Knox.

Amanda Knox has signed with one of the biggest literary agents in the book business, Washington D.C.-based Robert Barnett, according to the Daily News. Mr. Barnett is not technically an agent at all, he's a lawyer, but he brokers some of the largest book deals around. His clients include Barack Obama, the Clintons,  George W. Bush and Laura Bush and James Patterson. Amanda Knox's ex-boyfriend and co-accused in the murder of Meredith Kerchner, Rafaele Sollicitto, has also taken on a literary agent, Seattle-based Sharlene Martin.

According to Mr. Sherman, during the negotiations, Mr. Barnett told Fox News executives that Ms. Palin did not want to be constantly bombarded for interview requests from various Fox News producers. As a result, Mr. Sherman reports, any time Fox News producers on say, The O'Reilly Factor or The Sean Hannity Show, want to book Ms. Palin, they must channel their requests through senior vice president for programming Bill Shine.

More from New York:

Her star power at Fox has sparked competition among the various personalities, all of whom would like more Palin on their shows. Shine is responsible for making sure everyone gets equal time, to maximize her ratings appeal across the network. “Obviously, there needs to be a sense of fairness,” Shine explains.

Ms. Mayhew declined to go into detail about Mr. Gergen’s project, but characterized it as as being about “watching an administration take hold.”

“It’s early days,” Ms. Mayhew said by phone this afternoon. “He’s writing about this administration and how it takes office, but he’s writing from the perspective of Gergen, which is unique, I think, as he has worked in so many administrations on the inside.”

UPDATE (6 p.m.) : Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal clarified that Mr. Gergen's book will not deal with the Obama administration specifically, but will explore in general terms what happens when a new administration takes over the presidency.

"What Gergen is writing about is how any new administration gets rolling and assumes power," Mr. Rosenthal said. "It's much more of an historical perspective than an examination of the Obamas or any of the other administration he has worked for in particular. It's history, as opposed to current events."

A former advisor to Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton, Mr. Gergen has written only one other book, Eyewitness to Power, which was a memoiristic take on Washington culture that Simon & Schuster published in 2001. He has a background both in politics and in journalism, having spent the better part of a decade at U.S. News and World Report, two and a half of them as editor in chief. Mr. Gergen currently serves on the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where he is a professor of public service and the director of the Center for Public Leadership.

Ms. Mayhew would not say how much access Mr. Gergen was getting within the White House nor whether he is interviewing the president himself.

“Needless to say, David is very connected, and he goes back with a lot of people a long way, and he has this perspective of having served in all those administrations on both sides of the political fence,” she said. “So I think this book will have a depth and a perspective that will be singular.”

Mr. Gergen is not the only journalist working on a book about Obama for Simon & Schuster. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is writing one that will focus on the administration's first year or so in office, and David Maraniss is preparing a biography of the president. The Penguin Press, meanwhile, will be publishing a book on the administration by The New Yorker's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza.

Mr. Gergen is represented by Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who has brokered book deals for a number of TV news correspondents as well as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, both Clintons, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and countless other D.C. heavyweights. Asked for comment on Mr. Gergen’s book project in late July, when Mr. Gergen was spotted in the White House doing interviews, Mr. Barnett declined to comment. It is unclear whether Mr. Gergen has actually signed a contract with Simon & Schuster, but at the very least an informal agreement seems to be in place.

Mr. Gergen's special assistant at the Kennedy School, Nancy Howley, said Mr. Gergen is on vacation and cannot be reached.

It would be a big victory for Viking president Clare Ferraro in any context, but the fact of the imprint's recent acquisition record—since last fall, at least three other major books have landed there—makes it even more breathtaking. Just last week, the editorial director of Viking's fiction list, Molly Stern, defeated a number of other houses for the rights to Danielle Trussoni's Angelology, a purchase that numerous sources said was in the neighborhood of $800,000. Before that, Wendy Wolf won Lynn Cheney's book about James Madison, and before that Rick Kot picked up Andrew Ross Sorkin's $700,000 book on the financial crisis.

There are probably more books that belong on that list, but even if there aren't, it's still a formidable haul, and one that says as much about Viking's health—and Penguin's—as it does about all the houses they're beating.

The incident took place more than 20 years ago. The short version is that Ms. Newberg was representing Ms. Ferraro on a memoir, and Mr. Barnett, who had helped prep Ms. Ferraro for the VP debate during the 1984 presidential campaign, got involved in some aspect of the negotiations. Together, Ms. Newberg and Mr. Barnett sold Ms. Ferarro's book to Bantam for seven figures, making her the first Washington politician ever to win such a big deal and setting Mr. Barnett on the path to becoming one of the most powerful people in publishing.

Apparently there is some disagreement over how exactly the Ferraro deal went down. When Mr. Guttenplan first asked Mr. Barnett the name of the agent he worked with on it, he initially said, "A woman. I can't remember." When Mr. Guttenplan followed up over e-mail, Mr. Barnett dodged it, claiming "he didn't want the 'individual—whomever it may be—badgered by colleagues' for launching him into publishing."

That didn't stop Mr. Guttenplan, who found Ms. Newberg's name in the acknowledgements of Ms. Ferraro's book and asked her to recount what happened. "He didn't work with me," Ms. Newberg told him. "He did the contracts later. I sold the book in an auction. He watched." Then she added that "three-quarters of the people he [Barnett] represents are morally repugnant to me".

Mr. Guttenplan brought those remarks back to Mr. Barnett, who replied via email: "[She] taught me a lot, but seems to have regretted it—and been jealous about it—ever since."

The New York Times first reported the deal this morning, noting that Ms. Welch will be edited by Scribner's Samantha Martin.

Titled 10-10-10, the book will be Ms. Welch's second, though her first, 2005's bestselling Winning, was co-written with her husband. 

Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who has recently brokered massive book deals for political heavyweights Karl Rove, Ted Kennedy, and Tony Blair, represented Ms. Welch in the deal. Mr. Barnett would not comment on the size of the advance Ms. Welch received--publishing insiders said it was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $1 million--but said there was already "strong foreign interest" from publishers abroad looking to acquire rights.

Ms. Welch, who writes columns for BusinessWeek and O, rose to prominence in 2002 after it was revealed that she and Mr. Welch—at that time married to someone else—were having an affair that began after she conducted an interview with him for an article in the Harvard Business Review.

Earlier this week, Mr. Rove and his representative in the deal, DC lawyer Robert Barnett, were deciding between Threshold and Free Press, another imprint of Simon & Schuster.

In the press release announcing the deal, Mr. Rove is quoted as saying, "I look forward to writing about my role in George W. Bush's campaigns and in his consequential and contentious Presidency. The book will be a candid, careful look at how he got there and what his Administration did once in office. It will tackle and shed light on important events and big controversies, spell out their implications for America and set the record straight."

Naturally, the announcement made no mention of how much Threshold is paying Mr. Rove for the book, but you can be sure there will be plenty of guessing in the next few days.

Mr. Rove wants to ask questions about their intentions regarding promotion, timing, editing, etc.--questions he has already asked in prior meetings, but is revisiting now that he's faced with a decision.

Because the holiday season is so busy, the source said, meetings have been hard to arrange.

As previously reported, Mr. Rove is considering two imprints, both of which are part of Simon & Schuster: Threshold Editions, a conservative shop run by GOP strategist Mary Matalin, and Free Press, which used to be aggressively conservative but has since refashioned itself as a general interest operation.

Reached for comment this morning, Mr. Barnett said, "Mr. Rove is taking the time to make an informed decision."

Robert Barnett, a 61-year-old lawyer at Williams & Connolly known in New York mostly for brokering massive book deals, was in his Washington, D.C., office on Monday morning, wearing a gray suit and a bright necktie decorated with animals and flowers. In the half-hour he had before flying to Iowa to prepare Senator Hillary Clinton for last night’s Democratic debate (for Mr. Barnett, lawyering is an expansive occupation), he was talking about how little he had to do with the astonishing regularity with which publishers agree to pay his clients enormous amounts of money to write books.

The week before, Mr. Barnett had arranged for Senator Edward Kennedy to receive more than $8 million for his memoirs, which will be published in 2010 by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA. (See story below.) Before that, Mr. Barnett was in New York with Karl Rove, meeting with publishers who are considering participating in an auction, scheduled to begin this week, for the former White House strategist’s memoirs.

>> Related: Inside the Kennedy Auction: The senator’s memoirs sold for over $8 million. So what’s he going to write about, anyway?

While reason suggests that Mr. Rove’s book will not draw an advance quite as high as Mr. Kennedy’s—Mr. Rove is not famous outside of the United States, so foreign rights to the book will not be especially lucrative—it is difficult to imagine, given his track record, that Mr. Barnett will walk away from the auction with anything less than a spectacular deal. Indeed, his recent performance in the book market has been pyrotechnic. A month before he closed on Kennedy, he presided over an auction for Tony Blair’s book, which Knopf won; the publisher shelled out a reported $9 million. And about a month before that, he was celebrating the release of Alan Greenspan’s Age of Turbulence, which he sold to the Penguin Press the year before for a reported $8.5 million. For Hillary Clinton’s memoirs he got $8 million; for her husband’s, he got somewhere between 10 and 12. (“President Clinton’s figure has never been accurately reported,” said Mr. Barnett, who didn’t offer to clear up the mystery.)

Forgive the cliché, but it really does seem like everything Mr. Barnett touches turns to gold. One might expect Mr. Rove’s book to push eight figures on inertia alone.

Mr. Barnett, for his part, is as aggressive in his self-deprecation as he is in his professionalism, and he insists that his clients, being who they are, would do just fine without him.

“I hope that when I call [publishers], they know that I have carefully considered the project and judged it in my limited view to be viable,” Mr. Barnett said. “I hope they know that I wouldn’t waste their time otherwise. But they’re going to make a judgment based on what they see and what they hear, not on whether I bring it to them. And that’s the way it should be, because I’m not writing the book. I don’t have enough talent to do so.”

There is a certain stoical detachment in the way Mr. Barnett talks about his career in book publishing, partly because he sees everything he does—whether it’s representing McDonalds in court, helping a retired politician schedule speeches or brokering a book deal—as legal work. He charges a $900 hourly rate for his services no matter the task: an implicit critique of the commission-based business model followed by the New York literary agents who are competing with him. And whereas some literary agents—a breed Mr. Barnett is careful not to identify himself with—might try to play publishers against each other, and sometimes even report bids they have not received in order to inflate the pot, Mr. Barnett is known for his candor.

“He’s just a straight shooter,” said Random House editor Susan Mercandetti, who bid unsuccessfully on the Kennedy book. “You never have to think there’s something behind his back. … It’s just very straightforward, you know where you stand, there’s no funny stuff.”

Still, like New York agents, he does enjoy taking lunch at Michael’s: “He’s a client, and I like the food,” said Mr. Barnett.

THE KENNEDY AUCTION, which officially kicked off on Nov. 9, proceeded characteristically enough.

“We were told many months before we met with Kennedy that we were going to meet with Kennedy,” said a source from a major New York publishing house. “The presumption was that we were interested.”

Indeed, Mr. Barnett did not even need to send out a book proposal: He simply called the publishers he thought might be interested, and those who were took meetings with Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Barnett at the senator’s home in D.C. during September and October.

There, publishers were greeted by Mr. Barnett, Mr. Kennedy, his Portugese waterdogs and his butler, who served refreshments.

During these meetings, Mr. Barnett let the senator tell stories and discuss the book he wanted to write, speaking up only when the conversation turned to the mechanics of the auction.

“I prepare a memo for the client on these meetings,” Mr. Barnett said, when asked to describe his procedure. “How to approach them, what’s likely to come up, types of questions that might likely be asked, types of questions they might want to ask.”

The Rove meetings, at this point, are over, and houses have been instructed to submit offers by Thursday. Random House plans to put in a bid, according to Ms. Mercandetti, as does Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that specializes in conservative books.

“I’m sure that will be a very lucrative deal for both of them,” said Anthony Ziccardi, deputy publisher of Pocket Books, which Threshold is a part of. “I think it’s going to be seven figures.”

Mr. Barnett, unsurprisingly, would not speculate on how much money he expected Mr. Rove to pull in for his memoirs. “He’s in great demand,” is all the lawyer would say.

Mr. Rove—who is here with his lawyer, Michael O’Connor—is said to have meetings with editors scheduled for early next week as well. News of the book project comes just a day after it was announced that Mr. Rove will soon be regularly contributing opinion pieces to Newsweek.

When he left the White House in August, Mr. Rove confirmed that he planned to write a book, and that he was talking to Mr. Barnett.