Publishers and authors are suddenly $125 million richer than they were last week (pending court approval next year), thanks to a settlement with Google over its copyright-breaking Library Search program. Much of it goes to lawyers and a new joint search program, but what if a new publisher had that kind of loot and wanted to build a list to end all lists? After the jump, a breakdown of what you could’ve gotten (some writers would still be out of your league — $64 million for five Mary Higgins Clark novels? Not likely).
$24 million: The Clintons and a Powell
• $10 million for Bill
• $8 million for Hillary
• $6 million for Colin
$22.5 million: Three economic sages
• $7 million for Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice
Shroeder
• $7 million for Jack: Straight From the Gut, by Jack Welsh
• $8.5 million for The Age of Turbulence, by Alan Greenspan (possibly less for a potential follow-up, perhaps titled Never Mind: I Was Wrong)
$17.6 million: Three celebrity puffers
• $6 million for Tina Fey
• $6 million for Whoopi Goldberg
• $5.6 million for Paul Reiser
$15.9 million: Six Regan-esque tell-alls
• Six memoirs related to the O.J. trial (If I Did It not included)
$14 million: Two blockbuster social novels
• $7 million a pop for Tom Wolfe’s last novel and his next one
$8.5 million: One Pope
• Pope John Paul II’s memoir
$8 million: One overhyped follow-up historical novel
• Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier
$5.575 million: Three ass-covering political memoirs
• $4 million for George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm
• $1.5 million for Karl Rove’s coming memoir
• $75,000 for Scott McLellan’s What Happened
$4 million: One dead rocker’s doodles
• Kurt Cobain’s Journals
$1.5 million: One disgraced memoirist
• Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey
$2 million: One next Da Vinci Code
• Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian
$400,000: One actual Da Vinci Code
$800,000: One cute debut novelist
• Approximate advance for Marisha Pessl
$200,000: Five less-cute debut novelists
