Bestseller

Bestseller
Olivia Goldsmith

From the inimitable Olivia Goldsmith, an outrageous comedy of manners and morals, set in the cut-throat world of international publishing.It's autumn in New York, and in the anything but gentlemanly world of books, the knives are out as the new season's list is launched. Stars and wannabes, hustlers and has-beens all scramble for the prizes, the profits and the prestige – not least at big-time publishing house Davis & Dash where success depends on a handful of authors:Behind the books and the writers, and the people who make and break them, is a world of passion, politics and intrigue. Who will survive in the race to the top?

Olivia Goldsmith

Bestseller

COPYRIGHT (#ulink_f762bf44-a009-5bd2-a9fe-79444b56352d)

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

This edition 1997

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

First published in the USA by

HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Olivia Goldsmith 1996

Olivia Goldsmith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780006496731

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780008154066

Version: 2015-10-28

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

PRAISE FOR OLIVIA GOLDSMITH (#ulink_c8add7dd-2c5c-54ab-81e4-e36ec70ba579)

Acclaim for Bestseller:

‘A highly entertaining tale.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Olivia Goldsmith’s forte has always been the writing of revenge novels with great, good humour … There’s lots of romance and revenge here … Plenty of awful people get their comeuppance and there’s more satisfactory coupling at the end than in a Shakespeare comedy.’

Washington Post

‘The achievement of Bestseller is that Olivia Goldsmith takes the sometimes arcane publishing industry and makes it interesting as well as completely credible. Her descriptions of the pressures on authors, the often arbitrary editorial process and even the bottom-line problems of small booksellers are dead right.’

New York Times Book Review

‘Goldsmith hands out her characters’ rewards and comeuppances like Jane Austen dealing blackjack … You keep licking your fingers and reaching for the next page as if it were another potato chip.’

Newsweek

DEDICATION (#ulink_cd1e1fb9-b8d9-5c0d-9603-12f2a3738058)

To Larry Ashmead

Editor of Genius

Cultivator of Tomatoes

Whose stories of writers, agents, editors, and publishers inspired, awed, and amused me.

This is your book as much as it is mine. Let them sue you.

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_cb188af3-6657-5d00-a9dd-693031edd0db)

The year I returned to active publishing there were five varied manuscripts submitted to Davis & Dash; five manuscripts, each by a different author, each with different aspirations. All five made the enormous jump from unpublished manuscript to published book, but only one among them was destined to make the next leap to become the bestseller.

—Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Though it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used merely to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Cover (#uf6d40ba5-1fbd-599d-a9d4-a09a828d2c56)

Title Page (#ueac78c33-abfb-5e2f-97fd-b1031dd365da)

Copyright (#ulink_28346c82-5b46-5ed5-af7b-d8f07bee446a)

Praise (#ulink_9f7041c0-6e19-5908-b611-7b61b48f437e)

Dedication (#ulink_d0e7d4f6-81d8-5b25-a9a9-34cee231be8c)

Epigraph (#ulink_d7e80472-dad3-5a6d-a6ed-40e5a2bb3885)

Part One: A Novel Idea (#ulink_7fed70fb-2952-5dff-9aae-9886c31da1a1)

Chapter 1 (#ulink_7de43ccb-8924-5dcd-ae46-7bf5cdf36e6f)

Chapter 2 (#ulink_3878be1c-a638-512a-ac4c-a39181839d54)