Rich People Publishing: An Industry Veteran on the Amy Griffin Lawsuit, Belle Burden’s Strangers, and Sarah Ferguson’s Memoir Drama

Plus: Blazy’s Chanel is supposed to hit U.S. stores today but here’s what’s actually going on...

Happy Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel-coming-to-the-U.S.-day-but-not-actually. In case you haven’t been following the rumors circulating through the boutiques, Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel drop was widely expected to hit the U.S. today. From what I can tell, that idea mostly started with the S.As in Paris, who told the crowds pulling each other’s hair out over there that it would land stateside today.

In reality, it looks like the drop is scheduled for Tuesday, March 17th, at least according to S.As¹ (and clients with well-connected S.As) at the Madison Avenue, Greenwich, and Beverly Hills boutiques. (How many of you got the text from your S.A.? I’m told some clients didn’t hear a word, perhaps because the mania in Europe has already been… intense.)

Today we have a Q&A with Kathleen Schmidt of Publishing Confidential, and we’re diving into one of my favorite subjects: Rich People Publishing (RPP)?

I have a lot of personal experience in this arena. Most people name-check me as a career journalist, but I’m also a five-time ghostwriter who has quietly used that path to keep herself in (mostly secondhand) designer clothing and very expensive dinners. That means I know exactly what it looks like to work with celebrities and top business executives on a book from start to finish and what money can really buy you in publishing. It also means I’ve seen the glamorous side of the business and the less glamorous one.

Today we’re going to talk about the mechanics behind that world: vanity publishing arrangements, the strange genre of wealth porn, and the well-known industry trick of bulk-buying thousands of copies to manufacture a spot on the bestseller lists. And of course, the “ugly” side of the industry too.

First, there’s Amy Griffin’s memoir The Tell. The venture capitalist and philanthropist’s book has become the center of a rapidly escalating controversy involving allegations about the role psychedelic therapy played in resurfacing memories of childhood abuse (and a lawsuit that now threatens to upend the entire narrative around the book). If you’re not caught up on what’s going on with Griffin, I strongly suggest reading these two New York Times stories here and here before getting into our interview below.

Then there’s Sarah Ferguson. The Duchess of York reportedly secured a roughly $2 million deal for a memoir that was supposed to be her big publishing comeback only for the project to stall out before it ever really reached the market.

And finally, there’s Belle Burden’s novel Strangers, the debut that has become one of those fascinating publishing stories. Burden, whose life blew up and who decided to write about it, is the extremely private granddaughter of Babe Paley.

To help unpack all of this, we’re speaking with Kathleen Schmidt. Schmidt is the writer behind Publishing Confidential, a newsletter that has become required reading for people who actually work in the book business (and thousands of those who don’t—that’s how good it is). She’s a publishing industry veteran with more than two decades of experience in publicity, marketing, and just about every other function required to shepherd a book into the marketplace. She’s also the founder and president of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, a boutique firm that advises authors and publishers on strategy and how to survive the modern publishing ecosystem. In other words, she’s exactly the person you want explaining how all of this stuff actually works. She’s also incredibly blunt, which, in publishing, is a rare and extremely useful quality. So I asked her to walk us through the things everyone in (rich people) publishing is talking about right now.

All of that, plus our usual round-up of rich-person chaos, after the jump.