THE BUCKS DON'T STOP HERE Overpayment of the week? That's what some industry insiders are calling Anne Lamott's new book deal. Though Lamott's fiction (Crooked Little Heart) has never sold as well as her nonfiction (Operating Instructions), Riverhead Books made a preemptive bid for her new novel, The Blue Shoe, taking it off the table for a figure insiders estimate at around $1.2 million. ''I'm ready to have her fiction break out,'' says Cindy Spiegel, Riverhead's coeditorial director, who acquired the novel on the basis of a four-page proposal. In another deal, Putnam senior editor John Duff paid a rumored $450,000 for a book by former Sony Pictures head Peter Guber and Variety editor Peter Bart. Shoot-Out: A Survival Guide to the Filmmaking Process grew out of a class the two teach at UCLA.
HE REMEMBERS YESTERDAY The secret diaries of John Lennon's last years are finally seeing the light of day -- sort of. The journals have been out of circulation since they were recovered from a former assistant to Lennon who had stolen them with the intention of writing a book. But now Robert Rosen, a freelancer who is one of the few people to have read the diaries, has penned his own book based on them. Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, which will be published by Soft Skull Press next June, doesn't quote from the journals, says Rosen. Instead, he uses his memory of them to corroborate others' stories about the Beatle. Yoko Ono had no comment.
