IP Picks🔎: 'Stranger Things' Aged Up
➕ A Gilded Age grifter and going undercover to bust the Klan
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along.
This week, I want to kick things off with a recommendation: You really need to check out Richard's Ankler column "Our $18 Billion Blindspot," which dives into the perpetually overlooked Latino market. This is something that I've been thinking about ever since I started writing the Optionist. In fact, there are only two things that I ask agents to pitch me on: backlist titles and Latino stories/authors. Still, I feel like I always have to look harder than I should for books by Latino authors or with Latino protagonists.
The scarcity is especially pronounced when you compare it to the recent explosion in Asian-American literature and Asian-American representation in Hollywood in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians. There’s an emerging mini-boom in South Asian-American literature, and overall, the Asian translation market feels more robust than the Spanish-language one. I optimistically (and probably naively) believed that the old maxim “a rising tide lifts all boats” would apply to Crazy Rich Asians and lead to an increase in all kinds of representation on screen. But it hasn't quite worked out that way.
Richard's insightful piece grew out of an Ankler-sponsored lunch that gathered a group of Latinos working in the industry to discuss the problem. The article really digs deep, describing both the causes and the economic shortsightedness of ignoring this market. There's more than I can possibly summarize here, so just go read it!
Turning to a different subject, let’s check in again on Michael Crichton and James Patterson’s Eruption. I promised myself that I was done with this title — especially after another newsletter basically cut-and-pasted my rundown of the book’s thirsty marketing campaign (but you know where you read it first). But as much as I want to ignore this, I’ll admit that I’ve still been keeping half an eye on how the novel has been selling in bookstores (very well) and in Hollywood (no deal yet . . . so not as well).
But check out what I noticed recently on Amazon:
What you see there isn’t the book’s actual title, of course. It's merely the tydesperate, marketing-forward title that the Crichton team convinced Amazon (and Apple but not BN.com) to let them use. Hilarious!
I don't think I've ever seen this done before. It's the sort of stunt you would pull if you didn't have confidence in the book alone. You'd think the actual cover with the two superstar authors’ names in a huge, blaring font would be sufficient (not to mention the shout-outs to their biggest hits and that ominous volcano illustration), but evidently not. It not only feels a tad pathetic, but it also reinforces why I think the marketing around this book, despite its success, reeks of insecurity.
Here's a fun little item . . . If you're a stationery-store nerd like me, then you know that the gold standard when it comes to pencils has always been the Blackwing 602 ("Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed"). It was long beloved by writers, illustrators and composers, including Chuck Jones, John Williams, Quincy Jones and John Steinbeck.
I say was because the 602 was discontinued in 1998. Back then, many aficionados scrambled to buy up what stock they could. A decade or so later, a different company bought the Blackwing name and reintroduced the 602. But it wasn’t the same. Not all leads are created equal, I guess. Original 602s are still around, but hard to get your hands on. And they’re super-expensive. An unused vintage 602 can fetch more than $50 on eBay. That's for one pencil!
Recently, Doyle Auctions held a sale of personal items from the estate of Stephen Sondheim — a Blackwing zealot who gobbled up as many of the coveted pencils as he could in the late ‘90s. Doyle’s was offering his remaining supply (two full boxes and one partial, a total of 32 pencils) with a presale estimate of $600. Want to take a wild guess how much they went for? How about $6,400?! That’s $200 per pencil! Now, you're probably thinking that they must have been engraved with Sondheim’s name or something, right? Wrong. These are off-the-shelf Blackwings that just happened to have once had a famous owner.
I can’t help but be curious what the buyer is going to do with them. Like I said, there's nothing special or flashy about them, so it's not like displaying them is cool. But using a $200 pencil seems like . . . either quite a flex or a sign that you have more money than sense. It reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine mistakenly eats a slice of King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson’s 60-year-old wedding cake that J. Peterman bought at auction.
For the record, this wasn't the only outrageous sale at Doyle’s. A generic set of four editions of Roget's Thesaurus that Sondheim used — without any sort of notations or marginalia — had a presale estimate of $200. They ended up going for $25,600! These Sondheim fans are committed.
Onto this week’s picks:
A true-life thriller about an ex-army sniper who gets recruited by the FBI to go undercover and infiltrate the KKK
A grifter tale from the Gilded Age about a female con artist
A horror novel with grown-up, Stranger Things vibes about five people who share a late-night smoke break and investigate a series of bizarre occurrences
A kids’ adventure series following a child detective in 1900 who helps people find things while he searches for his parents, whose disappearance may or may not be the result of a kidnapping
Another real-life horror story about the creepy people who collect human remains and the even creepier black market in which they’re sold.
