How to Sell a Book for 6.7 Million

“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” —Randy Pausch

According to news reports, Hyperion recently paid 6.7 million to acquire the rights to Last Lecture a book by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch and Jeff Zaslow, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The book is based on a lecture Pausch, 46, gave at Carnegie Mellon. Pausch called the lecture “How to Achieve Your Childhood Dreams.”

The lecture was part of a "Last Lecture Series" universities around the country have been holding. In this series, universities ask their best professors to deliver talks about what matters most deeply to them, as if it were the professor’s last lecture.

Pausch’s was especially poignant. At the time of the lecture Pausch, who was suffering from pancreatic cancer, had only weeks to live.

Videos of the lecture—or parts of it—reportedly have been viewed over 6 million times.