HARPER Studio, the new im print of HarperCollins headed by one-time Hyperion president Robert Miller, has snagged celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse as part of its debut list of authors.
The long-term deal calls for Lagasse to publish a 10-book series on a wide range of topics over the next five to seven years.
The first, tentatively titled “Emeril at the Grill,” is slated to hit in June 2009.
Miller said Lagasse is the first of about a dozen authors who will be in the fledgling imprint’s debut list of authors for next summer.
In April, Lagasse completed the sale of his media and merchandising company to Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia for $45 million in cash and $5 million in stock.
The deal included everything in the Lagasse holdings except for his 11 restaurants, which are scattered around New Orleans, Miami and Atlanta.
Miller said he is offering MSLO and Lagasse a 50-50 split with Harper Studio on all profits.
“It works for authors who don’t need a big advance to finish the book and works for us because we get a bigger commitment from the author,” he said. “The idea is to relaunch him to a wider audience,” said Miller, who said the books will be paperback originals priced at $24.95.
Said MSLO Chairman Charles Koppelman, “I think it will generate a boatload of money.”
The Harper Studio imprint is an unusual experiment in book publishing. It offers authors small advances or no advance money in exchange for a much greater share of profits. (News Corp. owns HarperCollins and The Post.)
Conventional hardcover book deals give authors a royalty of about 15 percent once a book earns out its advance money, and a royalty of about 7 percent on paperback sales.
This is the way to call at tention to a redesign.
Consumer Reports, which is the fourth-largest maga zine in the country in terms of circulation, unveiled a new look with the October issue that hit this week, which features a cover story on energy-saving products.
But within days, the magazine became embroiled in a nice brawl with the Environmental Protection Agency over the feds’ “Energy Star” rating system that gets slapped on everything from air conditioners to refrigerators to washing machines.
Consumer Reports says the EPA’s system is misleading and outdated and in desperate need of revision.
In its test of French-door refrigerators, for instance, Consumer Reports in its own testing didn’t find anywhere near the energy savings that the government says is present in some of the units it tested. That’s be cause the government tested the appliances with the ice- making ma chines turned off, Consumer Reports found.
The problem, of course, is that in real life, most con sumers have the energy-sapping ice machine running.
In another case, the magazine found that, on the EPA’s dishwasher tests vir tually every machine – some 91 percent of units tested – had achieved high marks from the EPA for energy efficiency. As Consumer Reports sees it, if that’s the norm, it shouldn’t get a top rating.
It was a dramatic way to launch the newly-designed issue for the venerable brand, which boasts paid circulation of 4.49 million a month.
Editor-in-Chief Kim Kleman commissioned Pentagram’s Luke Heyman to oversee the redesign, which tries to give the data-heavy title a more modern look.
Over the past five years, subscriptions have gone up 12 percent to 4.3 million and newsstand sales of 190,000 copies a month on average have nearly doubled – figures that most glossy consumer magazines would be happy to claim.
Nevertheless, Kleman pushed for the magazine to be freshened up to “look less like your father’s magazine,” she said.
The magazine is also trying to show a new nimbleness to switching off stories in response to changing times. A July issue with a cover story on gas-saving cars was a sellout on newsstands.
It was a last-minute replacement for the annual summer cover special on cameras. In the past, magazine covers were planned a year in advance and rolled out like clockwork with no changes.
The debut issue of the new lifestyle magazine WSJ. scored a lucky break when it had a small feature on Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin‘s fitness regimen.
The issue, which will land inside a select group of subscribers’ copies of The Wall Street Journal tomorrow, was completed last week when the BlackBerry of Editor-in-Chief Tina Gaudoin started going wild with messages that Palin was the surprise pick as John McCain‘s running mate.
The story was immediately put on the Web to capitalize on whatever buzz it could grab.
The magazine will go to 800,000 domestic readers of the weekend edition of the Journal, which has a circulation of 1.7 million. Another 160,000 copies will go to overseas readers of the Journal.
It’s an ambitious gamble by News Corp., which purchased Wall Street Journal parent company Dow Jones last December.
The magazine slightly exceeded its goal with 51 ad pages in the debut issue.
“We were budgeted for a 100 page issue and we came in at 104,” said Publisher Ellen Asmodeo Giglio.
“If we can aver age 50 pages per issue, we’ll be happy,” said Dow Jones Chief Revenue Officer Michael Roo ney.
The next issue hits on Dec. 6. It is slated to move from quarterly to monthly next year.