According to The Bookseller, HarperCollins acquired the rights from Christie’s estate for a seven figure sum. Interestingly, the rights include rights to the digital and audio formats.
According to the article, HarperCollins repackaged its Christie backlist in the UK two years ago so there will probably not be a refresh. However, they intend to redesign the backlist for the US market in the spring of 2011.
A seven-figure sum means single-digit millions. Given that she wrote some eighty books and remains popular around the world year after year, that’s a wise investment even if the purchase does not include movie or TV rights. Let’s hope HarperCollins has the good sense to create editions in all the common ebook formats and perhaps even rich format editions that combine digital and audio texts in one edition. I’d love to see books that’d let me shift modes, depending on what I am doing.
I take these are complete world rights since they already seem to be the rights holders in a number of markets. Text, digital, audio … is video considered digital I wonder?
$999,999.99 plus a penny is a “seven figure sum”.
I think these are in good hands with a major publisher as HarperCollins. Cool.
I grew up reading her pieces featuring Poirot; they were so simply orchestrated but gripped the reader all the same. Although I enjoyed Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures more, there’s good reasons as to why she sold so many detective novels.
This is very interesting – back in the very early 1990s, when HarperCollins was first getting into the mass-market paperback business in the US, they paid something like $9 million for the paperback rights to many of Christie’s novels (all the ones that had been published by Pocket Books for many years, as well as Dell and Bantam). When these licenses expired, everything was divided up in the US between Penguin/Putnam (who published all the Poirots under their Berkley imprint and the novels featuring Jane Marple and Tommy & Tuppence under their Signet imprint) and St. Martin’s Press Paperbacks (including AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, all the stand-alone mystery/detective novels, and short-story collections). Now EVERYTHING’s back with HarperCollins, who will apparently issue them in oversized trade paperback editions at $12.95 and mass-market editions (with different covers) for $6.99.