An excerpt from the cover art for ‘The Novel of Marceau Miller,’ a work written under a pseudonym that has been drawing mounting international rights interest since Frankfurter Buchmesse in October
By Eric Dupuy | @duperico
Marleen Seegers: ‘When Buzz Spreads, It Can Go Far’
After the close of last month’s Frankfurter Buchmesse, a title w that began a fast rise in pre-publication rights sales.
Currently called The Novel of Marceau Miller—and here is its page at literary agent Marleen Seegers‘ 2 Seas Agency—the book is to be published on January in the original French by Éditions de la Martinière Littérature in Paris.
Marceau Miller’s novel is attracting growing interest, much to the surprise of its French publisher.
“There will be at least 10 countries buying the book before publication,” according to Séverin Cassan, general manager of La Martinière, which is part of the Media-Participations group that includes Seuil, Dargaud, Dupuis.
Séverin Cassan and Marie Leroy
“Martinière Littérature’s It’s an unexpected success in these proportions,” publisher Marie Leroy says, unaccustomed to this craze in the almost 10 years she’s been running the publishing house’s literature department.
To handle the heavy interest in international rights, Leroy has called on Seegers, the Dutch-born former rights manager at Hachette’s Stock. As Publishing Perspectives readers know, Seegers founded her own San Francisco-based agency, 2 Seas Agency, in 2011—and says she received just 40 pages of the manuscript a week before Frankfurt.
When she mentioned the forthcoming book during her early meetings at the trade show, she says she found immediate interest, especially in her Dutch and Italian contacts.
Marleen Seegers
“I sensed a thirst for good stories in fiction on the spot,” she says, “while Japanese and Korean feel-good books were a big hit.”
Faced with this unexpected curiosity, a request for pre-emption was refused by the publishing house.
“In Frankfurt, everyone talks to each other,” Seegers says, ”and when the buzz starts to spread, it can go very far. It’s not until the week after the appointment that the agent can send the entire manuscript, and then the machine goes into overdrive: Auctions in Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, where seven publishers were in the running for a contract won by Einaudi-Stile Libero for six figures at almost €150,000 (US$157,199).” There was also a pre-emption in Spain and an acquisition in Portugal.
Cassan says, “Interest and readings are underway in several Eastern European countries,” Cassan says, plus “Brazil, Japan, and the United States.”
The Unknown Author: A Television Screenwriter
Seegers says that in the current cautious American market, “It’s very rare to sell fiction before publication,” and that she was “intrigued by this text with good suspense.”
The plot of book is set on Lake Geneva, on French-Swiss border, after the death of a novelist who leaves a last manuscript revealing the lies that built his life.
“It’s a crude parody of a bad Joël Dicker,” a French scout for various German, Spanish, and English publishers says, referring to the Swiss thriller writer.
“But the pitch seems to work,” this scout says, “assuming that interest is also linked to the ‘mystery’ around the author, the soon-to-be-famous Marceau Miller.
“He’s a screenwriter, notably for television,” Marie Leroy says. “He has already written novels under another name, but this is the first we’re publishing.”
She says she bought the rights to the book in early 2023 and has been working on the text with the novelist ever since. “We really want to have the best publishers to build up the author over time”, she says. “The fascination around the writer’s identity plays in our favor.”
And the book may well become a craze among booksellers. Delighted by this success story even before the book’s publication, Cassan says that a sequel is already in the works, while plans for the first run in France “have gone from 6,000 copies to more than 10,000″ before the new book has even been formally announced to international and paperback houses.
Auctions for the paperback rights are reported to be underway in France.
More from Publishing Perspectives on international publication and translation rights is here, more on the work of literary agents is here, more on the French market is here, and more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here.