Audrey Niffenegger Receives $5 Million Advance for Second Novel
By MOTOKO RICH writing in The New York Times, March 10 2009

Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world.

Author pic - Dennis Hearne/MacAdam/Cage

After a fiercely contested auction, Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, bought the rights to publish the new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” in the United States this fall. The book is a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.
The auction for Ms. Niffenegger’s second novel involved several large New York publishing houses, as well as the original hardcover publisher of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” MacAdam/Cage, the San Francisco-based independent, and the publisher that holds paperback rights to the first novel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ms. Niffenegger, a visual artist who is also a faculty member at Columbia College Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts, became a publishing sensation with “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” her debut novel.
“Her Fearful Symmetry” is set to go on sale at the end of September, and will coincide with the British publication by Jonathan Cape this fall.

The film adaptation of “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” directed by Robert Schwentke and starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana, is scheduled for a February release.

Link here for the rest of the story.