Publishers Weekly, 12/17/2001

Terry Goodkind is high up on the bestseller list with his seventh and latest novel, The Pillars of Creation, and his agent, Russell Galen at Scovil Chichak & Galen, is determined to get him $10 million for his next three books. That's the total he asked for at a lunch last fall with Goodkind's editor and publisher at Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden and Tom Doherty, respectively, when they sought to get a long-term commitment from the author. Galen actually received less than that from Tor, but has been working since, with foreign rights specialist Danny Baror, to get the rest of the way to the magic figure. Baror made a high- six-figures deal with Bertelsmann, the author's regular German publisher, and then switched him to HarperCollins as a result of an auction in the U.K. that brought in a sum "very substantially" into seven figures. The bid, by Harper's Jane Johnson, was not the biggest, but, said Galen, the publisher offered the best marketing plan. He's still a tad short of the magic $10 million, "but Goodkind is popular in 17 other countries. We'll get there."