Prescient Media

When you can sell a book for enough to make Bloomberg News take notice, you know you’re doing something right.

A dear friend of Prescient Media’s, the indomitable Chad Harbach (co-founder of the excellent journal of ideas n+1), put his first novel on the market just weeks ago. (That’s him on the right at a NY Public Library forum n+1 led back in 2008. He’s trying as hard as possible not to leap at the leather-clad Trotsky impersonator who was, if we remember right, saying that global warming would be solved any day now in an R&D lab somewhere, since the history of humanity is the history of “man” subduing “nature.”)

The result of Chad’s nine years of labor on the book:

Five months ago, Chad Harbach was an out-of-work copy editor with an unpaid position at a literary journal and an unpublished novel: 475 pages centering on a baseball team at a fictional Wisconsin college. A few weeks ago, Hachette Book Group’s Little, Brown agreed to pay about $650,000 for it, according to two people briefed on the sale.

Exactly how rare is that kind of money? Really, really rare.

It was one of the highest prices for a man’s first novel on a topic appealing to a male audience, said Jon Baker, a book scout who advises non-U.S. publishers. Harbach’s novel, tentatively titled “The Art of Fielding,” sold after a two-day telephone auction of eight publishers. “If you don’t have a vampire, you don’t expect that kind of money,” Baker said.

The really exciting thing — which, unfortunately, audiences in the seven or so languages the book has sold in won’t find out for another year or so — is that the book’s worth every penny.

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