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Valerie Plame Inks Seven Figure Book Deal
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Outed former CIA agent Valerie Plame has reportedly inked a seven figure book deal.

Valerie Plame, the former CIA operative whose unmasking led to a federal investigation and the indictment of a top vice presidential aide, has agreed to a book deal with the Crown Publishing Group. Financial terms were not disclosed, but two sources close to the negotiations said the deal was in the low seven figures. Several publishers had competed for the memoir, scheduled to come out in the fall of 2007 and tentatively titled "Fair Game."

In 2003, White House adviser Karl Rove reportedly said Plame was "fair game" after her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, accused the Bush administration of distorting intelligence about Iraq to justify going to war. "She will tell her whole story, absolutely," Crown's publisher and senior vice president, Steve Ross, said Friday. "This book will be the first time the public will get to hear about her work and the surprising role she had in intelligence gathering in the lead-up to the war in Iraq."

Ross also said that Plame would tell of "being a high ranking woman in the male-dominated intelligence community." He said Plame would write the book herself and that "one of the most pleasant surprises was the quality of her craftsmanship and the richness of her storytelling" in the book proposal she submitted.

How much Plame, now retired from the agency, will reveal could be complicated by two factors: The CIA, which reviews the manuscripts of former agents and has reportedly become stricter about what it will permit, and next year's scheduled trial of I. Libby Lewis, the former chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Tweezer-thin Maureen Dowd thinks she gained weight from those hotel- room snacks on tour for her hilarious book Are Men Necessary?.

"At 5 p.m. it was Oreos, at 8 p.m., the Pringles," Dowd confessed to us last week.

Ausiello: What about the intended romance with Ana Lucia and Jack? Did you change your mind about that?

Carlton: Yes. Sometimes we tell the show what to do and sometimes the show tells us what to do. And as we started to try to work on it, we never really got to a place where it made sense. Those characters were not in a place where we felt it was believable for them to have a romance. We had intentions of doing that, but as we started telling the stories and started writing the scripts, it just didn't feel right to us.

"Little, Brown and Company will not be publishing a revised edition of `How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life' by Kaavya Viswanathan, nor will we publish the second book under contract," Michael Pietsch, Little Brown's senior vice president and publisher, said in a statement. Little, Brown, which had withdrawn the book last week, declined further comment. Tuesday's decision caps a stunning downfall for the 19-year-old Viswanathan, a Harvard sophomore with a reported six-figure book deal whose novel came out in March to widespread attention. Viswanathan (prounounced Kah-vee-uh Viss-wahn-uh-thon), who was just 17 when she signed the deal, did not immediately return calls for comment Tuesday.

*****

The Harvard Crimson, alerted by reader e-mails, reported Tuesday on its Web site that "Opal Mehta" contained passages similar to Meg Cabot's 2000 novel, "The Princess Diaries." The New York Times also reported comparable material in Viswanathan's novel and Sophie Kinsella's "Can You Keep a Secret?"

In Cabot's "The Princess Diaries," published by HarperCollins, the following passage appears on page 12: "There isn't a single inch of me that hasn't been pinched, cut, filed, painted, sloughed, blown dry, or moisturized. ... Because I don't look a thing like Mia Thermopolis. Mia Thermopolis never had fingernails. Mia Thermopolis never had blond highlights."

In Viswanathan's book, page 59 reads: "Every inch of me had been cut, filed, steamed, exfoliated, polished, painted, or moisturized. I didn't look a thing like Opal Mehta. Opal Mehta didn't own five pairs of shoes so expensive they could have been traded in for a small sailboat."

SmashPhone will soon roll out Girls & Sports and The Meaning of Lila, with help from Creators Syndicate, a provider of comic strips to newspapers. A new comic strip called Mostly Heads will debut, too. The free service will run on an advertising model, where the ads appear before the comic strip.

The Meaning of Lila was created and written by John Forgetta, editorial director at American Greetings. Girls & Sports was created by Justin Borus and Andrew Feinstein, a former Warner Bros. animator. Mostly Heads is a new comic strip created by Darren Jones, a former E! Entertainment Network producer, and SmashPhone co-founder.

SmashPhone will charge advertisers 5 cents per frame, said co-founder Robin Rowe. "We're aiming for the top 100 companies to advertise," he said. "The usual ones like General Motors and Procter & Gamble."

Seventy-two percent of all respondents said they followed the news closely, including 67 percent of those 18 to 24 years old.

Asked to name the news source they most trusted, without any prompting, 59 percent of Egyptians said Al Jazeera, 52 percent of Brazilians said Rede Globo, 32 percent of Britons said the BBC, 22 percent of Germans said ARD and 11 percent of Americans said Fox News, each leading their respective nations.

The most trusted news brands globally were the BBC, Britain's publicly funded broadcaster, and CNN, which is owned by the world's biggest media conglomerate, Time Warner Inc..

Three Internet portals -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft/MSN -- received the next highest trust ratings across the 10 countries, when respondents were prompted with 16 different brand names.

Although trust in media has grown in most countries over the past four years, the survey found, 28 percent of people across the 10 countries either strongly agreed or somewhat agreed with the statement: "In the past year I have stopped using a specific media source because it lost my trust."