National Book Award Winners Announced

The winners of the 2005 National Book Awards were announced last night, November 16, at a ceremony at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City. The annual awards are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize achievements in four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature. The night's ceremonies included the presentation of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Norman Mailer. The Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community was presented to poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore.

This year's winners by category are:

Fiction

Europe Central by William T. Vollmann (Viking)

Nonfiction

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf)

Poetry

Migration: New and Selected Poems by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press)

Young People's Literature

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall (Knopf Books for Young Readers)

The Goat at Saks and Other Marketing Tales
By LORNE MANLY

November 14, 2005

Few children's books carry promotional blurbs from the likes of the fashion designers Roberto Cavalli, Giorgio Armani and Jean Paul Gaultier. But then "Cashmere if You Can," is not your typical children's book.

This new lavishly illustrated book from HarperCollins Publishers follows the misadventures of Wawa Hohhot and her family of Mongolian cashmere goats who just happen to live on the roof of Saks's Midtown Manhattan store.

The location is no accident: a Saks Fifth Avenue marketing executive came up with the idea, and the department store chain owns the text copyright. It is as if the Plaza Hotel had underwritten "Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups."

On sale now only in Saks stores, HarperCollins plans to distribute the $16.99 book nationwide in January as if it were any other children's picture book. And "Cashmere if You Can" has inspired HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation, to make a business out of these sorts of corporate collaborations.

Saks has already signed with the publisher to produce another children's book for next year's holiday season, and HarperCollins is in negotiations with sports and entertainment entities and packaged goods companies.

The weaving of brands and products into content - making them supporting characters or even the stars rather than mere scenery -is growing elsewhere in the media, particularly on television, as advertisers try to cut through the clutter.

The book world, however, has not always been hospitable to such commercialization. Working that closely with a sponsor is viewed as compromising the work's artistic or literary aspirations or sullying the integrity of the reading experience, as the novelist Fay Weldon discovered when she accepted a product placement fee for a 2001 book.

While there have always been books, like "Weber's Big Book of Grilling" and "The Cheerios Counting Book," with obvious corporate tie-ins, "Cashmere if You Can" offers a new twist, with a more subtle connection and no clear disclosure of Saks's involvement.

Although there is a Mr. Saks in the story, who hires Wawa to be a model, and the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon at the Saks Midtown location makes an appearance, they are in service to an actual plot. "It's not the 'Saks Book of Style,' " said Andrea Rosen, vice president of special markets at HarperCollins. "We flipped the model." (HarperCollins receives a publishing fee from Saks and an undisclosed share of revenue.)

In attempting to make a business - albeit a modest one - out of publishing similar books, HarperCollins is also trying to goose an industry that is being squeezed from different sides. Powerful discounters like Wal-Mart and Costco sell a limited selection of books and return them promptly for full refunds if they do not sell quickly. Book chains like Barnes & Noble are devoting more space to gift items and other trinkets.

Amid all this, publishers have been trying to push into nontraditional markets and to find new outlets for their wares, like Saks Fifth Avenue.

"We can't keep chasing only best sellers," said Jane Friedman, chief executive of HarperCollins. "We all recognize we all have to do different things today."

Ms. Friedman enjoys doing just that. Not one to play down accomplishments - she misses few opportunities to take credit for the invention of the author tour or popularizing the audio book - she recently put corporate initiatives into place aimed at making HarperCollins as much of a brand name as its authors.

To further those ends, she relishes making use of other assets within the News Corporation empire. On "Stacked," the Fox television show revolving around a ditzy character played by Pamela Anderson who works in a bookstore, the books on display are from HarperCollins.

And Ms. Friedman mused in a recent interview about steering her writers on to the show. "Wouldn't it be fun to put Jack Welch with Pamela Anderson?" Ms. Friedman asked.

Given synergy's dodgy record, it is unclear whether these efforts will help sell HarperCollins books. But Ms. Friedman does not lack optimism. "Maybe I'm a dreamer," she said, "but a lot of what I've dreamt has come true."

Terron Schaefer, the senior vice president of marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue who came up with the idea for a children's book and has an as-told-to credit on the cover, also dreams big. He envisions a movie or television show based on the antics of the Hohhot goat family, and has hired a Hollywood talent agency to sell the project.

(He hit upon the surname while researching cashmere, discovering that much of today's fabric comes from Inner Mongolia, and that Hohhot is one of its towns.)

Although "Cashmere if You Can" is part of a chainwide holiday promotion for a certain expensive fabric, Mr. Schaefer said the book was not about persuading 7-year-olds (or their mothers) to develop a taste for fur-trimmed cashmere scarves. "There's no real sell in the book," he said. "It's just about being happy with who you are."

But the ultimate goal is, of course, all about marketing in some form. "If you can get into the lexicon of the public, I think we'll have accomplished something," he said. "Eloise at the Plaza; I rest my case."

But not all booksellers may be keen to help HarperCollins insinuate the Hohhots into the national consciousness come January.

"That's disgusting," said Carla Cohen, co-owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, when told about the book. "Teaching kids about material things most people can't afford, that's gross."

The intersection of books and advertising - disguised or not - has always been a fraught issue. Chris Whittle was greeted by a torrent of criticism more than 15 years ago when he bound ads into books by authors like John Kenneth Galbraith and Richard Rhodes.

Ms. Weldon created a minitempest when she accepted an undisclosed sum from Bulgari, the Italian jewelry company, in exchange for prominent placement in her 2001 book, "The Bulgari Connection." (HarperCollins was the book's British publisher, while Grove/Atlantic published the novel in the United States.)

And last year, the Ford Motor Company paid Carole Matthews, a British author, to feature the Ford Fiesta in her next two novels.

The Saks imprimatur does not necessarily bother other booksellers. "If it's a good book, we'll buy it," Steve Riggio, chief executive of Barnes & Noble, said through a spokeswoman.

That view was echoed by people in the independent bookselling world, including Roxanne J. Coady, owner of R J Julia Booksellers, which owns two stores in Connecticut, and Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, with three locations in southern Florida. "All the books published come from a big corporation," Mr. Kaplan said. "In situations like this, it all depends on how good the book is."

Anne Irish, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children, concurred that merit would be the primary consideration.

Ms. Friedman said the publisher would disclose Saks's involvement in the trade version of the book, but she was puzzled by objections.

"The idea of working with a company and creating editorial together, I see nothing untoward about that, nothing," Ms. Friedman said.

And if people do have a problem? "Don't buy our book if you don't want to," Ms. Friedman said.

Karon's Father Tim to leave 'Mitford'
By Nanci Hellmich, USA TODAY

Best-selling author Jan Karon, 68, is closing the book on her popular Mitford series, with the ninth, Light from Heaven (Viking, $26.95), out this week.

I have no more stories to tell about Mitford," she says of the novels that chronicle the escapades of the affable Episcopal priest Father Tim Kavanagh in the charming village of Mitford, N.C.

There are 25 million copies of her 15 books in print, including two children's books. Her work, which has Christian overtones, has a devout following.

Although it was time to leave Mitford, Karon won't leave Father Tim behind. She'll continue to track the life of the 70-year-old priest in three new books, called the Father Tim Novels, launching in fall 2007.

"I'll go straight from this series into another, which is rather like having a baby on Saturday night and waking up pregnant on Sunday morning," she says, laughing.

In the first novel, Father Tim will return to his hometown of Holly Springs, Miss. "He's going to learn something that will change his life forever."

The next two will take him to Ireland, then to England. But throughout, he'll be in touch with people in Mitford by e-mail and cellphone so that readers "will know of any significant happenings," she says.

Karon thinks Father Tim has helped redeem the tarnished reputation clergy have gotten in novels.

"Ever since Elmer Gantry was published in 1927, we have had very dark clergy in literature," she says. "They've been melancholy, depraved, greedy, godless, grasping. They've been the most miserable creatures. I wanted to show there are also wonderful, God-loving clergy out there."

Karon weaves parts of her own life into her books. She's an Episcopalian who, until a few years ago, lived in the Appalachian Mountain town of Blowing Rock, N.C., which is similar to the fictional town of Mitford. She now lives on a farm outside Charlottesville, Va.

Like Father Tim, Karon is ready to travel and slow down. "I want to enjoy all that God has given me."

The Name Blame: Authors Take Aliases To Cover Up Flops; With Stores Tracking Sales, One Bad Book Is Poison; William Becomes Diana

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
Wall Street Journal

Reed Farrel Coleman had six mystery books under his belt but sales were steadily weakening. His then-agent made a startling suggestion, he says: Take a new name.
Mr. Coleman, or as he's now known, Tony Spinosa, says he's just "doing what the market expects me to do: Play the game." The first book in his new series, "Hose Monkey," will be out next October, published by Bleak House Books. "Do I have some bitterness?" he asks. "Yes. But what good will it do me?"

Now that retailers can track books sales speedily and efficiently with point-of-sale technology, the entire publishing world knows when an author's commercial performance takes a dive. For these unfortunate scribblers, such a sales record makes it hard to get good advances and big orders from bookstores. So some are adopting an unusual strategy: adopting an alias -- even one of the opposite sex.
Two decades ago, the book industry largely relied on guesswork as it decided what to publish and sell. Editors could keep promoting promising authors, even if sales were weak. When they finally wrote a "breakout" title, their catalog of older books would become valuable.

These days, publishing veterans talk about "the death spiral" of authors' careers. A first novel generates terrific reviews and good sales, but with each succeeding book, sales get weaker and the chains cut their orders until they don't stock any at all.

"You're only as good as your last book's sales to much of the retail market," says New York literary agent Richard Pine, a principal in Inkwell Management LLC.
Dean James has published seven novels and six nonfiction books under his own name but hasn't earned enough to give up running a Houston bookstore. Rather than risk being cut off by his publisher, Mr. James offered to publish his latest work under the androgynous name Jimmie Ruth Evans. The book, "Flamingo Fatale," is a mystery involving a woman who lives in a trailer park, published in July by Berkley Prime Crime, a unit of Pearson PLC.

"I knew I'd have a better chance under a different name because I know how the book business works," says Mr. James.

A few months ago the author spoke to a book group at a private Houston club. Many of the members knew he was writing under a female- sounding name but one man was clearly stunned, expecting to see a woman. "When I walked into the room his jaw literally dropped," says Mr. James.

Natalee Rosenstein, Berkley Prime Crime's senior executive editor, says nobody asked Mr. James to change his name. Nonetheless, since his new protagonist is a woman, it made sense to give him a female moniker, or at least an ambiguous one. "You want to create a fresh start," she says.

William P. Kennedy went one step further. By the early 1990s, the military thrillers that had made his career were no longer selling well. Determined to reinvent himself, Mr. Kennedy sent his publisher a novel involving kidnapping and high finance called "The Trophy Wife." His editor at St. Martin's Press thought the book would appeal to women if it was written by a woman. He pressed Mr. Kennedy to change his name. An amused friend of the author suggested Diana Diamond.

The book, published in 2000, was a success. So was a subsequent title, "The Babysitter." The third, "The Good Sister," hit the best- seller lists. TV talk-show host Kelly Ripa invited the author to appear on "Live with Regis and Kelly." He wore, as a joke, a wavy, blond wig. Although Mr. Kennedy revealed his true identity during the program, it didn't hurt his sales. As Ms. Diamond, he has published six novels.

Mr. Kennedy has some regrets about becoming Diana Diamond, mostly because the literary career of William P. Kennedy appears to be over.

"I still submit books under my own name but it seems to be the consensus that they won't sell," says Mr. Kennedy. What irritates him most, he says, is that he's now acclaimed as the "Queen" of a genre known as the relational thriller. "If I was a sensitive person I'd be suicidal," he says.

Terrill Lee Lankford's literary agency was urging him to take a pseudonym even before his book, "Blonde Lightning," hit the shelves this summer. He declined the advice. His earlier title, "Earthquake Weather," was a critical, if not commercial success. But since it wasn't a big seller, orders from bookstores for the follow-up were lackluster. Mr. Lankford's editor at Bertelsmann AG's Ballantine imprint was enthusiastic about the sequel but the author's agency said his name was a liability.
Mr. Lankford says switching monikers is unethical. "If somebody didn't like my book under my own name it would be wrong to sell another book to that person under a different name," he says. "Just to defeat the computers at Barnes & Noble and Borders isn't a good reason for doing this."

Barry Martin, co-owner of Book'em Mysteries, a bookstore in South Pasadena, Calif., agrees with Mr. Lankford that the practice is "deceitful." He adds: "Publishers will do anything to sell a book."

Others make the point that poor sales may reflect bad marketing decisions rather than negative reader reaction. "A book could have a bad dust jacket," suggests Jack Rems, owner of Dark Carnival, a science-fiction and mystery bookshop in Berkeley, Calif. "I don't think my customers care that much about an author using a new name. It's about getting around the chain-store track record."

Pseudonyms have a long, established historical pedigree. Mary Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot because writing was considered a man's job in the 19th century. Sometimes authors have an itch to try something new but don't want to disappoint or confuse fans. Romance writer Nora Roberts, for example, writes a futuristic crime series as J.D. Robb. Stephen King created the pseudonym Richard Bachman to publish several books written early in his career. But not until recently was a pseudonym considered a marketing necessity.

In today's market, some successful writers might not have survived. James Ellroy, author of "L.A. Confidential," is one example, says his former publisher Otto Penzler, who owns The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. The first three of Mr. Ellroy's books published by Mr. Penzler sold cumulatively less than 5,000 copies in hardcover. His fourth book, "The Black Dahlia," was a massive best seller.

Want 'War and Peace' Online? How About 20 Pages at a Time?
By EDWARD WYATT

In a race to become the iTunes of the publishing world, Amazon.com and Google are both developing systems to allow consumers to purchase online access to any page, section or chapter of a book. These programs would combine their already available systems of searching books online with a commercial component that could revolutionize the way that people read books.

The idea is to do for books what Apple has done for music, allowing readers to buy and download parts of individual books for their own use through their computers rather than trek to a store or receive them by mail. Consumers could purchase a single recipe from a cookbook, for example, or a chapter on rebuilding a car engine from a repair manual.

The initiatives are already setting off a tug of war among publishers and the potential vendors over who will do business with whom and how to split the proceeds. Random House, the biggest American publisher, proposed a micropayment model yesterday in which readers would be charged about 5 cents a page, with 4 cents of that going to the publisher to be shared with the author. The fact that Random House has already developed such a model indicates that it supports the concept, and that other publishers are likely to follow.

The proposals could also become bargaining chips in current lawsuits against Google by trade groups representing publishers and authors. These groups have charged that Google is violating copyrights by making digital copies of books from libraries for use in its book-related search engine. But if those copies of older books on library shelves that have long been absent from bookstores started to produce revenue for publishers and authors, the trade groups might drop some of their objections.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, which filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in September over its Google Print program, called the Amazon announcement "a positive development."

"This is the way it's supposed to work: to give consumers access to books and have revenues flow back to publishers and authors," Mr. Aiken said. "Conceptually, something similar might be possible for the Google program."

Amazon said yesterday that it was developing two programs that would begin some time next year. The first, Amazon Pages, is intended to work with the company's "search inside the book" feature to allow users to search its universe of books and then buy and read online whatever pages they need of a given book. The second program, Amazon Upgrade, will allow customers to add online access to their purchase of a physical copy of a book.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, said in an interview that he believed that, for a vast majority of books, consumers would be able to download, copy and print out whatever portions of the book they buy. But, he added, that decision would ultimately be up to the publisher or the author.

Google is working to develop a similar system, said executives at three publishing companies who were briefed by Google on its efforts. Using the Google Print site, readers would be able to search Google's digitized library of books, then buy either an entire book or the relevant parts.

A spokesman for Google, Nate Tyler, declined to comment yesterday on its plans, saying only that the company was "exploring other economic models, but we don't have anything to announce yet."

Mr. Tyler said Google welcomed the Amazon program. "Amazon is a valuable partner," he said, "and we link to Amazon so people can buy books they've found with Google Print. We're glad our users will have additional ways to access the books they've found using Google Print."

Google and Amazon would each seem to have some advantages over the other in the development of their programs. Amazon already has the credit card numbers of a large population of potential users of the service and is familiar to people looking to buy books and other goods.

Google is the first stop for most people searching electronically for anything. And Google has the potential to have a far greater collection of materials, given its program to copy digitally much of the collections of five major research libraries and make that content searchable on its site.

Currently, the Google Print program provides free online access to the full content of books no longer under copyright, but only limited viewing of parts of books that are still protected. Under the plans being developed by Google, publishers say, those older, copyrighted books could be bought in whole or in part.

"We've had conversations with both Google and Amazon over the past few months" about their search and purchase systems, said Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House's corporate development group. By creating a financial model under which the Amazon and Google programs could work, Mr. Sarnoff said Random House was "planting a flag, trying to establish some ground rules that we are comfortable with to create this new kind of commerce around book content."

The Random House model calls for consumers to be able to buy access to a book for, say, 5 cents a page for most books and higher amounts, like 25 cents a page, for cookbooks and other specialty publications. It calls for users to gain online access, though not to be able to copy or print the page. But "if consumers absolutely demand certain kinds of access," like the ability to print, Mr. Sarnoff said, "it would be important to provide that."

David Steinberger, chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, said he welcomed the new initiatives and believed it would be better for consumers if several companies developed these services, giving readers more choices and types of material available.

"This is a much more significant development than we saw during the Internet boom," when scores of companies were rushing to develop e-books - complete books that could be downloaded onto an electronic reader. Those plans were largely shelved as consumers found the electronic readers unwieldy, and the Internet boom collapsed. "This time," Mr. Steinberger said, "it looks like this really might happen."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/04/technology/04publish.html?emc=eta1

NEW STORYLINE FOR MARVEL'S CAPTAIN AMERICA

NEW YORK - Considered by many to be the father of the modern action novel, award-winning author David Morrell will be the creative mastermind behind a new Captain America project, slated for next year.

With a complex body of work that traverses the Horror, Espionage and Thriller genres, Morrell is a giant in the literary world. He is the author of First Blood, the award-winning novel in which Rambo was created. He has written numerous best-selling thrillers, including The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC mini-series), The Fifth Profession, Extreme Denial and Assumed Identity. Most recently, he wrote the dark suspense-thriller Creepers (CDS Books, September 2005). Two of his novellas received Stoker awards from the Horror Writers Association.

In his first comic book writing effort, Morrell will bring his action writing talent to Captain America, in the story of a young Marine, Corporal James Newman, who is on his tour of duty in Afghanistan. In the midst of a brutal fire fight with enemy forces, Captain America leads him out of the battle while helping him rescue his wounded comrades who are trapped by enemy fire. When the smoke clears, Newman is unsure if Captain America was really there, or a hallucination in the stress of battle.

"As the creator of Rambo, Morrell is known for heroes who've been trained to handle action and danger. He is a master of weaving action into a thought-provoking plot with more than a few twists, and I am eager to see the thrills he has in store for the newest installments of Captain America," said Joe Quesada, Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics.

"I want the characters to feel real," says David Morrell. "In particular I want the reader to believe in Captain America. Also, I want to explore the major theme of what it means to be a hero in this troubled modern world. I hope the story is deeply moving as well as exciting."

The Man Who's Riding Dan Brown's 'Code' Tales

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; C01

You'd have to be insane to do a spinoff of a book that doesn't even have a publication date yet -- wouldn't you?

Not if it's the sequel to "The Da Vinci Code," Dan Burstein says.

Burstein is a publishing entrepreneur with a day job: He's the founder of a New York-based venture capital firm. Lately he's been on the road promoting "Secrets of the Widow's Son," which promises to prep readers for "Da Vinci" author Dan Brown's next venture into the world of secret societies, conspiracy theories, myths and alternative history.

All that's known about the still-unscheduled Brown book is that when it's finally published -- perhaps in late 2006 or 2007 -- it will involve the Freemasons, will be set at least partly in Washington and will be called "The Solomon Key." That was enough for Burstein.

And why not?

He'd already made a killing with last year's "Secrets of the Code: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind the Da Vinci Code" -- of which there are well over a million copies in print.

Burstein says he got hooked on "Da Vinci" in June 2003, three months after Brown's religio-historical thriller was published. (Thirty-six million hardback copies are now in print worldwide, according to Brown's publisher, Doubleday.) He shelled out hundreds of dollars for books related to Brown's narrative, in which the Gnostic Gospels and Mary Magdalene figure heavily, and started thinking about a guidebook that could help readers separate fact from fiction.

He and a friend started a small company, Squibnocket Partners, to pull "Secrets of the Code" together. They made contact with Barnes & Noble, which signaled significant interest. They signed up more than 40 contributors (with Burstein serving as editor) and by May 2004 the anthology was a New York Times bestseller. Later came a guide to an earlier Brown book, "Angels and Demons."

Ah, but those books exist! How can you do a guide to a book that isn't written ?

One of Burstein's team, reporter David Shugarts, supplied the answer by checking out a rumor that there was a code embedded in the dust jacket flaps of "The Da Vinci Code." Sure enough, some letters on the flaps were in a slightly bolder face and spelled out "Is there no hope for the widow's son?" Researching that phrase led Shugarts first to the history of the Mormon church and eventually -- the details are too complex to get into here -- to a predicted Washington/Freemason backdrop for Brown's next book.

Brown later confirmed as much in a rare public appearance.

So if you're truly Brown-obsessed -- or if you're just dying to read about the conjunction of Freemasonry, the Founding Fathers and the nation's capital -- "Secrets of the Widow's Son," which Burstein commissioned Shugarts to write, is there for you.

But for the publisher, there's more to it than that. Odds are the next Dan Brown work will be one of the biggest sellers ever -- and who do you think will be ideally positioned to rush a true guide into print? "We intend to do a whole 'Secrets of the Solomon Key,' " says Burstein, laughing, "once we can read 'The Solomon Key.' "

He's far from the only one piggybacking on Dan Brown. By now there are a couple dozen books with such titles as "Da Vinci Decoded" and "The Da Vinci Hoax" that serve as guides to or refutations of Brown's megahit. And there's even another preview title -- "The Guide to Dan Brown's 'The Solomon Key,' " by Greg Taylor -- though it lags behind "Widow's Son" in Amazon sales rank.

Burstein isn't losing sleep about competition. "People are so interested," he says.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101906.html?referrer=email

INTERVIEW WITH PAUL LEVINE

Paul Levine is the author of the newly released SOLOMON VS. LORD, a humorous legal thriller. Levine is a former trial and appellate attorney, and the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed series featuring Miami trial lawyer Jake Lassiter and other legal thrillers. He has also written for ABC Television, Stephen J. Cannell Studios, and the CBS television program, "JAG." Levine makes his home in Los Angeles, where he is at work on the second Solomon vs. Lord mystery, which Bantam will publish in Spring 2006.

BookBitch: SOLOMON VS. LORD seems like a bit of a departure for you. How does it compare with the Lassiter books?

Paul Levine: I'd rather not characterize the book...rather you do it [see review]. It's true, though, that personal relationships are as important here as the A-story murder trial. And I guess that's a departure for me, though the Jake Lassiter books were character driven, but more male oriented. Here, instead of writing 1st person from the POV of an ex-jock, it's shifting POV between the equal male & female co-protagonists. I worked hard as hell to get the woman's voice right, and the early reaction from women (my wife, Bantam editors, my grown daughter, my mother [& the BookBitch]) is that it seems to work. Obviously men can write women as main characters and make them real. Stephen King wrote Dolores Claiborne and dozens of great women characters. Tom Wolfe wrote an 18-year-old Carolina hillbilly girl, Charlotte Simmons. Arthur Golden wrote the [fictional] memoirs of a Japanese geisha in the 1930's-40's. Not being that good, I just based Victoria Lord on my wife and put our arguments on the page.

I'm pitching the book to the networks as a TV series in the next few weeks and trying to pigeon-hole it in a few sentences is hard. A battle-of-the-sexes courtroom dramedy seems to be one phrase. Opposites Attract. Moonlighting in the courtroom. Law partners who are sparring partners. Etc. 

BookBitch: Does Jake Lassiter have a future? 

Paul Levine: I think Jake might have been disbarred or at least publicly reprimanded for his courtroom antics. I'll have to check with the Florida Bar. But yes, if Bantam would like to resurrect Jake, I'm willing. But I'm under contract for four "Solomon vs. Lord" novels, so they come first. 

BookBitch: Why did you stop writing novels?

Paul Levine: I didn't plan on stopping. I moved to the Left Coast six years ago to go on the writing staff of JAG. Even though I'd free-lanced two episodes, I was clueless about the life of a TV writer. When they told me I'd write five or six episodes in a season, I really thought it was a part-time job. I mean, how long can it take to write 60 pages of: "Request permission to speak freely, Sir?" So, I thought I'd dash off a script in the morning, have a martini at Musso & Frank at noon, then work on my novels. I quickly learned that TV writers sometimes work around the clock, especially if one of their episodes is filming. It's not unusual to re-write scenes as cameras roll or to get a call from the set at 3 a.m. with the director asking for changes.  

BookBitch: Why did you decide to move to California and write for TV?
 
Paul Levine: For the health insurance. Don't laugh. I was seeking cheap meds, not fame and fortune. My last novel, "9 Scorpions," a stand-alone thriller, was not a great success, and I was tired and disillusioned after writing eight novels in eight years. In 1999, I traveled to L.A. to pitch the studios on a World War II film based on my father's experiences as a POW in Japan. I didn't sell it as a feature but I sold it to CBS for a four-hour mini-series. So, I had a script to write. On the same trip, Don Bellisario, the executive producer of JAG, offered me a job on staff. So, now I'm thinking I'm hot out here. Of course, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't know a smash cut from a cold cut. I also didn't know about ageism in Hollywood, and that most writers are considered dead at 40. 

[May I digress for a moment? As Burt Lancaster said (in another context) to Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success: "You're dead, kid. Get yourself buried."]
 
Anyway, when I started on JAG, the Christian Science Monitor called me "the oldest rookie writer in Hollywood."

BookBitch: Do you like writing for TV?  

Paul Levine: No. Not more than books. Not more than grocery lists. I mean more than books.  

BookBitch: But for established shows especially, aren't you somewhat stifled creatively with what you can do because of existing characters and storylines? 

Paul Levine: Exactly! I'm writing a piece on just this subject for MWA’s Third Degree.
 
BookBitch: What was the first show you wrote for? Which show did you enjoy writing for the most? Which did you hate? Are you allowed to say? 

Paul Levine: A lot of novelists take a snobbish attitude toward screenwriting. But it's really a demanding craft. I think writing for JAG and co-creating and writing for First Monday actually sharpened my prose skills. My writing is leaner, my plotting tighter, my dialogue zippier. There's also something to be said for regular paychecks plus pension and health benefits. I was such a rube I had to ask if I'd been overpaid when checks started arriving for re-runs. "Gee, I didn't do any extra work, but they're paying me again." Other checks arrive in your mailbox with no explanation. Money for cable syndication, foreign rights, character payments, and program fees. What are "program fees?" I don't have a clue, but the checks cleared all the same.  

Still...I find writing fiction far more rewarding in other ways. In television, it's not your show. It takes upwards of 200 people to put on a one-hour network drama. The writer is dependent on the director, the cinematographer, the producers, dozens of actors, studio and network executives, and the guys serving lunch at the craft services table. With a book, it's all you, baby. 

BookBitch: Do you think money influences writers to write? David Morell told me he thinks writers have to be obsessed with writing to be successful and it has nothing to do with the money or anything else.  

Paul Levine: Writers write because it’s an illness.

BookBitch: Do you like living in California? Do the earthquakes make up for the lack of hurricanes? I know you were in Miami for Hurricane Andrew, did that prompt your move at all? 

Paul Levine: After living 30 years in Miami, I fell in love with the mountains. The first year, my wife and I rented a house in the Hollywood Hills...very near the Hollywood sign. One day, looking out the window into a ravine, I saw my first mountain lion. Then we bought a house in the hills off Coldwater Canyon in Studio City. We have deer and owls and hummingbirds, and our rosebushes grow eight feet tall. [To say nothing of the coyotes, and I don't mean Hollywood agents.] So, yes, I like it here. At night, it's cool, even in the summer. And it hasn't rained since April. Still...I miss Mia-muh. Hurricanes and all. Mosquitoes and all. And someday, we're gonna come home. 

BookBitch: If your Jake Lassiter novels were to be made into films (or TV movies or a series) who would you cast? How about your new series, Solomon vs. Lord?  

Paul Levine: As for Jake, how about George Clooney? He's got that twinkle in the eye. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I would have said Tom Selleck. As for Steve Solomon and Victoria Lord, I'm going to defer. With a little luck...actually with a lot of luck...I'll be sitting in a casting session shortly after the first of the year. CBS has ordered a pilot script based on "Solomon vs. Lord." If they decide to shoot a pilot, we'll be faced with the happy dilemma of casting.
 
BookBitch: I poked around your new website (very nice, by the way) and saw a picture of you getting an the Penn State Distinguished Alumnus Award. Is that where you went for undergrad or law school, or both?  

Paul Levine: I majored in journalism at Penn State and in the swimming pool at the University of Miami Law School.

BookBitch: My standard questions for authors - these are the things I am most curious about. I'm curious about how you work. Tell me what a typical writing day is like for you.  

Paul Levine: Up at 5:30. Swim laps at 6:30. Coffee and cereal with fresh berries from the farmer's market at 7:30, reading the L.A. Times. Work from 8 until 1 p.m. Eat lunch watching CNN and reading The New York Times. Get back to work until 6 p.m. or so. Maybe some e-mail and editing at night. Read The Miami Herald, The Sun-Sentinel and Variety on-line. Fall asleep reading a novel at 10:30 or 11 p.m. That's why they call me "Mr. Excitement." 

BookBitch: How does your family affect that process?  

Paul Levine: My two kids are grown. Wendy (Sachs) is a television producer and the author of "How She Really Does It," an excellent non-fiction book about working mothers. My son Michael is a sportscaster, the play-by-play voice of the Kalamazoo Kings of the Frontier (baseball) League. My wife, Renee, is a deputy city attorney for City of Los Angeles. She's the one who calls me "Mr. Excitement." 

BookBitch: How long does it take you to complete a novel?  

Paul Levine: Six to nine months, working hard and fulltime. 

BookBitch: Do you use researchers or do your own or just use yourself as your chief resource?  

Paul Levine: I do my own research. Internet, of course. But I use the L.A. public library system, too. It's quite good. 

BookBitch: Do you have groupies? 

Paul Levine: Yes, my rescue dog Nikki and rescue cat Taxi (found by Renee under a taxicab). I have, however, wowed the ladies of Hadassah in various Jewish Community Centers where I am usually asked three questions:  

1. "So, you making any money at this?"  
2. "Are your married?"  
3, And depending on the answer to 2, "Would you like to see a picture of my daughter?" 

BookBitch: What are you currently reading?
 
Paul Levine: The short story collection, "Dangerous Women." The non-fiction account of life in Cook County Criminal Court: "Courtroom 302" by journalist Steve Bogira. John Schulian's excellent compilation of baseball columns: "Twilight of the Long-ball Gods." 

BookBitch: Can you read other legal fiction type books while you're working on writing one?

Paul Levine: Not a problem. 

BookBitch: What sort of books do you read for pleasure?
 
Paul Levine: Mostly fiction. Lots of Florida authors, and aren't there a hell of a lot of good ones?  And here's a question for Stacy. Why do Florida authors write with so much humor while L.A. authors are so grim in a faux neo-noir style? Don't ask me because I don't know. 

BookBitch: Well, you lived here, you should know. And you still read the Miami Herald. I heard Carl Hiaasen say he just clips articles from the Miami Herald and then writes books around them. When the publisher calls and says no one is going to believe this, he sends them a copy of the article referencing the unbelievable subject.  He went on to say after the election in 2000, they stopped asking. And for the pseudo noir LA style stuff, let's just blame it on Hammett. Great question - wish I'd thought to ask first! 

Paul Levine: Carl is being too modest. Or everyone would just take those clips and make their stories sing.

BookBitch: Who are some of your favorite authors?

Paul Levine: This changes often, depending what I'm reading at the time. Omitting living writers makes it easier: John D. MacDonald. Raymond Chandler. Ernest Hemingway. It's so difficult listing favorites or compiling Top Ten lists. How do you compare "Huckleberry Finn" with "All the King's Men"? What's a better book: "The Old Man & the Sea" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest"? And can a book that's essentially journalistic be considered great? If so, how about John Hersey's "Hiroshima"? And even thought I said I wouldn't mention living writers, let me express my admiration for Stephen King's "Misery" and Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities."

BookBitch: Thank you for being so nice about doing this and for being so forthcoming with your answers. I wish you much success with your new series and I can't wait to read the next one! 

Publish and Perish
By ELIZABETH ROYTE

For any writer, the publication of a book, labored over for years, is an exciting event. But excitement is a fleeting emotion, and the business of publicizing the book, so that it sells and the author can earn out his advance, quickly displaces any initial euphoria. The writer then embarks on a tortured journey toward acceptance of the fact, several months after publication, that his book isn't going to vault him into the empyrean of fame, or even improve his life. At the intersection of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of grief and Stendhal's stages of love, the contemporary author trudges along a predictable path that can only be described, in hindsight, as self-induced misery.

• The Fog of Love: Galleys are being printed, and the final installment of the book advance has been spent. You give the galley to your agent, "who gets paid to tell you you're great," says E. Jean Carroll, the author of a long-running advice column for Elle magazine and of "Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson."

"You're still in that mad, golden phase." The galley goes out for review and, says Mary Roach, the author of "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife," "you can't believe people are actually reading it." So far nothing bad has happened.

• The Big Suck-Up: Author contacts anyone who's remotely associated with a publication that reviews books, anyone with a cousin at the "Today" show, and starts to badger and wheedle. He begs Important People to attend his book party and sends flowers and candy to his publicist.

• Naked in Public: Yearning for affirmation mixed with equal dread of being attacked, misunderstood, or ignored. Terry Reed, whose first novel is "The Full Cleveland," likens pre-pub-date fear to the classic nightmare: "You dream you're at the party, thinking you're wearing Prada, but you look down and realize you're wearing nada."

• Euphoria: A positive review creates a craving for more positive reviews. "It's a feedback loop, and it's totally addictive," Roach said.

Negative reviews, obviously, extinguish Euphoria. Author skips directly to Denial (see below).

• Honeymoon: Enjoyed by all, but mostly the publicist. "It's a great phase. They don't call you," said Alisa Wyatt, who spent 16 years working for university and trade publishers and gave that all up to teach Pilates. ("I still feel like I'm helping people, but now after an hour they go away," she said.)

• Obsession: The tour concludes, the sugar high ends, and the author begins to enter withdrawal. He calls the publicist several times a day. "I call this stage infantile narcissism," said Lynn Goldberg of Goldberg McDuffie Communications, a public relations company that deals with many big-name authors. "They're completely self-absorbed, and they can't understand why they're not selling more books or getting on TV."

Todd Oppenheimer, the author of "The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology," recalled: "I wrote long memos and pitches and lists of contacts to the in-house publicist. I left no stone unturned." And the publicist? "She'd say, 'I'm on it, Todd. Every hour I talk to you is an hour I'm not publicizing your book.' "

Author spends hours and hours in autoerotic self-Googling and checking his Amazon ranking (and the rankings of his friends' books and of books published during the same time frame as his). He moves his book to the front of the bookstores, changes its position on display tables and flips shelf orientation from spine out to cover out. He cajoles friends into writing positive reviews on Amazon.

• Denial: Author speed-dials publicist to ask, "Are you sure there aren't any other reviews?" Hires private publicist. "For nine weeks, you keep hope alive,"Carroll said. "You check Jane Austen's ranking on Amazon, and if you're outselling her you figure you're O.K. You overcome your doubts."

• Bitter Recrimination: Disappointed by lackluster sales, author blames in-house publicist for not sending out enough books for review; publisher for releasing it in the wrong season, choosing a bad title, commissioning bad jacket art or miscategorizing the book, so buyers can't find it.

• Shame and Embarrassment: Keenly experienced by author at a reading attended by only one person, or when author feels he's being jerked around. "You ask yourself, 'Why am I getting up at 4 a.m. to go to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to be on a business program that no one will see when I wrote a sensitive literary book about relationships on the Internet?' " said John Seabrook, the author of "Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace" and "Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing - The Marketing of Culture."

• "What About Oprah?": "Every author eventually asks this question. I tell them, 'I'm sure someone has thought about it,' " said Nicholas Latimer, the director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf.

• Reality Beckons: "I'd put together three media events in this city and had been driving around all day. I was stuck in traffic, it was raining, I had no readings lined up and I was headed toward a store to sign between 6 and 10 books," Oppenheimer said. "That's when I realized I'd pushed this thing too far."

• The Last Hurrah: "It's a hideous thing," Carroll said. "You get a good review." As Stendhal wrote of the last stages of love, this review is "the final torment: utter despair poisoned still further by a shred of hope." Carroll likens the book's sudden resurgence to the Drunk Dial, when a lover asks, "Can I come over one more time?" "So you make love, and then that's it," Carroll said. "You never ever rise on Amazon again. The interview with Terry Gross falls through, and even the publicist's assistant won't return your call."

• Withering: Publicist attempts to wean author. The message is delivered subtly; most authors get it. "I'm sorry," they might say in the tone of an emergency-room surgeon. "We've done all we can." For some authors, though, "all" isn't enough. "I have a saying," Oppenheimer said. "You never know what's enough until you've done more than enough. My publicist, the second one I hired, finally told me, 'I think it's time for you to think about the paperback.' "

"The beginning of acceptance," Seabrook said, "is when you realize that the reason your book isn't in bookstores isn't because it's sold out. It's not there because the store never ordered it in the first place."

Elizabeth Royte is the author of "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash" and "The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them."



Publish and Perish - New York Times

TIME Magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
The Complete List
In Alphabetical Order

The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron

The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead


Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys


The Complete List | TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels

2005 National Book Award Finalists

FICTION

* E.L. Doctorow, The March (Random House), ISBN# 0375506713
* Mary Gaitskill, Veronica (Pantheon), ISBN# 0375421459
* Christopher Sorrentino, Trance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), ISBN# 0374278644
* Renè Steinke, Holy Skirts (William Morrow), ISBN# 0688176941
* William T. Vollmann, Europe Central (Viking), ISBN# 0670033928

----------------------------------------------------------------------
NONFICTION

* Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), ISBN# 0374219737
* Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin), ISBN # 0618446966
* Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf), ISBN# 140004314x
* Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Times Books), ISBN# 0805076824
* Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin), ISBN# 0618104690

----------------------------------------------------------------------
POETRY

* John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander (Ecco), ISBN# 0060765291
* Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), ISBN# 0374269734
* Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press), ISBN# 0807130478
* W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press), ISBN# 1556592183
* Vern Rutsala, The Moment's Equation (Ashland Poetry Press), ISBN# 0912592540

----------------------------------------------------------------------
YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

* Jeanne Birdsall, The Penderwicks (Alfred A. Knopf), ISBN# 0375831436
* Adele Griffin, Where I Want to Be (Putnam), ISBN# 0399237836
* Chris Lynch, Inexcusable (Atheneum), ISBN# 0689847890
* Walter Dean Myers, Autobiography of My Dead Brother (HarperTempest), ISBN# 006058291x
* Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings (Harcourt), ISBN# 0152051139

The winners of the 2005 Quill Book Awards are:

Book of the Year - presented by Brian Williams
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)
Arthur Levine/Scholastic

Debut Author of the Year - presented by Kim Cattrall
The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova
Little Brown & Company

Audio Book - presented by Tony Roberts
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Jon Stewart and the Writers of the Daily Show
Time Warner AudioBooks

Children's Illustrated Book - presented by Elmo
Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook
Shel Silverstein
HarperCollins Children's Books

Children's Chapter Book/Middle Grade - presented by Jules Feiffer
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
J.K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré (Illustrator)
Arthur Levine/Scholastic

Young Adult/Teen - presented by Anthony Rapp
Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood
Ann Brashares
Delacorte Press

General Fiction - presented by Erica Jong
The Mermaid Chair
Sue Monk Kidd
Viking Press

Graphic Novel - presented by Jonathan Lethem
Marvel 1602 Volume I
Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, and Richard Isanove
Marvel Comics

Mystery/Suspense/Thriller - presented by Stephen J. Cannell and Annie Parisse
Eleven on Top
Janet Evanovich
St. Martin's Press

Poetry - presented by Robert Klein
Let America Be America Again: And Other Poems
Langston Hughes
Vintage Books

Romance - presented by Candace Bushnell
44 Cranberry Point
Debbie Macomber
Mira Books

Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror - presented by Tamara Tunie
The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
Christopher Moore
William Morrow & Company

Religion/Spirituality - presented by Matthew Modine
Peace is the Way: Bringing War and Violence to an End
Deepak Chopra
Harmony

Biography/Memoir - presented by Nick Hornby
Chronicles: Volume One
Bob Dylan
Simon & Schuster

Business - presented by Maria Bartiromo
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
William Morrow & Company

Cooking - presented by Rocco DeSpirito
Rachel Ray's 30-Minute Get Real Meals: Eat Healthy Without Going to Extremes
Rachael Ray
Clarkson Potter

Health/Self Improvement - presented by Dr. Joyce Brothers
He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys
Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo
Simon Spotlight Entertainment

History/Current Events/Politics - presented by Tony LoBianco
1776
David McCullough
Simon & Schuster

Humor - presented by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction
Jon Stewart and the Writers of the Daily Show
Warner Books

Sports - presented by Len Berman
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season
Stewart O'Nan and Stephen King
Scribner

http://www.quillsliteracy.org/categories.php

Internet Grows as Factor in Used-Book Business
By EDWARD WYATT

In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books, a trend that calls into question the future of brick-and-mortar stores devoted to used books, according to a study financed by the publishing industry and released yesterday.

The study, by the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research organization whose membership includes nearly all commercial publishers as well as libraries and nonprofit book-related organizations, found that online sales of general-interest used books are growing at a rate of more than 30 percent a year, while sales of used books at stores are almost flat.

Used books account for a relatively small portion of overall consumer spending on books, with roughly $600 million, or 3 percent, of the $21 billion that Americans spent last year on general-interest titles going for secondhand books, the study found.

The market for used textbooks is far larger, at $1.6 billion, or more than 30 percent of the $5.3 billion spent by consumers on educational and professional books.

Over all, used-book purchases accounted for $2.2 billion, or 8 percent, of the $26.3 billion that American consumers spent in 2004 on books of all types. That total was up 11 percent from the previous year, the study found.

"The growth reflects how easy is has become to sell used books and to create inventory in this business," Jeff Abraham, the executive director of the study group, said in an interview.

Most of the growth is coming in the online sale of general-interest books, said Jeff Hayes, a group director of InfoTrends, a research company that worked on the study, a trend suggesting that traditional used bookstores might be an increasingly endangered species.

"The growth is really being entirely fueled by the online channels," Mr. Hayes said. "And without question, the volume is going to continue to go up." Mr. Abraham said that the sales growth was being aided by the fact that most customers of online booksellers report having good experiences with vendors, leading them to conclude overwhelmingly that they would recommend such services to friends.

The Book Industry Study Group report is based on transaction data from large online sites where books are bought and sold, including Amazon, eBay and others; data from Monument Information Resource, which tracks college bookstores; a survey of independent booksellers around the country; and online questionnaires aimed at used-book consumers. It does not include used-book sales by large national chain stores, like Barnes & Noble; used books are generally a small portion of those stores' businesses, however.

The study's findings are similar if different in scale to other recent studies. Ipsos BookTrends, a commercial research company, has reported that used books account for about 8 percent of overall sales of general-interest books to consumers.

Publishing companies and authors have long expressed concern over used-book sales, saying they cannibalize potential sales of new books and, because they generate no royalties for authors or revenue for publishers, they harm the ability of authors and publishers to make a living.

"It certainly is a threat," Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said in an interview. The guild has complained in particular about Amazon.com, whose Internet site offers consumers the ability to buy used copies of a book on the same screen where it offers new copies. In many instances, used copies are made available for sale by outside parties almost as soon as a new book goes on sale.

Sales of used copies of recently published books "can affect publishing decisions, such as whether to do another printing or whether a book is doing well enough to warrant further publicity," Mr. Aiken said.

A research paper released a year ago, however, found that online used-book markets like Amazon cannibalized potential sales of new books only about 15 percent of the time. The researchers - Anindya Ghose of New York University and Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang of Carnegie Mellon University - also hypothesized that because the lower prices of used books leave more money in consumers' pockets, the gains from additional readership might result in more purchases of new books and in the increased exposure of authors to new audiences.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/books/29book.html

If you have any concerns about Hurricane Katrina and the way things were handled by the government...
If you have any concerns about the way things are going in this country in general...
If you have any concerns about how things have deteriorated to this point...
then this is a MUST READ --

Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt - Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault
by Christopher Cooper
Link to Article

This won't take long. And it won't be much fun. But duty and decency demand that we do it.

Sometimes you buy a cantaloupe because it looks good and you have enjoyed some fine ripe cantaloupes in your time, even though a buck and a half for a little melon that went three for a dollar within living memory seems pretty pricey. And you leave it on the kitchen counter for a few days, because it's a little green, but it softens and gets a better color so you slice it open, but it's mushy and rotten and smells like feet and tastes like vomit and you remember other, similar, corporate grocery chain cantaloupe experiences and vow as you heave the mess into the compost not to get fooled again.

Maybe you've bought a car. Reasonable mileage, no rust, convincing salesman who chatted you up about your hobbies, agreed with your prejudices, and made you feel you were a pretty clever guy for choosing this vehicle from his selection. But you couldn't keep it aligned, it ate tires, the brakes, exhaust system and radiator didn't survive the life of the payment book, and when you tried to sell it three years later every seventeen-year-old who looked at it was astute enough to reference the oil blown past the rear main seals as his reason for declining your “Best Offer Over $500 Dollars” prayer.

Some of you lady readers married men whose virtues are now no more apparent to you than they were pre-nuptually to your mothers, friends or even relatives of the groom himself. True, he was a successful inseminator but, sadly, the children look disturbingly like him. Of you, people say, “She could have done so much better.” What were you thinking? What can you do?

Or let's say a whole country was riding a foaming crest of good times, new cars, low interest rates, affordable gas, electronic gadgets and a We're Number One world view that was maybe weak on history, geography and empathy, but sure did by God show the big stick to the heathen foreigners. Such a people might toss a coin in a contest between a dorky, dull Democrat and an insipid dry drunk Texas fratboy Republican whose every and many failures had been rendered moot by family money and connections. They might not be paying much attention.

Then, let's say, some really nasty guys from a country larded up with ugly, corrupt fat cats blew a great big hole in a part of that country. Suppose the new president “rose to the occasion” by starting a war with another country in the same part of the world as the one where the bad guys came from, but which, for political and personal reasons and reasons having very much indeed to do with very valuable mineral resources and very profitable corporations and some other complicated considerations having to do with weapons sales, it was not convenient to invade because those particular rich foreigners were personal friends and business partners of that new chief executive.

And further (stay with me; I know it's a weird trip), imagine that just as it was made startlingly clear that pretty much everything this president had advanced as a reason for that war was a fabrication, a misdirection, a deliberate under- or over-statement (well, hell, yes, I guess just a pile of tremendous lies, really, if we need to use such an ugly word), imagine that he got re-elected despite his manifest incompetence and venality and smugness because the same Democrats who had advanced the very dull, unappealing candidate four years previously selected this time a cipher who ran against his own finest, most decent history and tried to seem more and more like the dull incumbent until, finally, some voters stuck with the dummy they knew, and some voted against the sad-sack they'd come to not respect, and the rigged Republican voting machines in two critical states made up the shortfall.

Now what if the best-studied, most carefully-observed, best-tracked, most predictable-coursed hurricane ever seen, and one of the biggest, wiped out a major coastal city that, had the president in question not been so intent upon “drowning government in a bathtub” and reducing the unwelcome sting of taxation upon the richest people and corporations he knew (outside of his friends in Saudi Arabia, I mean), might have received enough money to fortify its dikes and seawalls in the true spirit of “Homeland Security”, and maybe every old lady trying to board an airplane could have been spared the burden of taking off her shoes. (OK, I know it doesn't cost much to humiliate old ladies, and I know the money saved wouldn't have been diverted to New Orleans, but great craziness must be recognized and ridiculed and, when it is public policy, repudiated, and that's what they pay me to do here.)

You've seen the pictures. Twenty per cent of the residents of New Orleans lacked the resources, the vehicles, the health, the money to evacuate ahead of the storm. Too old, too sick, too poor to save themselves, and mostly, given America's great secret still, all these years after we thought we'd equalized these things, even after the token Scalia wannabe on the Supreme Court and the sad yes-man who abandoned the Secretary of State job after the lies he told finally began to curdle on his lips, mostly black. Poor blacks. Indeed.

You've seen the Superdome, the convention center footage. You've heard the first-person accounts of scores of hurting, hungry homeless (poor, black) persons trying to cross a bridge to dry ground but ordered back by white officials with guns. You've seen the misery, the neglect, the abuse. So has the rest of the world. We're Number One! Say it loud.

Is it time yet? Can we all just admit we made a stupid mistake? We weren't paying attention? We heard what we wanted to hear? We succumbed to slick advertising? The fruit was rotten; the car was a lemon; that bum was just piss-poor husband and father material and your momma was right. Stay the course? What course? Our country, its citizens, its principles have been reduced, abused, worked-over, bled-out, violated and humiliated. Not by terrorists or foreign enemies or tsunamis or tornadoes or an angry god. We have rotted from within.

Blame the Republicans? Nah, they're just “protecting their base.” Like helping like. It is the party of wealth and privilege. Blame the Democrats? Sure, if you can distinguish 'em from the Republicans. It sure ain't the party of FDR any more. Or even Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. I'll see your Tom DeLay and your Bill Frist and raise you a Joe Biden and a Joe Lieberman. Blame the press for avoiding or killing any story that wasn't a press release from the Pentagon, the White House or the American Association of Yellow Ribbon Manufacturers. Blame our stars. Blame ourselves; we weren't paying attention; we didn't do the work democracy demands.

Do I exaggerate our desperate straits? The man at the top in his own words and by his own actions. Add the smirk and swagger yourself; you've seen it often enough.

First response? Fly over on Air Force One; go play golf. Condi Rice shopped shoe boutiques. Dick Cheney bought a three million dollar vacation home.

While you and I watched the Superdome and convention center fiascoes? Lunch with Al Greenspan. “Hurricane Katrina will represent a temporary setback for the U.S. Economy and the energy sector.”

As WalMart water trucks, Red Cross workers, TV reporters and Canadian Mounted Police forces tended the stricken city while FEMA and the National Guard waited for orders that didn't come? “Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job.”

Days after we'd all heard testimony from the engineers and planners who'd repeatedly sounded the alarm about Category Five storms and Cat. Three levees: “I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

With hundred of thousands homeless, uncounted dead, the poorest among us hit the hardest: “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- the guy lost his entire house -- there's going to be fantastic house. I look forward to sitting on the porch.” [Yes, rubbles, plural. I know it sounds stupid, but I got it right off the White House website. He's proud of it, for Christ's sake!]

There's more. You've seen it, heard it, been repulsed by it. But did you get this from his mom, the husband of one bad president, the mother of the worst one yet, a woman who you'll remember said she couldn't find the time to trouble her “beautiful mind” about Iraqi civilians we'd bombed to death by the tens of thousands? Of those who'd lost all they owned, including, in many cases, loved ones, to the flood and were now enjoying the hospitality of Texas shelters: "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this [chuckle] is working very well for them."

Oh, those lucky, lucky homeless, sick people! What happy niggras we have here on our grand plantation. It makes a person feel dirty and disgusted and sick to his stomach. Don't you suppose a couple billion other people all over the world heard that chortle, you bloated, ignorant, overprivileged mother of a moron?

Hey, folks, things have gotten so bad that even the press is beginning to pay attention. Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan said at least fourteen times during two press briefings last week that now is not the time to “play the blame game.” I say it's an excellent time, while the dead are still floating on the polluted tides and we are not yet distracted by the World's Series or the run-up to Christmas or another newly-discovered “Axis Of Terror” triumvirate.

Now, for pure, wholesome, refreshing local idiocy we have the Maine Republicans' brilliant plan to make us forget the screwing we're getting from Exxon by canceling the state gasoline tax for a few months and (this is really too perfect for me to have made up) forgiving the sales tax on home heating oil (struggling, low wage, two-job homeowners get ready for this!) for business use.

OK. I'm done. Gotta go wax the yacht and wind my Rolex. Jesus, I wish I could be homeless and eat some donated food in Texas while my wife rots in a drainage canal and my dogs starve to death on the balcony of our ruined home.


The Neil Rogers Show - News - Sugar for Sugar, Salt For Salt - Go Down In The Flood Gonna Be Your Own Fault

WOO HOO! Oprah's back in the book biz!

Oprah's Book Club Reopening to Writers Who'll Sit and Chat

By EDWARD WYATT

Oprah Winfrey said yesterday that she was expanding her highly influential television book club to include the works of contemporary authors, reversing a policy of choosing only classic novels and once again offering authors and their publishers the hope of huge sales resulting from her picks.

"I wanted to open the door and broaden the field," Ms. Winfrey said in an interview. "That allows me the opportunity to do what I like to do most, which is sit and talk to authors about their work. It's kind of hard to do that when they're dead."

As her first selection under the new criteria, Ms. Winfrey chose "A Million Little Pieces," by James Frey, a harrowing 2003 memoir about the author's stay in a treatment center to address his alcoholism and drug addiction.

From 1996 to 2002, a book's selection for Oprah's Book Club typically resulted in sales of more than a million copies, a boon to authors and publishers in a business where selling 20,000 copies of a literary novel is considered a success. Her picks drew readers both to well-regarded authors like Toni Morrison and to relative unknowns like Wally Lamb and Anita Shreve.

Ms. Winfrey abandoned the book club in 2002 but restarted it a year later in a different form, choosing only classic novels, mostly by authors long dead. While sales soared for some of her classic picks, like "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck, others did not reach expectations, most notably this summer's selection of three novels by William Faulkner.

In an interview, Ms. Winfrey, who does not profit from the sales of the books she chooses, acknowledged that some recent selections did not draw the enthusiasm of some of her early ones. In a break with the past, no shows this summer were devoted to the Faulkner books; rather, she had extensive materials available on her Internet site (www.oprah.com).

Ms. Winfrey said she intended to widen her choices to an array of genres, including history, biography and historical fiction, to give herself more room to follow her instincts about what makes a positive reading experience.

"For six years, I couldn't really read any nonfiction or biography because I thought I was wasting my time" by spending hours on a book that did not fit her book club format, she said. "Now, when I read something really interesting or promising, I can find a way to introduce it to the public." Her aides say she alone reads potential selections and makes the choice.

Publishers were quick to welcome the announcement yesterday.

"It is fabulous news," said Jane Friedman, the chief executive of HarperCollins. "I think her impact will be as great if not greater than it was initially," when she began her book club shows in 1996.

Sonny Mehta, the chairman of the Knopf Publishing Group at Random House Inc., which has published more than a third of the 58 books chosen for Oprah's Book Club, said the book club had "brought the act of reading home to people in a way that publishers have not always been successful at doing."

"The fact that she had 300,000 people reading William Faulkner over the summer - she should be given a cabinet post," he added.

But Ms. Winfrey's recent emphasis on classics has contributed to a drop in her book club's popularity, said Kathleen Rooney, the author of "Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America" (University of Arkansas Press, 2005).

"There wasn't the widespread enthusiasm that was evident when she was picking contemporary fiction and nonfiction" for the club, Ms. Rooney said.

That led a group of mostly female writers to send a petition to Ms. Winfrey this year, asking her to return to her advocacy of contemporary writing and citing evidence that sales of fiction began to drop about the time her book club went on hiatus in 2002.

Meg Wolitzer, a novelist who was one of the early signers of the petition, said Ms. Winfrey's effect on authors, particularly novelists, "was to make us feel relevant," whether they were chosen for the club or not.

"To have somebody with a really loud mouth and a lot of power saying to people, 'You need to read this,' is important," she added.

Ms. Winfrey said she was aware of the petition and was moved by it. When she stopped choosing contemporary books, Ms. Winfrey said she was struggling to find enough titles that she felt compelled to share with her viewers, a statement that angered many publishers. But the change also followed by a few months a highly public quarrel with Jonathan Franzen, whose novel "The Corrections" was chosen by Ms. Winfrey in September 2001.

After Mr. Franzen made public comments suggesting that her choices were unsophisticated and appealed mainly to women, she revoked an invitation for him to appear on her show.

Ms. Winfrey dismissed the notion that his remarks influenced her decision to drop the book club. "Jonathan Franzen was not even a blip on the radar screen of my life," she said. "I didn't think one day about it."

Mr. Frey, whose memoir was published by Anchor Books, said he received a call about a month ago asking if he would appear on a show about drug rehabilitation. After he accepted, Ms. Winfrey got on the phone and told him her intention to recommend the book.

"I was shocked and thrilled and had this sort of amazing and surreal moment," he said.

Mr. Frey and Ms. Winfrey then conspired to have Mr. Frey's mother, who he said had given him copies of many of Ms. Winfrey's picks in the past, in the audience for yesterday's show. When Ms. Winfrey started talking about her son's book, the author's mother started to scream, "That's my son!"