SOURCE: "11 Houses Bid, Doubleday Wins Shot in the Heart," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 238, May 17, 1991, pp. 33-4.

[In the essay below, Feldman discusses the interest surrounding Mikal Gilmore's upcoming book Shot in the Heart.]

Perhaps it's not so surprising that on April 23-24, 11 houses engaged in feverish bidding, and one house—Doubleday—finally agreed to pay a reported $700,000, for the right to publish a nonfiction book based on a 100-page proposal by a Rolling Stone senior writer named Mikal Gilmore. True, $700,000 for a first book is rather a lot of money, and 11 houses in an auction are rather more than the norm. It was a little unusual that three seemingly very different Random House Divisions—Knopf, Crown and Turtle Bay—were reportedly each willing to offer more than $600,000 for the prize. And this is the first occasion that this writer has ever heard of when a literary magazine—Granta...