New York.

I got her a deal with Doubleday, but it was far harder because if I started talking about this woman who sees angels to people in England, or Holland or Germany or France, they'd say, well, Matthew, what do you mean? Someone who sees angel.

But in America, people would say, ah, another one of those.

But I think she is very different from the other angel-bothering ladies.

It's called

The Weight of Angels by John Boyne, and it's published by Doubleday.

You're listening to ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf.

I'm Cassie McCullough.

It is, as I've said many times before, one of the most amazingly fulfilling creative experiences I've ever had in my life, and I'm always thrilled to, to get to talk with someone who had experienced something along those same lines, and that is exactly what Laura Van Wormer has been doing as well.

Laura started off as an editor over at Doubleday.

She decided to go ahead and start her own books, and from 1988 to 2015, she had written and released 14 different novels since the first one that came out in '88 called Riverside Drive.

But things took a bad turn in 2015 when she was in a serious and very life-threatening car accident.

Mm-hmm

... to go forward and experiment a little.

And when I started writing fiction, it was, I had come off these projects at Doubleday-

Mm-hmm

Sometime later, two or three weeks I suppose, I had lunch with her and explained what I wanted a bit more clearly.

As lunch was ending she suggested we walk over to the nearest Doubleday bookstore, which we did.

After looking at various books and talking to the manager we stopped at the shelf of astronomical books.

After pulling out three or four books of general interest she reached behind the main lineup of astronomical books and pulled out a pamphlet which I would not have seen at all.

Today, my guest on Anything Goes is Richard Traubner to help us with this look at the work of Ivor Novello.

Richard has just completed a history of operetta, which is being published by Doubleday and Company.

Richard is one of America's leading operetta historians with major articles contributed to the New York and London Times, Opera News, and the American Record Guide, just to name a few.

He's written program notes for operetta productions around the world, including productions by the New York City Opera and the Santa Fe Operetta.

Now, $400,000, he only got to keep like half of that because...

We learned about this when we were in Bangor, but Stephen King has complicated feelings about Doubleday and the agreement that he signed when he was very early on with them.

They took half, right? He sold the paperback rights for $400,000.

They took... 200 000 he had 200 000 for himself and that has to be you know that has to taxes have to be taken out of his his agent's fee and all like like manager like all that stuff gets taken out of so 400 grand great huge for stephen king um but that damn that damn double day new author agreement that he signed he eventually got off of it fortunately um