Perhaps you’ve heard about this already, but if you haven’t, I think you’ll be interested. I saw this in Publishers Weekly (”Live from Frankfurt,” by Karen Holt) first, but New York (”Dave Eggers’s Next Novel Is Based on ‘Where the Wild Things Are’?“) included pretty pictures:
Publishers Weekly reports that the Frankfurt Book Fair is abuzz with talk about Dave Eggers’s new novel, which apparently quietly sold to Ecco last winter. Ecco, the small, super-literary imprint at Harper, doesn’t usually brag about sales potential, usually because most of its books don’t have a lot of sales potential. According to PW, though, Ecco chief Dan Halpern is telling everyone at the fair that the book - an adult novel based on Where the Wild Things Are, scheduled to be published in 2008 to coincide with Spike Jonze’s movie, for which Eggers co-wrote the screenplay - will be a monster hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.
I can see why they think it has sales potential. I can also imagine a marketing meeting where someone riffs that the book will appeal to kids and adults, or the kid in everyone, or adults because they used to be kids, or kids through adults and everyone in between….
It probably won’t sell well to the anti-monster crowd, but what do those people like?
