COPYRIGHT

      HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

      This edition 1997

      First published in Great Britain by

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

      First published in the USA by

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

      Copyright © Olivia Goldsmith 1996

      Olivia Goldsmith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780006496731

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2015 ISBN: 9780008154066

      Version: 2015-10-28

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

PRAISE FOR OLIVIA GOLDSMITH

      Acclaim for Bestseller:

      ‘A highly entertaining tale.’

       Publishers Weekly

      ‘Olivia Goldsmith’s forte has always been the writing of revenge novels with great, good humour … There’s lots of romance and revenge here … Plenty of awful people get their comeuppance and there’s more satisfactory coupling at the end than in a Shakespeare comedy.’

       Washington Post

      ‘The achievement of Bestseller is that Olivia Goldsmith takes the sometimes arcane publishing industry and makes it interesting as well as completely credible. Her descriptions of the pressures on authors, the often arbitrary editorial process and even the bottom-line problems of small booksellers are dead right.’

       New York Times Book Review

      ‘Goldsmith hands out her characters’ rewards and comeuppances like Jane Austen dealing blackjack … You keep licking your fingers and reaching for the next page as if it were another potato chip.’

       Newsweek

DEDICATION

      To Larry Ashmead

      Editor of Genius

      Cultivator of Tomatoes

      Whose stories of writers, agents, editors, and publishers inspired, awed, and amused me.

      This is your book as much as it is mine. Let them sue you.

EPIGRAPH

      The year I returned to active publishing there were five varied manuscripts submitted to Davis & Dash; five manuscripts, each by a different author, each with different aspirations. All five made the enormous jump from unpublished manuscript to published book, but only one among them was destined to make the next leap to become the bestseller.

      —Gerald Ochs Davis, Sr.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Though it contains incidental references to actual people and places, these references are used merely to lend the fiction a realistic setting. All other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Part One: A Novel Idea

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part Two: Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog