Ecco

No doubt riding high on the breakout success of David Wrobewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the Ecco Press appears to be on something of a spending spree! Matthew Flamm at Crain's reports that Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith (not to be mistaken with Sinclair Lewis' similarly titled book), has sold them the rights to his autobiography for more than $2 million. This news comes just over a week after Ecco's publisher, Dan Halpern, dropped more than $2 million on that survival memoir Crazy for the Storm that had everyone wondering whether Rob Weisbach had taken up agenting.

We'll reserve our judgment on whether $2 million is or isn't an insane amount of money to pay for Steven Tyler's autobiography. As Flamm notes, it wouldn't be the first time an ex-rock star with wrinkles got seven figures to write a book.

Ecco announced this morning that they've acquired a major memoir called Crazy for the Storm, which tells the story of a boy from Southern California named Norman Ollestad who at 11 years old survived a plane crash that killed his father.

Interestingly, the agent who sold the book to Ecco is Rob Weisbach, former publisher of Weinstein Books.

About four months have passed since Mr. Weisbach announced he was leaving Weinstein, and until now, no one really knew what he was up to. At the time, he said he was not quite ready to announce his next move, but confirmed that it would "definitely" be somehow related to the business of literature.  read more »

Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Frank Bascombe Trilogy, has left Knopf, his home of 17 years, and signed on to write three books for Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins. The acquiring editor at Ecco was the publisher, Dan Halpern; Binky Urban of ICM, Mr. Ford's longtime literary agent, brokered the deal.

Two of the books will be novels and the third will be a collection of short stories.

According to the announcement from Ecco, the first of the novels to come out, tentatively titled Canada, will be a story of "revenge and violent retribution set on the Saskatchewan prairie, in the early 1960s." The book will be out in 2010.

Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, will publish a new novel this fall by Tom Robbins called B is For Beer.

According to HarperCollins executive editor David Hirshey, who is editing the book, it is about 100 pages long, and takes the form of a "hallucinogenic hymn to beer, children, and the cosmic mysteries that sustain us all."

Mr. Robbins, author of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, has not written a novel since 2003's Villa Incognito, and B is for Beer will be his first since leaving Bantam Books, his publisher of almost 30 years.  read more »