Share the Wealth

Being a businessman myself, I was interested in the recent offer of shares from Quercus Publishing to its existing shareholders. This is a common method by which a private company can raise capital for expansion and strengthen its balance sheet. If its existing shareholders are confident of the plans made by company directors, they’ll buy additional shares; if not, then they won’t. In Quercus’ case, the directors are only able to offer shares to interested third parties if existing shareholders decline the offer. Got that?

Anyway, I’d been watching from the sidelines ever since Quercus’ announcement, waiting to see how those existing shareholders would react. If they responded unfavorably, I was thinking to make the company an offer myself and see if it would take me on as a new shareholder. Why? Because I view Quercus as an excellent investment opportunity, even in our presently challenging economic times. One of the reasons is because Quercus/MacLehose Press holds the English language rights to the late author Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy.” And anyone who doesn’t know how enthusiastic I am about those three novels obviously hasn’t been keeping up.

I’m not the only one. Last year, I sent a copy of Larsson’s first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to Stephen King via a colleague, and I am pleased to see that he’s selected it as one of his top 10 reads for 2008. He writes in Entertainment Weekly:

Instead of a locked-room mystery, this is a “locked-island” mystery in which a disgraced journalist is hired to investigate a decades-old crime. He discovers something a lot more awful than a missing girl. The good news is that Larsson delivered two more novels with this one. The bad news is that he died of a heart attack shortly after doing so.

Click here to read about all of King’s favorites.

But back to Quercus’ financial efforts. It now seems that its shareholders have reacted positively to its offering, according to BookTrade. “We are delighted with the support shown by our shareholders in these challenging times,” CEO Mark Smith is quoted as saying. “The proceeds of this fundraising will allow us to invest in the continued development of Quercus.”

It shouldn’t hurt the company’s bottom line any to have Larsson’s second novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, coming out next month in the UK. And with the current worldwide economic downturn having depressed the value of British pound sterling against the European euro and the U.S. dollar, buying British books has become cheaper than usual. I’m willing to go out on a limb here and predict that some of the early sales of The Girl Who Played with Fire will be going to America, as readers there snap up the British edition, rather than waiting around until the fall for the U.S. release.