Eoin Purcell
It’s been a bad year for Doubleday and so they are sacking people!
Sometimes you think publishing is immune to economic problems, but if you are in New York publishing, this story must be feeling very close about now:
The cuts come on the heels of a painful year during which several of Doubleday’s big bets did not pan out, among them Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle, which famously drew an advance of $1.25 million but failed to ignite the bestseller list upon publication this summer, and Jon Krakauer’s biography of Pat Tillman, which the author unexpectedly canceled after promotion had already gotten underway.
Be careful what you wish for
In a sense that I never anticipated I’m glad that we don’t have a magazine that follows the Irish trade as closely as they do in New York. How hard would it be to be seen on the list in this article?
Eoin Purcell's Blog 
$1.25 million is a very large gamble on any writer, especially a new one.
On another note: how immune is publishing from the wider economy? If there is less money being spent – won’t that hurt book sales too?
I think there is a certain amount of gaming going on with advances of that size.
Companies think that they will generate lots of pr and press which will create a platform for the author and enable them to do better on release!
As for thinking we can outperform the economy kind of comes from the notion that people will buy books over other forms of spending because they are seen a affordable luxuries! Not sure how true it is!
Eoin