Deals. (Between the lines: the inside scoop on what's happening in the publishing industry).

After years of dishing out celebrity gossip daily on the radio, New York's WBLS FM "shock jock" Wendy Williams will finally deliver the dish on herself.

The self-proclaimed "Queen of the Radio" will expand on the hot topics she discusses on her show that have earned her the title of "Queen of Scandal." The book will also cover her personal and professional struggles, including her battles with drug addiction, her plastic surgery, and her very public dismissal and fall from grace at New York's HOT 97 FM. Atria Books/Pocket Books employees, Renee Brown, Pam Grant and Brigitte Smith, who are also listeners of Williams show now on WBLS, overheard her mention on air that she would like to write a book. A meeting was scheduled, and eventually a deal was made by Atria Books Publisher Judith Curt and Pocket Books Publisher Louise Burke. Atria Books senior editor Malaika Adero will edit the untitled memoir and Karen Hunter will serve as co-author. The hardcover edition from Atria Books is scheduled for fall 2003, and the mass market paperback release is scheduled for 2004 from Pocket Books.

Dawn Davis, editorial director of Amistad, announced that Amistad/HarperCollins and the Library of Congress will publish a book of photographs selected by W.E.B Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The book, A Small Nation of People, will include 150 duotone photos, along with essays by Pulitzer Prize-winning Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis and art historian and MacArthur fellow Deborah Willis. Publication is scheduled for fall 2003.

Kelli Martin has acquired two new novels in her new role as editor at Amistad/HarperCollins (see People on the Move). The first, A Love Noire, is a debut novel by Yale and Columbia alumnus Erika Simone Turnipseed that looks at present-day New York's black urban professional world. The second is The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of a Colored Vanity Fair, an epistolary novel by Edward Christopher Williams, who is recognized as the first African American to graduate from a library school and the first black librarian. Rediscovered by Professor Adam Mc Kible at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the novel details Washington, D.C's black high society during the Harlem Renaissance and was published anonymously in serial excerpts in The Messenger from 1925 to 1926. Tanya McKinnon of Mary Evans, Inc. brokered the deal.

Atria Books/Washington Square Press editors Malaika Adero and Rosemary Ahem acquired Carl Hancock Rux's debut novel, Asphalt, at auction for six figures from Victoria Sanders and Imani Wilson of Victoria Sanders and Associates. Rux's play Talk won an Obie Award and the 2002 New York Foundation Award.

St. Martin's Press Editor Monique Patterson has acquired three new novels by Brenda Jackson. First is The Savvy Sistahs, a mainstream women's fiction novel tentatively scheduled for a fall 2003 release. Second are two yet-to-be-titled romance novels featuring Jackson's popular Maderis family characters, scheduled for a winter 2004 release.

Self-published author Collen Dixon recently signed a two-book deal with Melody Guy at Striver's Row/Villard. Dixon's thriller, Simon Says, will be re-publish in the fall of 2003. The second book in the deal will be a sequel.