Megyn Kelly, Amy Schumer set for best-seller showdown
It’s showdown time.
Megyn Kelly’s $6 million book deal last week could set up a great battle for best-seller list supremacy vs. comedian Amy Schumer.
Schumer is believed to have commanded a higher advance, at $8.6 million, sources tell Media Ink.
Kelly, host of the top-rated “The Kelly File” on Fox News Channel, snagged her advance after a spirited bidding war, sources said.
That is well below the early $10 million estimate, which our sources said was too high.
In the pitched Kelly auction, HarperCollins is said to have nosed out the underbidder, Crown, part of Random House, which was believed to have bid around $5 million.
(HarperCollins is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post. Kelly is, alas, no relation to this writer.)
Kelly’s agent at CAA, Matt DelPiano, and HarperCollins declined to comment.
Schumer bagged her hefty advance from the Gallery imprint of Simon & Schuster.
As is customary, neither Schumer’s agent, David Kuhn, the former Vanity Fair editor turned agent, nor the publisher would comment.
Schumer’s deal eclipsed the $6 million to $7 milion that Tina Fey got from Little, Brown for her 2011 book “Bossypants,” which became a mega-best-seller, moving more than 3.5 million copies.
Schumer’s collection of essays were originally reported as set to be published in “late 2016.” Kelly’s book is also slated for fall 2016.
Schumer had originally contracted with HarperCollins Executive Editor David Hirshey, who had verbally agreed to a $500,000 advance. Then, as her show “Inside Amy Schumer” began to take off, she had second thoughts and said she wanted to shop it to other publishers.
HarperCollins agreed to up its offer to $1 million, matching a deal from a rival publisher, but then Schumer decided to opt out entirely and returned the advance plus interest to HarperCollins in 2014, saying she was too busy to write it at the time.
She agreed to the new deal in September. In an ironic twist, HarperCollins — the spurned publisher in the US — turned out to be the winning bidder in the UK in the overseas rights auction.
Schumer’s book is said to be a mixture of comedic essays and more serious topics. Kelly, despite her classic battles with Donald Trump, is not expected to command much interest in the foreign market.
Neither publisher commented when asked for more specific pub dates, but it could turn into a classic book battle for the fall.