Michael Lewis Is Betting His New Book About High-Speed Trading Shakes Up Wall Street
With Norton, an independent press, the special treatment goes both ways. Lewis says he turned down large advances to remain with his longtime editor, Norton head Starling Lawrence, and for his last two books, he’s taken no book advance at all. “I like the risk,” he says. “Most writers treat their publishers as banks — very expensive banks. Norton is owned by its employees
.. Norton’s master plan actually went awry this week, through no fault of its own. Apropos of a book about the ways technology can betray the people it’s meant to serve, Google mistakenly allowed portions of the Flash Boys e-book to leak — not only onto Amazon’s “Look Inside” preview, but to other sites, includingWWNorton.com. “Losing control of their algorithms,” Lewis calls it. Before the excerpts were taken down, interested Wall Street parties were linking to page scans, captioning them with breathless tweets about the uncertain fate of “dark pools” and “latency arbitrage.”
.. (Flash Boys chalks up Goldman’s support for “fair” flash trading to its mediocre record in executing the sneaky kind.)
.. The Big Short, his last big exposé of disastrous financial folly, didn’t change the world. Will Flash Boys? “It’s naïve to say yes, but if this doesn’t, I’m done. If this doesn’t actually provoke some interesting behavioral changes, then what’s the point of writing these books? This is my best shot yet.” The same goes for Norton’s strategic reticence, he thinks. “If the book isn’t interesting I think it’ll only work once.”