Chip Kidd, book cover designer, unmasked
By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — Whoever first said "You can't judge a book by its cover" has been lost to the ages, but Chip Kidd, the most celebrated of book cover designers, isn't arguing.

At 39, Kidd has designed more than 1,500 covers for authors from Michael Crichton to John Updike. But he says that judging a book by what's on its jacket is "irredeemably shallow."

He asks, "Would you want to be judged by your face?"

But don't people do that all the time?

"Yes, but it doesn't mean you should."

Kidd's work is now the subject of a book, Chip Kidd (Yale University Press, $19.95) by Veronique Vienne, a designer turned writer, who offers another view:

"Whether or not we know it, we all judge a book by its cover. Its role is to communicate not only what the book is about, but who will enjoy reading it. There is a subliminal language of images and typography that speaks directly to the subconscious mind of the potential book buyer."

Some covers, she says, can be misleading: "Serious anthropological studies can be disguised as mystery novels, but more often than not, they accurately reflect the mood, the style and the literary merits of what's between the covers."

And no one does that better, Vienne says, than Kidd, who has been described as a "design demigod," an "inky colossus" and "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design.

Such accolades seem to embarrass Kidd, who calls them "ridiculous" and admits to being "inky, but only on a dwarfish scale." He says the first cover he ever noticed was "no doubt for some sort of Batman comic I saw when I was about 3, enough said. Or maybe not enough said: the colors, the forms, the design. Batman himself is such a brilliant design solution."

A serious collector of Batman memorabilia, Kidd has designed and edited several books devoted to what Vienne describes as his "childhood obsession and lasting adult passion."

After graduating from Penn State, he went to work in the art department at Knopf, a leading literary publisher, in 1986. It was a time when books were replacing the covers of record albums as what Kidd calls the "cool, neat thing" for graphic designers.

Some of that had to do with the smaller size of CDs, which Kidd says "is not conducive to a bold, visual style," and the emergence of rock videos that make "the kind of visual statement album covers used to."

Vienne cites another difference: "Music stores are dark, with lots of reflective surfaces that make it difficult to look at graphics. Bookstores are more likely to use natural light and invite you to linger. It's an environment more conducive to graphics."

Kidd says the design process is "pretty simple, unless it becomes complicated."

It begins with the book's manuscript: "I read it, I brood, then eventually respond. Along the way, I may or may not involve photographers or illustrators or any amount of ephemeral detritus that washes up on my shores in the pursuit of solving the problem. And that is what it always amounts to: visually solving a problem." And that, he says, can take from 10 minutes to six months. He also talks to the author, who, he says at Knopf, "has final say, so it's a logical starting point."

Vienne, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, praises Kidd's ability to stretch "the visual boundaries between words and visuals by choosing pictures that appear at first glance to be non sequiturs."

She cites his cover for The Abomination, Paul Golding's 2000 novel about a child whose sexual identity makes him an outsider.

Kidd used a simple black and white photograph of a child's stuffed bunny rabbit standing on its head.

"It's not obvious," Vienne says. "But it's unsettling. The image makes you want to find out more. A nice cuddly thing turned upside down. It forces the reader's mind to make a leap."

Kidd also wrote a well-reviewed novel, The Cheese Monkeys, loosely based on his college experiences, and is working on what he calls not a sequel but "Episode Two." He says, "I'm aware a vast majority of human beings didn't read The Cheese Monkeys."

In her book, Vienne foresees Kidd eventually reinventing himself as a writer "too involved with his own writing to design the jackets of his books."

But Kidd cites two factors: "A: I love my job. And B: It pays the bills." (He says Monkeys sold about 50,000 copies in hardcover and paperback. Not bad for a debut novel, but no blockbuster.)

He also says he finds designing a lot easier than writing but can see gaining more attention and respect as an author, rather than as someone who designs covers for other authors.

"Which is the way it should be," he says. "The content inside is more important than the image on the cover."

-----------------------
Chip Kidd has designed more than 1,500 covers since 1986. His comments on four of them:

Who's Irish ?

Gish Jin's 1996 collection of stories about the immigrant experience: "The key here is spirit — to project the exuberant joy and rebellion of the kid in the story. I felt that if I could get that across, then I could pull readers into it."

Brazzaville Beach

William Boyd's 1991 novel: "One of my favorite covers ever because it's SUCH a great book! What I did was try to mimic the scheme of great cigarette packages, because the heroine of the story chain-smokes. I attempted to 'ape' the design of an African cigarette package that would have been used in the novel."

American Rhapsody

Joe Eszterhas' 2000 semi-fictional version of President Clinton's personal problems: "My editor-in-chief, Sonny Mehta, said to me, 'With this one, let's just give everyone a big kiss.' So I did."

Jurassic Park

Michael Crichton's 1990 thriller: "The trick there was figuring out how to show a dinosaur without actually showing one, and the answer was to do a sort of X-ray silhouette of a dino-skeleton. The producers of the movie obviously agreed, because they bought it and ran with it."

© Copyright 2003 USA TODAY

Chick Lit
Genre Aimed at Young Women Is Fueling Publishing Industry

By Heather Cabot

N E W Y O R K, Aug. 30
— Bridget Jones's Diary, the 1998 best seller turned Hollywood hit, inspired a spate of similar tales, all starring imperfect career women looking for love.

This contemporary genre, known as "chick lit," short for chick literature, is now setting the pace for an otherwise struggling fiction industry.

"The mega authors — John Grisham, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy — all have had a fall-off in sales," said Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble. "But the chick lit is growing, and they're growing exponentially."

In the $23 billion publishing industry, chick lit books earned publishers more than $71 million last year, and that's just the best sellers. Several publishers, including Harlequin, Broadway and Pocket Books, have created separate imprints to distribute the specialty titles.

The books feature everyday women in their 20s and 30s navigating their generation's challenges of balancing demanding careers with personal relationships.

"Nobody's got a great job," Hensley said. "Nobody has a perfect body, and God knows, none of them have perfect boyfriends."

‘Like Reading My Life Story’

The characters typically mirror the authors themselves. That's why 33-year-old Philadelphia writer Jennifer Weiner said chick literature captures a much more realistic side of women's lives. She believes it has an authenticity frequently missing from women's fiction of the past.

"I think that for a long time, what women were getting were sort of the Jackie Collins, Judith Krantz kind of books — sex and shopping, glitz and glamour, heroines that were fun to read about, but just felt nothing like where you were in your life," Weiner said.

A turning point in Weiner's own life inspired her first novel, Good in Bed.

She started the project at age 28, when a rough breakup left her dejected and depressed. The former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter turned her blues into a best seller by basing the lead character on herself.

The story of a plus-sized newspaper writer trying to navigate singledom touched a cord with her contemporaries and has sold more than 800,000 copies. Home Box Office is developing the book into a television series.

The women who packed a Weiner book signing in downtown Philadelphia one August weeknight reflected on the book's success.

"It was like reading my life story," said 30-year-old Danielle Medykowski, of Bucks County, Pa. "Just, I was reading it through somebody else's eyes."

A group of six Brooklyn-based writers hope to recreate that is the same feeling in their own chick lit manuscripts. Known as "The Little Red Writing Group," the 20- and 30-something women aspire to pen the genre's next best sellers.

For the last two years, the friends have met once a month over Sunday brunch to discuss their story development and characters. They strive to imbue their books with a tone that's similar to their chats among girlfriends.

"It has every single element: 'Oh, I'm so fat,' 'Oh, I want a date,' 'Oh, I don't make enough money,'" explained 32-year-old Elise Miller, who recently sold her book Star Craving Mad to Warner Books. "You know, it's all in there."

Author’s New Direction

Critics dismiss the books as nothing more than trendy beach reads. But the books appear to have staying power, now expanding into topics that move beyond the single life.

Recently, "bridal-" and "mommy lit" titles have become big hits, including Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It and Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic Ties the Knot.

The heroines may face new challenges, but the books maintain the same true-to-life narratives, along with some self-deprecating humor.

Weiner, now married for two years, said exploring more mature themes like motherhood was a natural evolution for readers and writers.

In June, she gave birth to her first child, Lucy, and promised parenting will be a prime theme of her third novel. She's confident her core audience will follow.

"Wouldn't you love to read, you know, Bridget Has a Baby?" she laughed.

You read it here first, but...

Book cover designers go out on a limb for latest trend

By Maureen Ryan
Chicago Tribune

August 27, 2003

You can't walk through a bookstore these days without seeing gams galore. Legs in boots, legs on roller skates and legs ending in bare feet abound, but stroll by the "new fiction" table, and what you'll see most often is a curvy set of legs in a sassy set of spike heels.

Many of the books are post-Bridget Jones, Sex and the City-esque tales, wherein a plucky gal-about-town eventually gets the great job, loses the weight and/or finds the perfect guy. And she does all of the above, if the book covers are to be believed, in a great pair of shoes.

In the past year or so, the appendage trend has strolled out of chick lit and started walking all over serious fiction.

"There is this zeitgeist thing with book jackets, where one trend kind of takes over," says noted book designer Chip Kidd, who has created covers for books by Donna Tartt, Michael Crichton and Cormac McCarthy. "I'm proud to say I don't think I've contributed to it."

Kidd thinks for a moment, then sighs. "I just did Platform by Michel Houellebecq, so I'm guilty," he groans.

Well, at least Platform, a bleak tale of sadomasochism by a bad-boy French writer, doesn't feature a perky heroine and her dating travails in the big city, a la classic leg-centric titles Jemima J, Someone Like You and Women About Town.

"They're all following me, they're all pretenders to my throne," jokes writer Jennifer Weiner, who got a leg up in the fiction world with her saucily titled 2001 novel, Good in Bed, which depicted a pair of curvaceous legs from a provocative angle.

Not content with the galloping success of Good in Bed, which peeked out of countless beach bags and eventually was sold to HBO, Weiner refined her winning formula for last year's In Her Shoes, the cover of which features two sets of feet in fabulous heels.

"The legs work on lots of different covers for [the] same reason they worked on Good in Bed," Weiner says. "They let you suggest lots of different things about your character with out specifying too rigidly what kind of person she is."

Weiner didn't even want legs on the cover of her first novel -- she wanted a "rumpled, sexy unmade bed," but that idea was shot down quickly.

"The [leg] jackets are fun and vibrant, they don't look like work -- some covers can look sort of daunting," says Stacy Creamer, executive editor of Doubleday, which published the leg-centric The Devil Wears Prada, and deputy editor of Broadway Books, which publishes a host of perky-gal tomes, including the limb-centric oeuvre of Jane Green.

What publishers don't want on most fiction covers is a full depiction of a woman, says Creamer, especially if the book's plot has an element of romance. Put a woman and a man on the cover, show their faces and you get dangerously close to the cliched "clutch jackets" of traditional romance novels, she notes.

Hence cutting a woman's face out of the picture entirely. For The Devil Wears Prada, Creamer and her team chose the image of a woman from the neck down in spike heels because "we really thought it would be iconographic, and that it would reproduce well for advertising. That was a big plus," she says.

Candace Bushnell's latest novel, Trading Up, also features a sexy pair of heels, which is not surprising, given that as the author of Sex and the City, she practically invented the concept of the urban heroine who has exhaustive knowledge of both heartache and $400 heels.

According to Bushnell's editor, Leigh Haber of Hyperion Books, earlier versions of the cover tried too literally to portray the idea of a woman looking for a better man, or "trading up." But "when you're trying to say too much with a cover, it doesn't work," Haber says.

Hence the sexy -- and simple -- shoes. "They best epitomized what [the heroine] Janey is about -- she's a Victoria's Secret model with great legs and great shoes," Haber says.

Given the success of the chick lit genre, Linda Bubon, co-owner of the Chicago bookstore Women and Children First, sees more and more titles with these kinds of perky, leggy covers. But she thinks the trend sells both writers and readers short.

Bubon cites Melissa Bank's 1999 story collection, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing -- one of the first kooky-shoes-on-the-cover books to hit big -- as well as Mary O'Connell's Living With Saints as substantial titles that potential readers may have dismissed as fluff, given their covers.

"As a bookseller, it concerns me if you don't pick a book up because you think it's silly and not worth your time," she says.

However, thank you for your interest
(Filed: 25/08/2003)

Tom Payne examines the art of the rejection letter

There are more rejection letters now than at any time in literary history. There are more manuscripts than ever - most publishers receive at least 100 a week - and more people to reject them. These days authors can expect rejections not only from publishers but also from the agents who themselves must wait for the work they're representing to be rejected.

Clare Morrall tells me she has received thousands of rejection letters. But now her novel Astonishing Splashes of Colour is on the long list for the Man Booker Prize, which was announced last week. It is the reward for an extraordinary amount of patience. Although this is the first novel she's published, it's the fifth that she's written. "I was very methodical with this one," she says; she sent it to agents rather than to publishers direct. Thirty-three agents. None took it on, so she sent it to Tindall Street, a publisher in Birmingham, who brought the book into the world.

DBC Pierre, who also appears on the long list, thinks this is because the agents don't look at much in their slush piles, and leave the skimming to interns. Some of the agents who turned down his book, Vernon God Little, don't even appear to know that they had done so. "I've since heard that some of the people I sent it to said they'd have loved to have seen it."

Yann Martel, who won the prize last year, was turned down by five publishers before Canongate accepted The Life of Pi. Francis Bickmore found it in the in-tray, and suspects that the publishers who rejected it didn't give themselves a chance to read it. The whole business is a raffle.

When there are so many blows to an author's confidence, it's hard to see how anyone can carry on writing. I suspect that those who do come to see rejection letters as scars that hurt for a while but soon become things you can show off. Jack London used to frame his. Plenty of writers have decorated walls with them. In this age of Oprah Winfrey, in which we all have something to say and, by God, we're going to say it, we are becoming increasingly familiar with the genre of the rejection letter. Don't worry if your work is turned down, we are told on myriad error-filled websites: so was Margaret Mitchell's, plenty of times, and JK Rowling's too. The premise here is that writers are beautiful individuals, and that publishers are corporate idiots.

And if aspiring writers still doubt that they're special, they can reflect that Paine, Poe and Pope published themselves, as if the work of these plucky pamphleteers and poets had spent years in a vault at HarperCollins but, hurray, they had enough self-belief to get out there and make us listen.

Just this month, the example of the Rev GP Taylor provides a fillip to all those who feel undervalued or overlooked: an editor took issue with his use of the word "skulduggery" in the manuscript of his novel Shadowmancer; he decided to publish the book himself; then it was forwarded to his parishioners and now the man has a six-figure advance. This sort of story is seductive because, understandably, we think of writers, not publishers, as the people who revolutionise literature.

But a book called Rotten Rejections, edited by André Bernard, makes you feel some pity for the people who sit in offices and make livings out of writers. For example, what is the correct response, on first looking into Gertrude Stein's Ida? However lyrical and lapidary the work, you have to applaud the publisher who wrote back in Stein's own voice: "Having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one."

Clare Morrall is aware of publishers who look to the bottom line: "They nearly all say, 'We quite like this but don't think it would sell enough copies.' With literary fiction they tend to say that either it's prize-winning material or they can't do anything with it." It's worth remembering that although TS Eliot was a modernist poet, as a publisher his banking side could come into play. In turning down George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London he wrote, "We did find it of very great interest, but I regret to say that it does not appear to me possible as a publishing venture."

It reminds us how brave publishers have been when they have put new work into the world. Many have rued that failure of nerve. I founded a creative writing paper at school, and can only remember rejecting one poet, who was called Patrick Mackie and whose elegant, sophisticated Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool is published by Carcanet. Bother; but I'm in excellent company.

When the first chunks of A la recherche du temps perdu reached the Nouvelle Revue Française, André Gide decided at a glance that the author was a snob and turned it down, only later to call it "one of the most burning regrets, remorses, of my life". Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape is unlikely to wallow like that, but does admit: "You're always haunted by the ones you said no to. I turned White Teeth down on the basis of about 10 pages," the same 10 pages that led Simon Prosser at Hamish Hamilton to snap it up. "And you know Leadville, that wonderful book [by Edward Platt] about the A40, the road I take in to work - I thought, in an ideal world yes, but… One should have been bolder."

In fact, the moments when writers receive a letter saying yes are more astonishing than the times when they are told no. Today, it is hard to imagine literature without the work of Primo Levi; but immediately after the war If This Is a Man was an extraordinary challenge to publishers. Nobody wanted to read about the Holocaust, perhaps because of horror mixed with a lingering anti-Semitism, and publishers knew it. One took the risk - a small house called De Silva - and printed 2,500 copies, of which they sold half. De Silva folded shortly afterwards, and only in 1958, after a handful of further rejections, did Einaudi take the book on. The plight of Anne Frank's diary was similar: it was turned down some 11 times before going into print.

Publishers still reject books that look all too relevant. David Caute wrote Fatima's Scarf, a novel about an author called Gamal Rahman whose own book, The Devil: an Interview, is burned by Muslims in the north of England. The novel, with its clear parallel to the Rushdie affair, was rejected 25 times. Publishers who had published him before turned it down; in the end he published it himself and writers queued up to praise the work. Something similar happened to Maggie Gee, who wrote The White Family, a novel about racism that many houses declined to publish. Perhaps they were uncomfortable with its frank but considered portrayal of white bigots; but Saqi Books was less afraid. When the book finally appeared it won a host of raves and a place on the Orange prize shortlist.

What makes the publishers in these cases look so short-sighted is how immediately Fatima's Scarf and The White Family found an enthusiastic audience - the authors were hardly loss leaders, after all. Still, in an ideal world, publishers should be able to judge each new book as if it were by a new author, and let the work speak to them on its own terms. How lovely it was when Doris Lessing had the self-effacement to submit a manuscript under a pseudonym, to establish whether the book would be considered regardless of who she was (it was rejected).

Many of John Blake's decisions are made precisely because of who the authors are. Among his authors are "Nasty" Nick Bateman, former Rhodesian leader Ian Smith and James Hewitt. Given the kind of flannelling that can pad a rejection letter, his honesty is refreshing. "There's a big problem with people who were famous five or 10 years ago, who were on telly every day and were very busy, but now they don't realise that time's moved on," he says. "You don't phrase it like that, though. You tend to say, 'the list's rather full at the moment', or, 'it's not quite right for us'. If you're feeling really mean you dump them on other publishers, and other publishers dump them on you. We pass each other dead celebrities all the time."

So what about the rejection letters themselves? These documents, coming as they do between the publisher's feelings and the author's, must mute the former to spare the latter. After all, they also come between a book's existence and non-existence. (Sometimes, too, they come between a person's life and death: the endless rejections of John Kennedy Toole's The Confederacy of Dunces are widely believed to have led to the author's suicide.) The letters publishers end up sending to authors are almost always lovely.

This is as true of the hard characters at John Blake as it is of the smoothies at John Murray. Blake says, "The other day we did have a call from a writer who was a bit hurt by the abruptness of the letter," but he does show signs of sympathy, adding, "To all writers, it's like their child… In the early days I used to write little letters of encouragement, but now we have a graduate who writes them." Katie Mahood, who composes courteous brush-offs at Murray, sounds so kind about the whole sad business that she reminds me of a vet who has to break bad news about a dog: "We're a particularly friendly company, and we try to make our letters a lot more personal, explaining why it's not suitable. They're normally apologising and encouraging, and we always look at the positive aspects."

Clare Morrall has more than 15 years' experience of rejection letters, and is in a position to say that they have become less personal in that time. She notes that those coming from a typewriter have been more detailed and helpful than the word-processed ones that are routine these days. She also has two daughters who are old enough to receive rejection letters of their own. The younger one gets politer responses, perhaps because she is submitting children's fiction. Agents are a growing source of the less intimate rebuff: DBC Pierre says that when they bothered to reply at all, they sent a standard rejection letter.

The rejections stashed in my own bottom drawer reveal nothing but politesse. My favourite came from Christopher Reid at Faber & Faber, whom I tried to impress not only with my poems but also with the fact that I had read them on the London cabaret circuit. "I must try to catch you one Friday at Kool Eddy's Café," he wrote, "but I'm afraid I shan't be able to publish this particular collection." The sweetest sort of letter is the one that makes you think it's the publisher's fault rather than yours. "I'm sorry, it's not for us" is the standard way of doing this, but some go a little further. "Our list reflects certain values, or interests, or specialities of the editors," Katie Mahood explains, "and so a proposal might not fit into the list." My best example of this is a charming note the Globe Theatre sent when returning my verse drama: "Our focus lies chiefly with Shakespeare and his contemporaries," it said, which is ageist but fair.

The biggest question facing the rejector is, how encouraging should I be? There are stories, urban myths I hope, of writers who, on being cheered by some halfway pleasant word from a publisher, renounce their jobs, remortgage their homes and starve their families in the name of their doubtful art. But from a publisher's point of view, the strongest argument against being too gentle is that it takes too much time. "Life's too short," says Dan Franklin. "I used to work with someone who'd write pages of A4, usually to unsolicited manuscripts, and the problem with that is that you get the manuscript back year after year, with the author having followed your advice."

I have heard it argued that there is no point in writing nasty rejection letters, since people who sit down to write a book, a play or a poem are doing no harm to the world. This is true, but it ignores the harm writers do to themselves by continuing to believe that the firstlings of their brains will at last reach the point of sale at Waterstone's. This is why the firmest rejection I received was also the kindest, and is quoted in full:

Dear Tom,

I spoke to Pat [Kavanagh, at the literary agents Peters Fraser & Dunlop] about your ideas.

As I suspected, her view is that unless you want to write a novel which you absolutely have to, then you shouldn't be writing that novel at all.

Does that make sense?

With best wishes, St John Donald

Anyone who has worked as a publisher, or editor, or reviewer, or as an editor or publisher of reviews, must wish that more people took this on board. It is a pre-emptive rejection, a kind of literary contraceptive that could save the world from many unwanted books, as well as the painful platitudes of real rejection letters. However special Sara Haardt was (she was a beautiful individual who married HL Mencken), one publisher at least wished she wouldn't write poetry. This is how he responded to her submission in 1923: "The poem I can't take. We have 200 or 300 hundred bales of poetry stored in Hoboken, in the old Norddeutsher-Lloyd Pier. There are 300,000 poets in America."

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003

August 20, 2003
An Author Gets Back at Knopf
By DINITIA SMITH

WASHINGTON — "I was fired from Knopf!" said the mystery writer Martha Grimes. "Sonny didn't want the next Jury book," she said, speaking of Sonny Mehta, editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf, and Ms. Grimes's 18-book series about an urbane British detective, Richard Jury, all named after English pubs, like "The Blue Last" and "The Grave Maurice."

Nearly 10 years later, Ms. Grimes speaks as if the hurt lingers. Knopf dropped her, she said, probably because at that time she wasn't earning back her advances.

Never mind. Now Ms. Grimes, 72, whose Jury novels are regularly best sellers, is having her revenge. She has written "Foul Matter," just out from Viking, a sendup of the publishing industry, with characters, her publicist says coyly, who may bear a resemblance to real people. There is plenty of inside information about publishing, but it is also a comic adventure full of quirky characters and plot twists.

"The woman is brutal," said Andrew Vachss, the mystery novelist, who is an old friend of Ms. Grimes. "This book is all-out war."

"Foul Matter" — it's the term for an unedited manuscript — is to publishing what Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" was to movies, a dissection of greed, hypocrisy and ambition. Publishers have been taken over by German conglomerates like Blundenraven and the real-life Bertelsmann. Companies have names like Queeg & Hyde, Grundge and Dreck Inc. An editor called Bill Mnemic regularly steals other houses' authors.

In the book a diabolical best-selling mystery writer names Paul Giverney agrees to jump ship at his old publisher and sign up with Mackenzie-Haack, but only if it gets rid of another, more literary author, Ned Isaly, who makes less money than Giverney

Giverney's motive is to prove that the business is so corrupt that publishers will go to any length to make money. But Isaly's contract is unbreakable, so the firm's head, Bobby Mackenzie, orders an editor, Clive Esterhaus, to have him killed. A Mackenzie author and Mafia informer in witness protection finds two hit men to do the job. The problem is that they insist on reading Isaly's work before killing him, and they turn out to be amateur literary critics.

Ms. Grimes is cagey about who the book's real-life antecedents are. Is Bobby Mackenzie supposed to be Sonny Mehta? Mackenzie is brilliant and canny, words applied to Mr. Mehta, who took over Knopf in 1987. Like Mr. Mehta, Mackenzie keeps a bottle of spirits in his desk, and he has added commercial authors to a previously rarefied list. Of course, this is a spoof, and any resemblance stops there.

"A couple of people have mentioned Sonny as a model," Ms. Grimes said. But she added, "I do consider Sonny to be some kind of publishing genius."

"I really admire him," she continued. She is hardly suggesting that Mr. Mehta would take out a contract on one of his own authors, she said.

"There's only one element of Sonny in Bobby Mackenzie," she said. "Sonny has a lot of power. It isn't inconceivable that he would demonstrate power for its own sake."

Paul Bogaards, the director of public relations at Knopf, said that Ms. Grimes and Mr. Mehta "had an amicable parting." He said that Mr. Mehta had not read the book.

Ms. Grimes says parts of her are in all the authors she portrays in the book: the best-selling Giverney, the purist Isaly, the unpretentious mystery writer Jamie. Clive, who in the end does the right thing, "is an amalgam of a number of people."

But what about Mortimer Durban, Giverney's agent, who is ruining publishing by getting huge advances for authors that they can't earn back? The name seems like a combination of two well-known real-life figures, Mort Janklow and Amanda Urban. "I wasn't even thinking of it," she said.

"Foul Matter" is one of several recent novels depicting publishing in a bad light. In "The Last Days of Publishing" (University of Massachusetts Press) by Tom Englehardt, a Pantheon editor resigned in protest when his boss, Andre Schiffrin, was forced out by S. I. Newhouse. As in "Foul Matter," publishing has been taken over by German conglomerates. Now the editor has to report to his ex-wife and a slimy former hippie.

German conglomerates have also taken over in "The Storyteller" (Doubleday) by Arthur Reid, a pseudonym for Howard Kaminsky, a longtime publishing executive, and his wife, Susan, a former editor at Dutton. Here the subject is plagiarism. An author who can't get published obtains a cache of manuscripts that he publishes under his own name. They become best sellers.

But why would Ms. Grimes, who admits to an annual income of over a million dollars from publishing, have a grudge against the industry? Well, success has not come easily.

In her autobiographical books, "Hotel Paradise" and "Cold Flat Junction," she describes growing up a smart, neglected child whose mother was part owner of a resort hotel in western Maryland. Ms. Grimes's father, a city attorney in Pittsburgh, died when she was 6.

She graduated from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa. She wanted to be a poet and studied alongside Donald Justice and Philip Levine.

Ms. Grimes married Edwin Van Holland and had a son, Kent, who today is her publicist. The couple divorced.

For 15 years, while bringing up Kent in Maryland, she taught English at Montgomery College, a community college, at its Takoma Park campus, "an awful job," she said, and tried to write. In her late 40's, she began sending out "The Man With a Load of Mischief," about Richard Jury. A dozen houses rejected it before Little, Brown published it in 1981.

Readers became passionately attached to Jury; his aristocratic assistant, Melrose Plant; and Plant's obnoxious aunt, Agatha. In 1992, when Ms. Grimes published her first novel out of the Jury series, "The End of the Pier," her fans and editors objected. She got hate mail, she said. Her editors call the non-Jury books, which have not been best sellers, "these other books," Ms. Grimes said. "If I hear that expression again, I'm quitting."

Today, Ms. Grimes lives in Washington and near Santa Fe. Tall and elegant, she has never remarried. "Someone had to thrill me enough," she said with a laugh.

"I have a reputation for being difficult," Ms. Grimes said. But that is because she refuses suggestions from editors without questioning them, she said. "I just squawk and complain."

Ms. Grimes has a generally dim view of the business. Her 1993 Jury mystery, "The Horse You Came In On" (Knopf), was reported to stem from a grievance she had against another mystery writer, Elizabeth George, also an American who sets books in England. Ms. Grimes said she thought Ms. George was stealing her ideas. Ms. George's agent called Ms. Grimes's accusations "baseless, preposterous and undignified."

Recently, Ms. Grimes said, "The book has no relationship to Elizabeth George."

Among Ms. Grimes's gripes are the big advances paid to some writers. "It's decadent," she said. "Most authors can't possibly earn them out."

She says this even though she receives advances of about $1 million for every three Richard Jury books. "I'm getting a lot — too much," she said.

In 1989 her agent sold "Send Bygraves," a book of mystery poems, for a quarter million dollars, "an exorbitant sum," Ms. Grimes said. "Crazy! You're not going to earn it back."

"I think agents do this to show their own power," she said. "That's one of the reasons I hate agents."

But wait, there's a mystery here. She's a best-selling author. Why bite the hand that feeds her?

"My motive in writing this book was not to attack publishing," Ms. Grimes said. "There were no characters in this book I actually disliked. I liked all of them."

"Foul Matter" could be about Ford, or any kind of business," she said.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

An Author Gets Back at Knopf

test from blogger.com

The Anti-Beach Book Crowd
Who said summer was a time for reading lite? Not the Chautauqua Literary and Science Circle, which has stuck with the heady stuff for 125 years.
By Margo Hammond
Book Editor, St. Petersburg Times

I just returned from the shores of Lake Chautauqua, a wooded area in western New York State, where the oldest continuous book club in America is celebrating its 125th anniversary. Founded by John Vincent, a bearded Methodist bishop who dressed in black cutaway suits, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) evolved as an extension of the good reverend's summer educational program for Sunday School ministers.

The concept for the book club was simple: Members (who paid annual dues of 50 cents) were sent four books a year to read within a four-year period. OK, so the books were often written and published by Vincent -- even a man of the cloth doesn't live by utopian dreams alone. But the list was not for the faint-hearted. It included challenging treatises on Greek and Roman history, studies of astronomy, and Bible history. No beach books for these folks! After four years, members would take a test to prove they had read all 16 books and then come to Chautauqua (if they could) to participate in a "recognition ceremony," passing through a golden gate to the Parthenon-like Hall of Philosophy while children tossed flowers at their feet.

Sure, it was corny and a tad bit pretentious. But remember, this was a time before public libraries, when people, especially in rural areas, had little access to books, and few women received advanced education. More than 8,000 people -- of all faiths -- signed up for the CLSC in those first years, and many wrote passionate letters to Vincent, thanking him for the chance to enter the ranks of the educated. One woman confessed to crying profusely when her books arrived in her postbox.

In 1882, 1,718 members "graduated," carrying a banner and calling themselves The Pioneers. In the ensuing years, hundreds came to Chautauqua each year to hear prominent speakers like Thomas Edison and Booker T. Washington. Meanwhile, readers across the country set up circles in places like Blue Earth, Minn., and Humbolt, Ohio, to discuss the books and perpetuate the Chautauqua principles of a sound mind, body and spirit.

Remarkably, the club still operates (it now costs $10 a year). The books on the club's list have gotten, well, more readable, but they are no less challenging. Among this year's suggested titles were Forrest Church's "The American Creed: A Spiritual and Patriotic Primer," Brian Hall's historic novel about Lewis and Clark, "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company," and L.A. Times journalist Robin Wright's "The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran." This week, Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak there. All told, no fewer than 142,000 souls will show up this season to listen and learn on the grounds where the Chatauquans first set up their summer camp.

Which brings me to my question: Why does the media (and book editors in particular) always push the idea of "lite reading" at this time of year? People don't have to turn off their brains during the summer. Summer is not when we should stop learning, but rather the perfect opportunity to grapple with some of the more important issues of the day.

Excuse me while I go stretch out on the beach with a copy of "War and Peace."

Sunday Herald

Life Of Pi hits one million sales as Spielberg eyes movie chance
Booker prize-winning author Yann Martel expresses delight as Canongate smashes Scottish record for first imprint sales
By Liam McDougall, Arts Correspondent


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CANONGATE, the Edinburgh-based publisher, will this week make literary history by becoming the first Scottish publishing house to sell one million copies of a novel in its first imprint.
As the Edinburgh International Book Festival gets under way and the city launches a bid to be named as the world’s first official City of Literature, Life Of Pi, a story about an Indian boy cast adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger, is set to propel the imprint into the record books.

Sales of the book, which is distributed in the UK, Europe, New Zealand and Australia under the Canongate name, have now reached 987,100. With the novel selling a massive 25,600 each week in paperback in Britain alone, senior figures in Scotland’s literary world say they believe that no other work of fiction by a Scottish publisher has breached the million mark in a year.

Film rights have been bought by Fox Pictures and screenwriter Dean Georgaris, whose credits include Tomb Raider 2 and the forthcoming Mission: Impossible 3, is set to adapt it for the big screen. Last night, there was also speculation that director Steven Spielberg was interested in becoming involved with the film.

A source close to the Fox studio told the Sunday Herald: “Speilberg’s name gets bandied about with all sorts of projects but he is nuts about Life Of Pi. It looks like he is keen to team up with the screenwriter to direct it.”

Jamie Byng, Canongate’s publisher, said: “The book has become a phenomenal success. It’s selling extremely well in the UK and has become a huge international hit.

“Without even having to break into a sweat it is out-selling all the commercial trash. It’s nice that a book that will change the way people think about lots of things is enjoying such an enormous readership.”

The achievement has placed the novel by Yann Martel, a Spanish-born Canadian, among the great literary works of fiction to have emerged from Scotland. Although sales of Life Of Pi fall short of those by the nation’s greatest novelists, the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, John Buchan or Sir Walter Scott have sold over many years and been printed in numerous editions.

Even more copies of the book are likely to have been sold than the figures given by Booktrack, which monitors only 80% of all book sales in the UK.

Speaking from his home in Vancouver, Canada, Martel said he was thrilled with the achievement. He said: “I am delighted for myself and for Canongate. It means great things for the Scottish publishing house and Scottish cultural life in general.”

Last year the novel made history for the Edinburgh firm after it won the coveted Booker prize. It was the first time a book from a Scottish publishing house had taken the £50,000 award and has meant a glittering new chapter for Canongate.

From profits of around £50,000 in 2001, Byng has helped transform the flagging imprint into a multi-million pound business and one of the most vibrant publishers in Scotland, featuring writers as diverse as Michel Faber, Dan Rhodes and Louise Welsh. Earlier this year the imprint confirmed its place in the major league after taking the title UK Publisher of the Year.

Byng added: “There’s a great buzz in the office. Life Of Pi has opened up so many exciting possibilities and it also enables us to move forward. I get the sense that agents are keener than ever to get us to acquire books they are representing.

“Recently, bigger publishing houses in London have been offering more money for books than we have but the agents have decided to go with us. That is unprecedented for us and is really exciting.”

In Life Of Pi, 16-year-old Pi Patel becomes shipwrecked while emigrating to North America along with zoo animals bound for new homes. When the ship sinks he finds himself alone in a lifeboat – his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450lb Bengal tiger. The tiger soon dispatches all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to co-exist with the animal for 227 days lost at sea.

The transformation of Martel’s life in the last year is a tale almost as incredible as the storyline of his book. At last year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival he was an unknown author who had sold only a handful of his previous two books. Now he is an international star.

News of the book’s record-breaking success was last night greeted with delight by the Scottish literary establishment. Catherine Lockerbie, director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which begins this weekend, said: “It is a book of joyous imagination at its heart. From the very first instance I thought this was a wonderful work. I never dreamed it would win the Booker or sell a million but it’s a completely delightful surprise in every way. This does move things to another plane for Canongate. I am certainly not aware of another novel from a Scottish publisher that has ever sold a million copies.”

Liz Small, of the Scottish Publishers’ Association, added: “We are delighted for Canongate. Life Of Pi has a taut story of great dramatic tension, and this coupled with the charismatic directors of Canongate has drawn – rightfully – great public attention.”

The success comes as Edinburgh, which has produced Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ian Rankin and works by JK Rowling, plans to have itself recognised as the world’s first City of Literature. In the autumn a team led by Jenny Brown, former head of literature at the Scottish Arts Council, will ask Unesco, the UN’s cultural body, to grant Edinburgh the first title of its kind.

Teen author wins readers book by book
By Yvonne Zipp | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

A lot of writers prefer to remain above the actual business of selling books. Christopher Paolini is not numbered among those. In fact, the young author has gone to great personal lengths to get his book into the hands of as many people as possible.

Take the time he arm-wrestled a Montana farmhand at an outdoor festival in Livingston.

"Fantasy wasn't his thing. Actually, I don't think reading was his thing," Paolini says. So he threw down his challenge. "We cleared off the table right there in the middle of the park. He was 6 ft. something, and I'm 5 ft., 8 in., and I ended up beating him."

Another copy sold.

This kind of take-charge entrepreneurial spirit helped Paolini and his parents, who published the book for him, sell about 10,000 copies of his fantasy epic "Eragon." As if writing around 500 pages about a 15-year-old who discovers a dragon's egg wasn't enough, Paolini designed the cover art and drew the illustrated map of his kingdom, marketed the book, and acted as chief salesman. And the 19-year-old did it all by the time most teens are filling out freshman orientation packets for college.

Time on his hands
Paolini started writing "Eragon" when he was 15 - the same year he got his GED. He didn't want to go to college right away, and the nearest town to his family's farmhouse is 18 miles away. "So there was not a whole lot ... to take up big chunks of my time," he says. "I decided to try to write a story I would enjoy reading." For Paolini, who admires authors like Mervyn Peake, Philip Pullman, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Octavia Butler, that meant fantasy.

He worked a year on the first draft - and was less than impressed by the results. "I know what a book is supposed to read like, and this wasn't it," he says. Draft No. 2 took another year, at which point his parents, who own a small publishing firm, helped him edit the book.

Around that time, Paolini had to make a choice. He had been accepted on a full scholarship to Reed College in Portland, Ore. "I literally had the orientation papers on my desk," he says.

Instead of moving into a dorm, he and his parents took "Eragon" on the road.

Paolini made more than 130 presentations at bookstores, schools, libraries, and fairs around the United States - dressed in leather lace-up boots, black pantaloons, a red swordsman's shirt, and a black beret. "The first time I spoke in public was [at] my local high school, which I never attended," says Paolini, who was home-schooled by his mom. "I find out they're going to cycle the whole school through in three batches. It's a farming community and there are all these ranchers' sons, and there I am standing on stage in medieval costume. I was petrified."

A year on the publicity circuit
After about a year on the road, public speaking held few terrors and Paolini had picked up a new hobby on the long car rides: making chainmail - a process he says involves galvanized fencing wire, metal snips, and a lot of patience.

But the book's success was becoming logistically overwhelming for the family. And Paolini was so busy selling Book 1, he wasn't making much headway on Book 2, "Eldest."

"In 2002, I literally only got 60 pages written," he says. "I've been working on the trilogy already for about five years. I do kind of want to get it out of my system."

As it happened, one of those 10,000 copies the Paolinis had sold landed in the hands of Carl Hiaasen's stepson, when the family was vacationing in Montana. Hiaasen, author of "Striptease" and the Newbery-winning "Hoot," called his editor at Alfred A. Knopf and suggested the firm might want to take a look.

It did, and at the end of this month, a newly edited hardcover edition of "Eragon" hits bookstores. The first printing is more than 100,000 copies. Paolini's original drawing is no longer on the cover, but he doesn't sound terribly upset. The new cover was designed by John Jude Palencar, an artist Paolini admired so much he named Eragon's home, Palancar Valley, after him.

One character drawn from real life
Paolini's own home of Paradise Valley - and the Beartooth Mountains - served as a model for his book. But Paolini says there's only one character that he drew from real life: Angela the herbalist, the funniest and warmest of his female characters. Paolini, as it happens, has a younger sister, Angela, who he says knows the Latin names of all the plants in their valley. She got her GED at 14. "She was determined to beat what I did," says Paolini.

"I put her in as a joke," he adds. But "her appearance ended up giving me the solution for the entire story arc."

The real Angela, now 17, has returned the favor, he says, installing him as a character in her first fantasy novel. In fact, all the Paolinis are working on books. "We all have computers and sit in our rooms typing all day," says Paolini, who, while he doesn't see college in his immediate future, listens to university lectures from The Teaching Co. "We come down to dinner, watch a movie or something, and then go back up."

So far, aside from plush advances, covers designed by his artistic heroes, and opportunities to talk to authors like Mr. Pullman and Tamora Pierce, Paolini says life has actually gotten quieter since his deal with Knopf. But that's only until the end of this month. After that, Paolini goes back on tour.

This time, though, he says, "I won't be in costume."

By Christopher Paolini
Alfred A. Knopf528 pp., $18.95

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Chick Lit Inc.

By Alyson Ward
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Their names are Bridget, Cannie and Jane, Jackie, Jemima and Mel. They live in rent-controlled urban apartments and buy Jimmy Choos on Nine West salaries. Their bosses are handsome, their mothers meddlesome. Single but looking, young but far from naive, these women have become the most recognizable, most successful -- and perhaps the most overexposed -- characters in modern fiction. They're the irrepressible (and unavoidable) women of chick lit.

"Chick lit," the shorthand term for breezy novels written by and about young women, has been a prominent, sometimes dominant part of publishing since the mid-'90s. The books are described as "perky," "witty" and "playful romps" -- and they have been romping up the bestseller charts on a routine basis.

But the backlash has begun. Derided by serious scholars, declared passé by the British press, chick lit has been on shaky ground for at least a year. "The chick lit phenomenon is in decline," Britain's `The Independent' declared last August. And this month's `Book' magazine claims the genre has failed to live up to its potential and is damaging the market for stronger, more serious female writers.

Not everyone agrees, though, about where chick lit is headed. In May, the `Philadelphia Inquirer' announced that the "sassy, kicky" genre is still the "hottest trend in publishing."

So what gives? Is the frothy feminine fiction bound to gain a permanent place in publishing, or is it a five-year flash in the pan?

The answer depends on where this much-debated genre goes next.

First of all: No one needs to sound a death knell for chick lit just yet. Rumors of its demise have been exaggerated.

"From the sales numbers, it's doing really well," says Elizabeth Bewley, an assistant editor at St. Martin's Press, which has published such chick lit titles as `The Nanny Diaries' and `The Dirty Girls Social Club.' "These books are selling really strongly, in a book market that is kind of dragging at the moment."

In fact, chick lit books are being pushed onto store shelves more quickly than ever.

"You used to go in the bookstore and you'd see one new chick-lit book," say Rian Montgomery of New Hampshire, an avid fan of the genre. "Now there are eight."

In the past couple of years, publishers have rolled out new imprints to snag their share of the chick lit market. Pocket Books started up Downtown Press this spring, with a shopping-bag logo and a list of chick-friendly titles, including Cara Lockwood's `I Do (But I Don't)' and Elise Juska's `Getting Over Jack Wagner.'

In late 2001, Harlequin emerged with Red Dress Ink, a subsidiary designed to attract young women who aren't reading romance novels. The first novel, `See Jane Date' by Melissa Senate, has become a TV movie starring `Buffy the Vampire Slayer's' Charisma Carpenter; it's scheduled to air on ABC in August.

"It's almost more like a mindset than a [literary] subgenre at this point," says chick lit and romance author Cathy Yardley.

Indeed. On TV, there's `Sex and the City,' based on Candace Bushnell's 1996 novel, the Women's Entertainment reality series `Single in the City,' and the ABC sitcom `Less Than Perfect,' in which Sara Rue stars as a single girl in a big-city newsroom. At theaters, `Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde' is full of fashion, female bonding and plenty of pink.

Academics, of course, tend to peer down their noses at chick lit. In 2001, British novelist Beryl Bainbridge famously called the genre "a froth sort of thing." Feminist writer Doris Lessing agreed, saying young women should write about their true lives, "and not these helpless girls, drunken, worrying about their weight and so on."

But Julia MacDonnell, a professor who heads the creative writing program at New Jersey's Rowan University, is one academic who sees value in chick lit.

The genre is full of "witty, ironic stories about idiosyncratic heroines," MacDonnell says. The stories, she claims, are "lightyears beyond your basic Harlequin romance, not merely entertaining but also offering insights into how we live now."

Montgomery, who's 25, agrees.

"I kind of lead a chick-lit life myself," says Montgomery, who runs the Web site Chicklitbooks.com. "I'm in my mid-20s, I'm single -- I can identify with some of the stuff the characters go through."

If you ask Montgomery, the only crucial element of a chick-lit story is a woman "trying to find her way in life." Of course, there's more to the stereotype than that.

`Bridget Jones's Diary,' Helen Fielding's novel-turned-movie, was the book that made chick-lit trendy in America, says Bewley.

The fictional Bridget, a thirtysomething British "singleton," is bent on self-improvement so she won't end up "dying fat and alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by Alsatians." Her diary recounts a year of bumbling career moves, disastrous romance and a full accounting of calorie, alcohol and cigarette consumption.

`Bridget Jones' was a bestseller in Fielding's own Britain and in the United States. "It was a really funny, intelligent book, I think, and it set the precedent," Bewley says.

Now there are hundreds of similar titles, and bookstores and chain discount stores all feature prominent shelves devoted to chick lit. (Target labels its section "`chic' lit."

Women are snapping up books with Barbie-colored covers bearing titles such as `Running in Heels, Good in Bed,' and `Dating Without Novocaine.' Some of the novels, thanks to `Bridget Jones,' take the form of a diary. Others use emails to tell the story. Almost all are written in a self-deprecating, funny, first-person voice. Sometimes the book works, and sometimes it doesn't.

"There have been a lot of spinoffs, both good and bad," Bewley says. "There's plenty of chick lit that's pretty schlocky, but there is some out there that is smart."

So is chick lit, then, the Harry Potter series of adult fiction? No matter the quality, do we simply shrug and say, "Well, at least people are reading"?

MacDonnell thinks so.

"People who haven't read much `are' reading -- and finding that they really like it," she says. "It makes them a little more daring in their next choice of book, I think."

MacDonnell is optimistic about the reading habits of her fellow chick-lit readers.

"What I think might happen is that these women who are reading what are, to me, very intelligent books. . . [will] then go back to other authors -- like Julia Alvarez, because her work can be approached from that angle." (Alvarez is the author of several books, including the acclaimed `How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.' )

Of course, the popularity of chick lit has already led readers to some excellent authors. Good stories have been published, sold and embraced that, a few years ago, might have slipped through the cracks.

Caren Lissner's `Carrie Pilby' is a novel that contains almost none of the chick-lit stereotypes. But it does have a quirky style of humor and a young female protagonist, and Lissner's book was published this year by Red Dress Ink. The book's cutesy pink-and-blue cover is a small price to pay for the kind of exposure a chick lit book receives, Lissner says.

"There are advantages to being published by Red Dress Ink," she says. "They published 50,000 copies of my book. If I'd gone to a more literary publisher with a more literary reputation, they would probably have put out 5,000 or 10,000 copies of it, and it wouldn't have gotten the attention it got."

"It doesn't matter how good it is if nobody sees it," Lissner says; the frilly packaging helps her novel more than it hurts, so she doesn't mind being swept up in the chick-lit current.

On the other hand, MacDonnell's first novel, `A Year of Favor,' was published in 1994 -- just a few years before the chick-lit craze emerged in America. The story of a young female reporter sent to investigate government corruption in a South American country, "it's a story that would have had more success in this [current] environment," MacDonnell says.

Oh, to have written that story when Helen Fielding was climbing the bestseller lists.

Lissner says her book made Amazon.com "wish lists" even before it was published, simply because it was classified as chick lit. Which proves one thing: Female readers are hooked. They can't get enough of breezy tales about single women's zany adventures in the city.

But to keep the momentum going, the publishing industry needs to breathe fresh life into the now-predictable stories.

"I think there's a limit to how many chick lit books there can be," Lissner says. "The genre is going to have to go in different directions if it wants to stay viable."

Many publishers, she says, are now rejecting manuscripts that are "about a woman getting dumped and having to go on dates with a lot of incompetent men."

In its second year, Yardley says, Red Dress Ink has made "a very concerted effort to look for nontraditional, nonconventional chick lit."

The imprint's Web site features guidelines for potential writers: "We're looking for novels that really set themselves apart from the average chick lit book. . . Predictability is not your friend. So shake it up. Put your heroine in some inspired and crazy circumstances. Give her quirky characteristics. (Maybe even a job that's not in publishing)."

Despite all that encouragement, though, here's the description of one of Red Dress Ink's latest releases: "All Evelyn Mays wants is to be the perfect bride in a size 8 Vera Wang wedding dress."

Diversification may not be easy.

But while most chick lit today is written for and about the young, white, urban, upwardly mobile career woman, some in publishing are determined to encourage books about women of different races. And that means finding `authors' of different races.

"What I would like to see -- at St. Martin's and elsewhere -- is more books written by Latina authors," Bewley says.

`The Dirty Girls Social Club,' a recent St. Martin's release by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, is the story of six Latina women who maintain a friendship over years, miles and life changes.

"`Dirty Girls' will set a precedent that will be really good," Bewley hopes. "It's an example that Latina writers will see, [and] they will write novels themselves."

Meanwhile, Harlem Moon, a Random House imprint, is publishing a handful of chick-lit novels that feature African-American protagonists. `SilkyDreamGirl,' a novel by Cris Burks, is the story of a woman who escapes her romance and weight worries by creating a new identity on the Web. And the E. Lynn Harris novel `A Love of My Own' tells of the life and loves of Zola, the young editor of a magazine called `Bling Bling.' (This books diversifies in two ways; the author is a man.)

Other trends show that chick lit is beginning to go in new directions. Here's what you can find today:

Chick lit mysteries. Nancy Drew lives: Chick lit mysteries are popping up. Sarah Strohmeyer has written a series of books about an investigative journalist/sleuth named Bubbles Yablonsky; `Bubbles Ablaze' is new this summer. The silly sleuth comes complete with a Camaro and a boyfriend called Steve Stiletto, and she balances a life of crime-solving and raising an ornery teen-age daughter.

Chick lit nonfiction. The chick-lit feel has even expanded beyond fiction. And we're not just talking about the breezy self-help books, `The Go-Girl Guide' and `How to Pee Standing Up.' Witness `Cooking for Mr. Latte,' an autobiographical story (and cookbook) by Amanda Hesser, a food writer for `The New York Times.' Hesser's book, published in May, chronicles a year in food and romance -- concluding with her marriage to a man who writes for `The New Yorker.' `The New York Times, The New Yorker. . . ' you might think it's literary nonfiction -- but then you see the hot-pink cover and the cartoonlike line drawings that portray the author and her romance.

Chick lit for young adults. "A lot of young-adult fiction is starting to be packaged like chick lit," Bewley says.

Consider the Louise Rennison series that started in 2000 with `Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging.' The British author has written a bestselling series about teen-ager Georgia Nicolson and her Bridget Jonesian crises.

"That series has an amazingly chick-lit feel, even though the protagonist is 14 years old," Yardley says. "She's got this sense of haplessness about her."

"It's sort of like hooking fans in really early," Bewley says. "They'll grow up and start reading the twentysomething ones and the thirtysomething ones."

Chick lit about older women. Until recently, chick lit has implied that the search for identity, romance, career satisfaction and Manolo Blahniks abruptly stops at age 39 -- and most protagonists were in their 20s. But now, Yardley says, a few of the candy-colored novels star older women.

Jeanne Ray, for example, writes chick-lit romances -- such as `Step-Ball-Change' and `Eat Cake' -- that feature women in their 50s and 60s.

They're calling it "lady lit," Yardley says.

Mommy lit. In the past couple of years, some of the most popular chick-lit titles have featured the adventures of women with children. Allison Pearson's `I Don't Know How She Does It: The Life of Kate Reddy, Working Mother' was a bestseller in both Britain and America. `Babyville,' a new offering from chick lit favorite Jane Green, is making its way up the sales charts. Books of this ilk are doing for mothers, critics say, what chick lit has done for single women: They are helping women connect by exposing the secret insecurities and absurdities of motherhood.

The fact that chick lit has developed so many tributaries is a sign that it's here to stay, MacDonnell says. And perhaps it's time to consider the books as more than mind candy and beach reads.

"I think, certainly, these will be studied in classrooms, although I'm not sure how many [books] will actually make the canon," MacDonnell says. "I don't know how lasting any of this will be, but I also don't know if it matters very much.

"If you look back to the glory days of the American novel, in the '20s, '30s and '40s, you're really looking at Guy Lit," MacDonnell claims. "Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the rest of the old boys telling tales about themselves."

This time around, women's lives are getting attention, she says, and that's a good thing.

There are perennial complaints, of course, that the often inept, clothes- and man-obsessed heroines are reflecting pre-feminist ideals. Nevertheless, MacDonnell says, chick lit represents progress.

"I think what's now being called `chick lit' is a very natural outgrowth of the feminist movement," MacDonnell says -- "the fact that you have just hordes of well-educated women out there in the world" who want to read books about themselves.

If authors and publishers successfully diversify the books and their readers, she says, "chick lit, in my opinion, is here to stay."

Banned at Borders

Borders bookstore, a treasure house of freedom of expression, bans a singer for her comments about the president's legs.

Date published: 7/26/2003

IT SEEMS INCONGRUOUS that the words "ban" and "bookstore" should appear in the same sentence. But Borders Books & Music at Central Park apparently banished a singer at least in part because her commentary, including a remark about President Bush's legs, angered some customers.

Borders suggests that Julia Rose is simply not the local clientele's cup of tea and that it had every right to terminate her contract. But Borders has a very scrawny leg to stand on itself if it is wielding such a quick ax on a performer who has been perfectly suitable at other Virginia stores in the chain. If there is any place in this country where freedom of expression should get the close calls, it has to be a general-interest bookstore.

To recap: Julia Rose is a singer-songwriter from Baltimore. Places like Borders are just her sort of venue, with, one would have thought, just her sort of crowd. Indeed, she's a veteran of the Borders circuit from Northern Virginia to Richmond and was debuting at the Fredericksburg location on July 18, the fateful evening. She had been scheduled to play there next month, too. Not so now.

How bizarre. On Borders' shelves and racks there are books, magazines, newspapers, and probably even CDs that upbraid the president over his policies and politics and poke fun at him and everyone else under the sun. Amy Korsun, the Borders marketing manager who cited Ms. Rose's comment "George Bush has chicken legs" in terminating her, surely wouldn't have it any other way. But one gets the feeling that when Ms. Rose sits before a mike and tweaks the president, free expression has taken the night off.

Borders may not be a bistro with blasphemous beatniks banging bongos, but it is still a bookstore where speech should trump the overdelicate sensibilities of some customers.

This episode naturally brings to mind the Texas-based Dixie Chicks, whose lead singer told concert-goers in London last March that "we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The Chicks paid a price for the self-indulgent pop-off, uttered the same month U.S. troops went into Iraq. Radio stations (though not WFLS) stopped playing their songs. People destroyed their CDs. Fine. Freedom of expression works both ways.

But Ms. Rose was giving aid and comfort to no one in her remarks with the possible exception of one or two Democratic presidential contenders who may look better than the president in a pair of cutoffs.

Still, maybe those offended by Ms. Rose's chatter ought to buy some of her CDs so they can stomp on them in front of TV cameras. She probably wouldn't mind the publicity.

The Free Lance Star, Fredericksburg, VA

The winners of the 2003 Agatha Awards
(presented in May 2003 at the Malice Domestic Conference) are as follows:

Best Novel - You've Got Murder by Donna Andrews, Berkley Prime Crime

Best First Novel - In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming, St, Martin's Minotaur

Best Non-Fiction - They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels, edited by Jim Huang, Crum Creek Press

Best Short Story - TIE:
"The Dog That Didn't Bark" by Margaret Maron, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (December 2002); and,
"Too Many Cooks" by Marcia Talley, Much Ado About Murder, edited by Anne Perry, Berkley Prime Crime

Best Children's/Young Adult - Red Card: A Zeke Armstrong Mystery (The Zeke Armstrong Mysteries, 1) by Daniel J. Hale & Matthew LaBrot, Top Publications

The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Elizabeth Peters.

Malice Domestic instituted a new award this year (not necessarily annual) for people (non-writers) and organizations who make a significant contribution to the field of mystery novels. The first Poirot Award was presented to David Suchet.

Three people won Malice Domestic Writer's Grants:

Mr. Thomas E. Bonsall, Baltimore, Maryland, for his work-in-progress, Lilac Time
Ms. Martha Crites, Seattle, Washington, for her work-in-progress, She Who Listens
Ms. G. M. Malliet, Alexandria, Virginia, for her work-in-progress, Death of a Cozy Writer

Malice XVI in 2004:
Guest of Honor: Dorothy Cannel
Toastmaster: Jan Burke
Ghost of Honor: Erle Stanley Gardner
Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Marian Babson
Fan Guest of Honor: Linda Pletzke

Thanks to Linda Rutledge for the update.

Seeking nirvana in a dusty bookshelf
They may look sleepy, but many used-book stores are thriving. Plus, the best places to get lost in the stacks.
By James Verini

July 17 2003

"How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I have undertaken in the pursuit of books!"
— Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"

It should be said from the start that going to used-book stores is, at best, a useless pursuit. It is reversionary, unhealthy even. Used-book stores are filled with books, dusty, old, sinus-polluting books and, as if that weren't enough, with the kind of people you make a conscious effort to avoid during the day — ne'er do-wells, layabouts, semi-employed dissertation candidates and self-proclaimed bibliophiles who consider writers such as Walter Benjamin, dead since 1940, their real friends.

Used-book stores are not where you absorb relevant knowledge; they are not where you go to bone up on Steven Pinker's latest thoughts on cognitive theory, to peruse the newest campaign biographies or to sneak a cheaper copy of "The Da Vinci Code" so you can affordably keep up with cocktail conversation.

If you like to make the most of your life, used-book stores can seem an absolute waste of time. That is precisely what makes spending time in them so worthwhile.

For devotees of the used-book store, Los Angeles has quietly become one of the last bastions, for L.A. has become one of the last great American book towns. New York may be home to the publishing industry and Lewis Lapham's thesaurus, Chicago still has Saul Bellow, but in both those cities high rents and the Internet have driven many of the venerable used- and rare-book stores out of business.

But here, the book business is thriving. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the greater Los Angeles area is the largest book market in the country now with 21.5% of the books sold by independent bookstores, the highest percentage in the country.

In social as well as economic terms, L.A. is a wordy town as never before. Witness last year's "Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology," from stuffy Library of America, and last month's "The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles." The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books now is the largest event of its kind in the country. Look at the lineup of authors the West Hollywood store Book Soup attracts, and at the recent national syndication of the impossibly literate radio show "Bookworm," a KCRW-FM creation.

For truly devoted book nuts, however, for those who know what they're doing is hopelessly archaic and love it, the used-books store still is the center of the universe. Because — before you get too hopeful about the state of civilization — books are, let's face it, on their deathbed. As an art and a business, they're obsolete. They have been for the better part of a century. They may continue to be for a century more. That is their charm.

Borders and Barnes & Noble would want to deny this. But it is at the used-books store, the least sensible of all businesses, a place perpetually teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, where you can drink in the utter futility of books without a $4 latte chaser.

Take, for instance, what probably is the best establishment in the greater Los Angeles area — certainly the most voluminous — Acres of Books, on Long Beach Boulevard in Long Beach.

The name is not an exaggeration. Acres has, by a conservative estimate, 750,000 books on its bowed, rotting shelves (the number probably is closer to 1 million). "More books than anybody in their right mind needs," acknowledges Jackie Smith, who has worked in the store since 1976 and now owns it (her husband's grandfather opened it in the 1930s).

You'll find everything from Kakfa to books on games to play with your cat, studies of Mesopotamian sexual practices to the early novels of Henry Fielding, and in every condition from mint first edition to dog-eared and ragged.

You'll discover, as one reporter did, the first volume of Evelyn Waugh's very hard-to-find one-volume autobiography (he planned three, but then died), "A Little Learning." And for $5, hard-bound, no less.

Disregard your claustrophobia and the justifiable fear of getting smothered beneath the Pisa-like spires of books, and have one of the helpful Sonic Youth clerks help you to the section on "Hackysack, Yo-Yo's and Juggling." Nearby, look over the three full shelves devoted to the history and study of prostitution. And don't forget the Frank Cotton Memorial Oddball shelves, named for the late head clerk of Acres, who until his death in 1988 functioned as the store's only computer. There, you find a volume titled "14,000 Things to Be Happy About," and another called "The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics."

Along with these testaments to the misguided history of human curiosity, there are any number of misguided, curious humans to be wondered at, shuffling along with that awkward sidelong gait particular to creatures used to over-tight bookstore aisles. Pale and near-sighted from years of 50-watt bulbs, they gaze up at titles mostly long forgotten, at authors mostly dead and buried, E.M. Forster's words from "Howards End" perhaps ringing in their ears: "Only connect....only connect."The proximity of the present to the past — of life to death — in used-book stores is electrifying. In a pre-digital electrical way.

Take the Eclectic Collector, a dark, breezy hole in the wall just off the pier in Hermosa Beach. Presided over by Tom Allard, a Barnaby Rudge-type who can usually be found outside the shop in a Hawaiian shirt, smoking, the Collector is usually empty. A wholly different experience from Acres, it is the kind of place where you can sit down with a copy of, for example, "Legendary Yachts: The Great American Yachts from Crowningshield's Cleopatra's Barge to Today's Intrepid Bill Robinson" (1971, $8.50), and lose yourself for hours in nautical luxuries.

Lose yourself in a book, off the pier in Hermosa? What exactly was being smoked on the pier beforehand, you ask?

But Los Angeles has lately come to the forefront in keeping the tradition of bibliomaniacal uselessness alive. As the university libraries of Southern California strive to keep pace with mushrooming student populations, and as the rising cost of books drives students and parents to look for better values, the secondhand reading business is thriving along with the likes of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

A recent tally by The Times uncovered roughly 40 used- and rare-book stores in the greater L.A. area. Although they tend to occupy low-rent districts, they exist in virtually every corner — Hollywood, Van Nuys, Thousand Oaks, Silver Lake, Westwood, Glendale — and in dizzying variety.

They cater to chefs (Cook's Library on 3rd Street in L.A.), photographers (Dawson's on Larchmont in L.A.), astrologers and soul-searchers (Bodhi Tree used book annex, on Melrose in West Hollywood).

Looking for an obscure work of 18th century German philosophy? Try Angel City Bookstore in Santa Monica. Want to know how to decorate a set entirely in bed linen? Book City in Hollywood. Looking for an obscure erotic science-fiction novel signed by the author? Bookfellows in Glendale. Need an early word of Samuel Johnson's? Why, Sam: Johnson's Bookshop on Pico, of course, where the owner, Bob Klein, a literature professor and novelist, will even deign to discuss the Doctor with you.

This being Los Angeles, of course, most stores abound in movie star biographies, self-help guides and Buddhism. Automobiles and art books often show up in force too.Still, some proprietors are not sanguine about the future. They say that, with as many used-book stores as there are, many have closed in the last 20 years. They say that the Internet, while it has helped them move inventory to far-flung customers, has also driven off-the-street business, and even regulars.

"Why should anyone go to a bookstore when they can order a book from the comfort of their desk and get it in a day?" asked Michael Thompson, who has owned Michael R. Thompson Bookseller, on 3rd Street in West Hollywood, for 30 years.

Thompson said that the huge market for libraries in Southern California may help business in the short run, but it has taken a lot of books that would have been bought and sold repeatedly out of circulation permanently. But he added that the mega-bookstore trend has not affected his business adversely.

But many experienced proprietors seem hopeful. Leonard Berstein's father opened Caravan Bookstore on Grand Avenue in 1954. Now Leonard owns it. "It's only been fifty years — I'll tell you in 75," says Bernstein, when asked about the state of business. He says he sees room for everyone in the book business — the Amazons, the Borders, the independent first-run stores and himself. "I'm not going out to buy a new Lexus every year," he says. "I'd rather spend it on books."

An encouraging sign is the recent influx of youth into the business. Traditionally the province of antiquaries and literates of the pre-computer age — that is to say, older people — used-book stores are now increasingly owned by people in their 30s and 40s.

Samantha Scully, 36, purchased Gene de Chene Booksellers on Santa Monica Boulevard in West L.A. from its aging owner last year. Faced with the store's closing and the loss of her job, Scully didn't want to see this neighborhood mainstay with a political bent (an antiwar poster adorns the door and a nice section of books on nuclear war sits inside) disappear. She believes she can keep the store afloat by attracting younger customers. "I wanted the store to stay here," she said, adding that, as she spoke, three patrons in their early 20s were browsing in her shop.

Brian Paepper, 39, a Dutch-born Angeleno, owns Alias Books, formerly West L.A. Book Center, on Sawtelle Boulevard. He sees a future in the used-book business, as long as it is treated as a business. The previous owner, Paepper said, would place high prices on books he felt especially attached to, and they wouldn't sell. He refused to utilize the Internet. To keep the store in business and relevant, Paepper has taken to selling textbooks and brought the store's inventory online.

"Used-book stores should cater to people who can't afford new books as they become more expensive," he says. Still, he adds, "it's a fool's profession."

But it is the foolishness, like the uselessness, like the smell of life and death on those shelves, that makes the used-book store what it is. Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW-FM's literary talk show "Bookworm," says: "At a first-run bookstore, people don't necessarily like books. They like trends, or CDs, or coffee. But used-book stores are meeting places for people who like books, and not just books, but people who want to find bookishness, a substance in rare supply these days."

Silverblatt is fond of Cambridge Bookshop on Beverly Boulevard in West Hollywood — he likes to buy a book there and then go sit in Lulu's and drink coffee; but then who wouldn't? — and Arnold M. Herr Bookseller on Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood.

The question, then, is not whether to get addicted to used-book stores — your mental well-being and family and professional lives, happily, stand only to suffer — but which used-book stores to get addicted to.

The Largest Book Deals Of 2002
Tomas Kellner, 07.18.03, 7:00 AM ET

Brand-name authors still dominate bestseller lists, but the reign of Stephen is over. King's last two books, From Buick 8 and Everything is Eventual, were each off 40% in sales compared with Dreamcatcher, his 2001 release.

Tom Clancy didn't fare much better. Sensing weakness, publishers are betting on new names and developing new brands. A fresh plot twist: Many of the writers lined up to take on Clancy, King, Michael Crichton and John Grisham are women.

Tim Lahaye
$42 million
Riding the surge in Christian-themed books, LaHaye signed a deal with Bantam Books to publish a new four-part Armageddon thriller. LaHaye is co-author of the doomsday series Left Behind, which sold 50 million copies. No surprise here. The religious books market hit $2.4 billion in 2001 and is projected to grow 3.7% annually through 2006. HarperCollins and Doubleday now have Christian book divisions.

Patricia Cornwell
$16 million
Her Portrait of the Killer purports to close the book on the Jack the Ripper case. Unlike her characters, the Cornwell brand is far from dead. The writer signed a two-book deal worth $16 million with PenguinPutnam last year. This fall she will deliver Blow Fly, a new installment in her Scarpetta series, chock-full with crime and corpses.

Charles Frazier
$11 million
The Pulitzer-prize winning author of Cold Mountain, a peripatetic Civil War epic about a Confederate deserter, sold his next book to Random House for $8 million and film rights to Paramount Pictures for $3 million. Miramax's movie adaptation of Cold Mountain is in the works, starring Nicole Kidman and Jude Law.

Diana Gabaldon
$10 million
One of the hottest new brand names in publishing, Gabaldon sold a three-book historical romance series for $10 million to her publishers at Delacorte Press in the U.S. and Doubleday and Random House abroad. Her first book, Outlander, a time-travel romance whose heroine has a husband in one century and a lover in another, got picked up after she posted parts of it on a CompuServe bulletin board. She built it into a best-selling six-book saga over the following decade.

Janet Evanovitch
$10 million
The creator of the Stephanie Plum series, about an intrepid New Jersey bounty hunter, sold the rights for her next two novels to HarperCollins for $10 million. Evanovich made an estimated $4 million for each Plum installment, of which there are nine now. She's branching out into romance, nonfiction and possibly even a TV series.

Alice Sebold
Keep an eye out for Alice Sebold. The Lovely Bones, her novel narrated by a murdered girl, has never been off the Publishers Weekly bestseller list since it came out in June 2002. To date it has sold more than 2.2 million copies. Sebold's publisher, Little, Brown, is postponing the book's paperback release until the strong hardcover sales fall off. Sebold is working on a second book for Little, Brown, and then she will be free to shop for a new contract, potentially worth tens of millions.

Forbes.com

Newton store sells well-traveled books:
Kontoleon family's shop on Auburn Street holds a collection amassed over 30

By Sarah Andrews/CNC Staff Writer
http://www.dailynewstribune.com/news/local_regional/newt_store07162003.htm
Wednesday, July 16, 2003

NEWTON -- It's an inventory that would make any literary historian drool.

A French thesaurus from 1757, pages yellowed but still intact. A gold-leafed volume of poetry from 1845 with a personal inscription on the inside cover. Old Civil War letters and personal diaries. Even an original copy of the now out-of-print "Arnold's Bodyshaping for Women" by Arnold Schwarzenegger, circa 1979.

But though the relatively new Auburndale shop, Old Books and Prints, doesn't profess to have every book ever written, its collection of rare and old books will impress even those with a fondness for crisp, white pages and high-gloss covers.

Located on Auburn Street, Old Books and Prints has been open for business since January and is one of the only used-book stores in Newton. While it is technically owned by former technology professional Jon Kontoleon, it is staffed by two people who call themselves "a senior citizen volunteer advisory committee" -- his parents, Jim and Jeanne Kontoleon.

The reason they work there? Well, it's their stuff.

Almost 30 years ago, the Kontoleons, who have been married for 50 years, "were looking for something to do," according to Jeanne, a former high school librarian. So they began collecting books by frequenting book auctions and yard sales.

It all started with one barn in New Hampshire. Jim, then a station manager at WGGB in Springfield, was feeling the stress of his job and its new responsibilities, which included giving on-air editorials. One weekend, the Kontoleons took a drive up to New Hampshire to get away and stumbled on a yard sale of sorts inside an old barn.

Minutes later they emerged with a bag full of old children's books (Jeanne's favorite) and the rest was history -- literally -- as the Kontoleons began to amass a giant collection of old books which they kept in a spare bedroom.

As Jim's job changed, the couple, who met at Syracuse University, moved from Massachusetts to Florida to Connecticut, each time hauling all their new collectibles. During one move from New England to Jacksonville, the load was so heavy and the streets so hot that the truck blew five tires on the way down.

"Each time we moved, it was always tremendous because we had all of our stuff and a book store," said Jeanne.

During the couple's final move, to New London, Conn., where Jim was starting up a television station, the collection was already quite serious. About three years ago, Jonathan came to visit his parents who were no longer working and decided to move them up to their present home in Oxford. Their new house even has a barn -- just for the books.

Jim and Jeanne's daughter, a Newton resident, found the Auburndale storefront recently and the Kontoleons decided to donate their collection to the store. They now not only sell their books, but also old original and hard-to-find prints and homemade greeting cards.

The difference in Jim and Jeanne's taste and preference makes for a store with a variety of merchandise, from military and medicine books, to old Life magazines and newspapers, to old Louis Prang prints.

And it's worth a visit if not just to meet the Kontoleons, who also refer to themselves as "the book gypsies." Maybe you will see Jeanne shyly roll her eyes when Jim calls her "lovely" in front of strangers. Or maybe Jim will tell you about how he was almost arrested in Medford when he threw pebbles at Jeanne's window before they were married.

"It was the kind of neighborhood where little short guys with suitcases couldn't peek in people's windows," he said.

While the Kontoleons don't actively peruse auctions and yard sales much anymore, they say they are still open to buying rare items. Currently, they have about 1,100 books in the store, with 3,000 more at home.

The store is a bit of a rarity these days, said Jon.

"The advent of book sales over the Internet and the increasing rents has forced many book stores of this type out of business," he said.