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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.

Author's lot not easy one at Costco gig
By Dick Kreck
columnist for the Denver Post

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

This authoring stuff is work.

Write a column three days a week for 16 years and people barely blink. Write one best seller and, suddenly, you're an Author.

Granted, an author who spent last Saturday at not one but two Costco stores, signing copies of "Murder at the Brown Palace," the runaway best seller about a 1911 shooting at the luxurious hotel. (Available at better bookstores everywhere.)

Anyway, there I was at the Park Meadows store, seated at a table between men's striped dress shirts and washable suede jackets. Just down the aisle was a large stack of plums by the crate.

I had some down time. Across the way was an endlessly repeating video for Oxi-Clean, a miracle if ever I saw one. Of course I watched. Scientists have proven that if there is a television turned on, a guy will watch it.

Costco is a phenomenon you have to visit to believe. This is impulse buying taken to a new level. On any given Saturday, a Costco outlet can expect to turn $500,000 in sales. One of the managers told me he sold a $53,000 diamond the previous day.

Products from lawn chairs to multi-packs of burritos tempt buyers-in-bulk. A woman strolled by (without buying a book, I might add), and in her cart were a giant bag of lemons, a smaller bag of giant mushrooms - and a 27-inch color TV. Did she go to get lemons, then decide she might as well get a new TV, too?

Anyone who thinks books are a dying art form should take a look at Costco. Both stores had a huge table of books at discounted prices. John Fielder's "Colorado 1870-2000" still sells like crazy. Me, I settled for a four-pack of Oxi-Clean products and a couple of pairs of boxers.

Good as gold

Bring us your tired, your poor, your 24-karat gold.

Buyers, in conjunction with Hyde Park Jewelers, are standing by at the erstwhile Roy's Cherry Creek restaurant in the shopping center to take those family heirlooms off your hands.

"We'll buy it! Sell Us Your Valuables!" proclaimed an almost-full-page ad in the paper earlier this week. Jewelry, silver, watches, autographs, vintage photos - bring 'em on.

"Don't make the mistake of thinking your items aren't good enough for us," they soothe. Is a gold coin from the Clark & Gruber Mint worth anything? Buyers are there from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Thursday.

End of the road

Enuf already. There must be more "classic" vehicles on the road than I thought.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a mini-pickup with 400,000 miles on it. This, of course, led to a reader calling with a Subaru that logged 484,000.

Chicken feed to Nancy Camp. She bought her Ford half-ton pickup new for $4,200 in 1972 and the odometer just zipped past 562,300 miles. She had the engine rebuilt at 400,000 and gets the rust treated every couple of years, but, she says, "it really looks good.

"I intend to keep it until I die but, then, I'm in my 70s," she says, quickly adding, "We're both in good health."

Around Denver

Still openings for the 162-mile Courage Classic bike ride taking place Saturday through Monday. The classic has raised $10 million for The Children's Hospital in its 13 years. Call 303-456-9704 for info. ... Oscar-winning documentary-film maker Donna Dewey slings drinks at the Denver Press Club, 1330 Glenarm Place, from 6 to 7 tonight to help renovate the club. ... Quotable: "Being a sportswriter was the same as being a welfare recipient, but without any supervision." - Jimmy Breslin.

Dick Kreck's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He may be reached at 303-820-1456 or DKreck@denverpost.com.

First-time novelist in his literary prime

SANDRA MARTIN talks to Mark Haddon, whose compelling debut novel narrated by an autistic teen looks set to be filmed by the Harry Potter team

By SANDRA MARTIN
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 3:35 PM EDT Tuesday, Jul. 15, 2003


Appearance versus reality is the underlying theme of the hottest debut novel of the summer. I can feel you yawning, but before you skip to another page of the newspaper, let me just say that the astonishing success of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time shows that the way a story is told, rather than the story itself, often makes the difference between an instant remainder and a literary bestseller.

Rights to the novel have been sold in more than a dozen countries, with the British publisher producing it in separate editions for teenagers and adults. A consortium of Warner Bros./Heyday Films/Brad Pitt and Brad Grey have bought the film rights and are in the process of negotiating with Steve Kloves (screenwriter for the Harry Potter films) to write and direct.

After nearly 20 years writing and illustrating children's books, churning out television scripts, papering his walls with his own unpublished novels and firing his agent, Haddon has become an instant success.

"I have this fantasy that someone in that office has been beaten heartily on the bottom with a copy of this book," he says about his former but unnamed agent during an interview on a hot summer day in the Toronto offices of Doubleday, his Canadian publisher.

The novel has a deceptively simple surface. Underneath, though, it is quirky and complicated, both graphically and textually. Mainly that's because Haddon has chosen to tell the story in the voice of Christopher John Francis Boone. He's a 15-year-old kid who finds his neighbour's black poodle stabbed to death with a garden fork in the middle of the night and sets out to find the murderer.

Christopher has Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. Typically, people with this syndrome have normal intelligence; some, like Christopher, have an exceptional skill in a particular area. He has a photographic memory and a special talent for math. For example, he knows the names of all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,057. Besides numbers, he loves science, puzzles, drawing pictures and his pet rat Toby. He also likes dogs, as "they do not tell lies because they cannot talk."

That's the upside.

Christopher has no peripheral emotional vision; he sees the world in strictly literal terms and he has no friends. He hates change, looking people in the eye, the colours brown and yellow, and having different foods touch on his plate. If somebody inadvertently grazes Christopher's arm or stares at him, he is likely to bang his head against the wall or roll into a ball on the ground and emit loud persistent groaning sounds for hours on end.

"Christopher seems supremely ill equipped to be a narrator," Haddon agrees. And yet, as he discovered early on, Christopher's apparent disabilities were actually a safeguard against the literary traps that ensnare so many novelists. "He never explains anything too much, he never tries to make the reader's mind up one way or the other," Haddon says. "He just paints a picture and leaves you to decide. He is very good at show, don't tell."

Christopher speaks in short declarative sentences that he has organized in chapters headed by prime numbers. Here's the way Christopher writes: "13. This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father's.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is . . . like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

And that is why there are no jokes in this book."

But there are plenty of puzzles. In fact, the novel is a giant question mark about making order out of chaos. There's Christopher himself, of course. He's the one who's been labelled and who goes to a "special needs" school. But, as quickly becomes apparent, it is the adults around Christopher, especially his parents, who are the truly dysfunctional ones. Christopher can't change the fact that he is autistic, but he does manage by the end of the book to organize his life in a manageable way. And in doing so, he provokes his parents into modifying their own crazily self-destructive behaviour.

Haddon, a soft-spoken Englishman, was born in Northampton, "the jewel of the Midlands," he says dismissively. "I always joke that there are only two literary links to Northampton, and both of them are to the same psychiatric hospital." Apparently John Clare, the English Romantic poet, ended up in St. Crispins Hospital, and so did Robert Lowell, the modern American poet, after suffering a manic episode when he was passing through. "That's the end of Northampton's link to world literature," Haddon says with a laugh.

Now happily living in Oxford, Haddon, 40, has big muscles from his penchant for marathon kayaking on the River Thames. "You can only write for five or six hours a day," he says, "so you have to find something else to do the rest of the time. For a lot of writers, it is either alcohol or family breakdown." Or both, one assumes. Haddon's solution is "wholesome outdoor sports" and painting with acrylics so that the canvases are dry before his toddler, Alfie, comes home from nursery school.

Haddon obviously doesn't suffer from a problem such as Asperger's, but there is lot of him in Christopher -- the love of math, for example, and also his need for solitude. "I was always one of those outsider kids," he says. He read gobs of science as a kid, avoiding fiction like a contagion. It wasn't until his teen years that he began wanting to write, and it was only at the last moment that he decided to study English lit rather than math at Oxford. "A narrow escape," he now thinks.

Even so, he periodically has to nourish the scientific part of his brain. "After I have read lots of fiction, it is like having too much birthday cake," he confides. "Reading science is like having a jug of cold water."

After Oxford, Haddon spent a few years doing assorted voluntary and part-time social-work type jobs before he discovered he "was completely unemployable." The longest he says he lasted at any one time in an office was five weeks. Not having a boss, he says, is one of the best things about being a writer.

All he ever really wanted to do vocationally was to paint and write. He fell into writing and illustrating children's books because "it seemed halfway there on both counts." Writing television scripts paid the rent. There is a double irony here: He was typecast because he was good at both; and the economy of diction and scene-setting he learned from the kiddie-lit and television trenches are the foundations of his international success.

He has blurred the boundaries between postmodern and genre fiction, between books for kids and those aimed at adults. But that is what fiction should do, he counters, pointing out that one of his favourite books is the quintessential 19th-century mystery novel, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

"People ask me what model I had in mind when I was writing this book," he says. After thinking about it for a while, he finally concluded it was Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. She has taken the Bennet family, with their parochial lives, and adopted their language, which is in itself restrained and limited. But, he says, she has drawn them with such empathy that there is a universality about them. In retrospect, Haddon realized it was that quality of empathy that he had been striving for in creating Christopher.

Who would want to read a novel, let alone make a film, about a disabled kid living in Swindon, he asks, evincing a mixture of surprise and pleasure. The same could be said about Yann Martel's Life of Pi, a novel about a shipwrecked boy adrift on a life raft in the middle of the Pacific with a starving tiger. The reason that both novels connect with readers of different ages is that they tell simple but powerful stories and they pose the biggest puzzle of all: What is life all about?

Read the complete first chapter of Mark Haddon's book on the Entertainment page of our Web site, globeandmail.com .

Literate Cities

Are you living in a literate city? A place with a love of books? A new survey by the University of Wisconsin ranks America's 64 largest cities with a population over 250,000 in terms of literacy.

The top 10 are: Minneapolis, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Washington, Louisville, Portland, Cincinnati.

http://www.uww.edu/cities/

The New Literary Lottery
Good news for aspiring novelists: Advances for first-time authors have blown sky-high. The catch? If the book doesn’t sell, the fallout can kill your career.

By Alex Williams

Amy Koppelman had always wanted to be a writer, even after all those years she spent slogging away on a first novel in her closet—the only “office” space available in her cramped Upper West Side apartment. “It was the closest thing I had to ‘a room of one’s own,’ ” she says. She still wanted to be a writer even after she got turned down by Columbia’s prestigious master’s-of-fine-arts fiction program. Twice.

For seven years, she hunched over her manuscript, a tale of post-partum depression and infanticide. The work spanned the course of two pregnancies and several thousand nagging doubts. Even after Koppelman, now 33, finally made the cut at Columbia in 1998, the doubts would grow so thunderous that she considered giving up and opening a coffee shop.

During the darkest of those spells, she happened across a “Page Six” item in the Post concerning noise complaints in Cindy Crawford’s apartment building; it mentioned in passing that Koppelman’s idol, Joan Didion, served on the building’s board. Although she had never met Didion, Koppelman tracked down the handsome East Seventies prewar and left a copy of her manuscript with the doorman. Tucked in the package was a note, meekly asking Didion if she should just quit altogether. Three days later, Koppelman received a reply on solemn gray stationery that started, “Yes, you are a real writer . . . ” And so Koppelman pressed on. It was only when she tried to sell the book, however, that she learned what it means to be a “real writer” these days.

She began by mailing out dozens of sample chapters of the book she had come to title Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight—later changed to A Mouthful of Air. As the answers started to trickle back, Koppelman detected an unsettling trend. “All the big New York agents and publishing houses told me the same thing: ‘Look at the movies. You need a happy ending,’ ” she recalls. “I showed it to one big agent who agreed to read the first eighteen pages. She told me to stick it in a drawer, nobody cares about dead babies—and that was her being nice. I sent a copy to a friend who works in Hollywood. He said, ‘You don’t really want to get this published, right? Just write the next Bridget Jones’s Diary.’ ”

It was clear to Koppelman that publishers not only didn’t seem interested in a modest first novel but also showed no interest in the idea of developing a writer over time, who might, several books down the road, produce something really stellar. Instead, even from unknown writers, they seemed to want only blockbusters. Not fitting that category, Koppelman finally found a small, independent publisher called MacAdam/Cage in San Francisco that believed in building a writer’s career. A Mouthful of Air was published in April, and the New York Observer was quick to call it an “exquisitely dark debut novel.” It is only now that Koppelman can pause long enough to contemplate the bigger question: Was it all worth it?

“I got a $3,000 advance for the book,” she says. “I’m not even sure that covers the postage on the queries I sent out.”

In other words, of course it was.

For thousands of would-be novelists like Koppelman, the dream of living the New York writer’s life will never die, even if it nearly kills them to pursue it. But that doesn’t mean the nature of that pursuit is in any way constant. And as always, the goal of carving out a life of letters in the city—shared by thousands of Sarah Lawrence graduates, Starbucks baristas, and drop-out tax attorneys alike—is inextricably linked to the chilly realities of the publishing business. But rarely have the realities of the marketplace changed so jarringly as they have over the past five years. While the major publishing conglomerates continue to cut back on “midlist” authors, they’re increasingly willing to lavish astronomical sums on unknowns. So many, in fact, that since the late nineties, half a million dollars is de rigueur for a first novelist who’s perceived to have hot prospects.

And the recession that has caused sales of all but a few books to flat-line hasn’t slowed the run on mega-advances; if anything, the desperation to find the next Alice Sebold has only upped the ante. In the past two years, a steady stream of first-time authors have joined the club. Yale Law professor Stephen Carter may have made headlines when Knopf coughed up an astonishing $4 million for his first two novels, but he is by no means alone. Medical student Daniel Mason received $1.2 million for a two-book deal from Knopf on the strength of his manuscript for The Piano Tuner, which appeared last fall. Hari Kunzru, a former editor at Wired UK, received nearly $1 million for the U.S. rights to his first novel, The Impressionist; Khaled Hosseni, an Afghan-American, whose first book, The Kite Runner, concerns life under the Taliban, pulled in a substantial six-figure sum, as did Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who received $475,000 for The Dirty Girls Social Club, which took the former New Mexico reporter six days to write (yes, that’s $80,000 a day). Arthur Phillips, a Minnesota-bred Gen-Xer, earned a similar sum with his debut smash, Prague. And the youngest recipient of publishing’s new largesse, local poster boy Jonathan Safran Foer—a 26-year-old Princeton grad living in Jackson Heights—received a clean half-million from Houghton Mifflin (not to speak of a very quick $925,000 for the paperback rights) for his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated.

The magnitude of Safran Foer’s advance, combined with his tender age, drew so much attention it served to demonstrate to publishers just how powerful a marketing tool the advance itself could be. The larger the advance, the louder the publisher’s declaration that this is the book the house is gambling on this season. The marketplace has become a literary lottery, not just for the authors but for the publishing houses too. A modest advance, which used to signal the intention to invest in a long-term relationship, now indicates lack of commitment. As one senior editor at a major house says: “The hardest thing to do is to buy a book for no money. The money is a function of enthusiasm. If there’s no enthusiasm, why bother?”

The book that really changed publishers’ minds about the commercial potential of literary fiction, and in particular the possibilities of first novels, was Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. Published by Grove/Atlantic in 1997, this Civil War tale was a groundbreaking success—a serious book that held its own on the Wal-Mart shelves, selling an incredible 1.5 million copies in hardback and following up with another 1.3 million in paperback. It was one of the biggest debuts in publishing history. The cry from every publisher in town was “Get me the new Charles Frazier!”

Suddenly, literary fiction was no longer thought of as a high-prestige but low-profit venture in an industry largely propelled by cookbooks, self-help tomes, and pulpy thrillers. Of course, literary authors like Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and John Updike were guaranteed generators of revenue, but they had built their reputations over a course of years. What had changed was publishing’s embrace of the unknown.

Last year, a record fifteen debut novels shipped more than 100,000 copies each. The most notable of these, of course, is Sebold’s The Lovely Bones—a surprising novel whose narrator is a murdered girl—which has sold more than 2 million copies in hardback and last week logged its fifty-third week on the New York Times best-seller list.

Even if the crossover smash was still the exception, such books encouraged the idea that any promising young nobody might be transformed into a very big somebody with the right promotion, and ironically, a big-enough advance could help serve as that promotion. The problem was, with everyone swinging for the fences, publishers could no longer afford to have much patience for young writers who show only warning-track power. “It’s the ‘blockbuster’ mentality applied to literature,” says New York literary agent Jody Hotchkiss. “The middle is falling out, but the financial upside is far, far greater. It’s exactly what’s happening in Hollywood right now.”

But what’s good for the author’s bank account—and the publisher’s—in the short term is not necessarily best for his career in the long term. “At Doubleday, we believe in investing in a career,” insists Bill Thomas, editor-in-chief of Random House’s Doubleday Broadway group. “That gets harder to do with the money that’s being thrown around these days. It’s closing your eyes and praying. And that can hurt the writer.”

Jonathan Burnham, president of Miramax Books, who startled the publishing world last fall by forking out $625,000 for a novel called Bergdorf Blondes by Vogue editor Plum Sykes, concurs. “There’s no doubt that publishers will be prepared to overpay for a major new literary voice,” he says. “But a big advance puts a huge pressure on the novel to succeed. This peculiar marketplace entrance-performance is something that everybody has to do now. William Faulkner didn’t go around and meet ten publishers, who then participated in a heated auction that was publicized by Keith Kelly in the Post the next day.”

Another publisher is even more blunt: “The writer has got two or three years to make the money back. If he doesn’t, that big advance might be the last nickel he ever earns in the book business.” So maybe it’s no longer publish or perish; now it’s also possible to publish and perish. The time-honored tradition of a novelist’s serving an apprenticeship through his early thirties is waning quickly, says Morgan Entrekin of Grove/Atlantic, who gave the world Frazier’s Cold Mountain six years ago.

“It used to be that you had pretty modest expectations for a first novel, and the idea was to get the writer in print and the writer would be allowed to develop,” Entrekin explains. He points to John Irving, who was shepherded by the industry through a number of promising but uncommercial early novels (who remembers Setting Free the Bears or The 158-Pound Marriage?) before bursting onto the airport newsstand with The World According to Garp. “That experience has been turned on its head. All publishers are looking for fresh new voices. It’s great if you have a positive sales record, but it’s better to have no sales record than a poor one.

Consequently, it’s easier to go out with an unknown writer than it is with a second or third book from a writer who hasn’t done very well.”

As Daniel Mason’s agent, Christy Fletcher, puts it: “It’s like credit. It’s better to have no credit than bad credit.”

One writer who wound up almost buried by a book-industry jackpot is Lori Lansens, an unpublished novelist from rural Chatham, Ontario, who four years ago found herself in the midtown Sheraton, the subject of a fierce bidding war among seven major New York houses. At that point, Lansens, now 40, thought she had already given up her career in the arts, having quit acting after fifteen years (the highlight: a scene opposite Al Pacino in Sea of Love that was later cut). Although she neither studied literature nor attended any writing programs, Lansens decided to attempt a novel—eventually titled Rush Home Road—chronicling the relationship between a black grandmother in an Ontario trailer park and the abandoned white girl she adopts. The writing went surprisingly fast—the first draft took her about a year. “I had read in some book that five to ten thousand dollars would be an average advance on a good book,” Lansens recalls. “And that was if, as was my dream, it was published at all. My husband and I were seriously talking about self-publishing.”

It never came to that. Unsolicited, Lansens sent her manuscript to a Toronto-based literary agent, who quickly sold the Canadian rights. Almost instantly, the big New York houses were squaring off over the world rights. “The deal happened within a day,” Lansens says. “I was meeting my agent at another publisher’s office in midtown Manhattan, and she stopped me at the door and said, ‘We can’t go in there. We have to talk.’ ” Little, Brown, the agent said, had made a preemptive offer: $500,000, for two books. “I was amazed,” Lansens says. “I was unknown.”

The euphoria didn’t last long. “It was a wonderful story, beautifully written, but they could hardly get the book reviewed, even with that advance,” recalls Jody Hotchkiss, Lansens’s New York film agent. “The book came out, had a beautiful half-page ad in the New York Times Book Review, which is very expensive, but essentially disappeared. She couldn’t get reviewed in the Times daily, which is still the Holy Grail. So now she’s on contract for this second book, and she’s due $250,000. But believe me, Little, Brown is sitting there saying, ‘Whoa, we better hope we can pull a rabbit out of a hat.’”

Lansens felt the pressure as she scrambled to find a suitably marketable topic for her second book. “After this big deal happened, I guess we did all have expectations,” she says. “It was frustrating, because nobody could really answer why.”

But just before Lansens became a casualty of publishing’s new economics, her luck turned violently, again. Hotchkiss, in New York, got a call from Whoopi Goldberg’s production company. She wanted to buy the movie rights and Whoopi herself wanted to play the lead. For Lansens, the deal meant another six-figure sum, not to mention an unimaginable windfall of publicity for the book, now in paperback.

Once again, and just as unimaginably, she was a poster child for the Hollywoodification of the book business—but this time, literally. Now anointed a significant literary voice, Lansens, who spent some time just processing all the drama, is now one fifth of her way through a second book. “This was my first book,” she says, still astonished. “If it were my tenth book, I wouldn’t have expected this.”

The new pressures are very clear to many young writers. A few years ago, Arthur Bradford, now 33, moved from Austin, Texas, where he was working as a school gym teacher. He quickly made his mark, earning an O. Henry Award for a short story in his collection, Dogwalker, and invitations to barbecues at Dave Eggers’s house. Already, however, Bradford’s worrying about following that artistic success with a commercial one. “If your first book or two is not widely read, it can ruin your chances of publishing anything else,” Bradford says. “You don’t want a small debut. You need to hit them over the head right away.” For some, the new equivalent of a writer’s apprenticeship seems more like a hazing ritual. Novelist Mary Morris is something of a Mother Superior to Brooklyn’s exploding writers’ scene. The author of thirteen highly readable midlist books, Morris presides over an exclusive writers’ group, which meets weekly in her Park Slope brownstone. Among the Slope’s legions of Next Jonathan Lethems, admission alone is something of a literary debut, a major step toward a first contract. Lately, however, Morris is finding it tougher to offer the sunny encouragement that young writers need to survive.

“There’s really more of a bottom-line mentality now,” Morris says wearily. “When I started out, publishers could still commit to a writer. Now they’re publishing a book. All any publisher has to do is push a button and get all the numbers from the big book chains. And those numbers,” she adds darkly, “will track you forever.”

Nelly Reifler is a typical young writer living in Brooklyn. Now 35, she spent the first fourteen years of her “professional” life working the register at a store that sold wind-up toys on Columbus Avenue, or walking dogs for Paul Auster—anything that allowed her time to write. She published ambitious short fiction in underground journals like Pressed Wafer and the better-known Bomb. Then Reifler signed on with Leigh Feldman, the agent who sold Arthur Golden’s best-selling Memoirs of a Geisha and Cold Mountain. Feldman sold Reifler’s first collection of stories—See Through—to Simon & Schuster, albeit for a sum that would barely be large enough to buy a new replacement for her 1987 Toyota Camry. While the irrepressible Reifler considers a sum like that heroic compared with her previous paychecks, she acknowledges that the concept of living a midlist writer’s life like Morris’s—nice brownstone, regular contracts—is looking ever more difficult to attain.

“It helps to have low expectations.” Reifler says with a shrug. “It’s a crazy way to live. It’s just a gamble. You’re just betting on a way of life.”

But while writers like Mary Morris consider the blockbuster mentality something of a sickness in the book business, others insist it’s a measure of health. “Some of the worst cynics tend to be people who maybe are never going to get published for a reason,” says Nicole Aragi, the superagent-of-the-moment who brokered Jonathan Safran Foer’s handsome payday. Aragi embodies the blockbuster mentality better than most. She claims not to bother with midlist clients and takes on at most one or two new authors a year, and then only the superhot (she also represents Junot Díaz). Winning Aragi’s approval in itself is a benediction of sorts.

“I’ve heard some very nasty accusations from people, then you look at their work and think, Well, there’s a reason fifteen rejections are sitting in your box,” Aragi says. “I’m very cruel about that, though, so I’m not going to start sounding like an old bitch. There have always been bean-counters in the industry, because it’s a business. We need them to behave in a businesslike way.”

Though Bill Thomas of Doubleday disagrees that this shift in publishing has created better fiction writers, he suggests it has coincided with a really good crop of emerging American novelists. “I think American fiction is in a very good place right now,” says Thomas, who edited Jonathan Lethem’s commercial breakthrough, Motherless Brooklyn, before ascending to his current post. “If you look at Jonathan Safran Foer, no one said, ‘Well, this is a difficult postmodern novel by an unknown writer, we’re not going to get involved.’ Everyone bid on it. That feeling of excitement when you start turning pages of a manuscript and you want to share this with the world, that still drives the business.”

For superstar authors, the publicity machine runs nonstop. Lesser-known writers hit the road and promote their own books. Never mind that they may have better things to do -- like write

Adair Lara, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, July 12, 2003
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle


Hillary Rodham Clinton got a cool $8 million advance for her memoir, "Living History," and a publicity blitz that included prominent journalists from foreign countries flying to Washington to interview her. Right behind that, Harry Potter fans were whipped into a frenzy by an orchestrated campaign of embargoes on the new volume and then treated to bookstore pajama parties across the country.

Alas, the publishers of the estimated 55,000 books that come out every year in the United States must count on lesser-known authors to do more and more of the promoting of a book, from hiring publicists to setting up and paying for tours. Many publishers even expect authors to submit their marketing strategy as part of their proposal. For authors, finding readers for a book is often harder than writing it was.

J.S. Holliday, author of the acclaimed "The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience," recently drove from his home in Carmel to a vast chain bookstore 200 miles north in Roseville for a reading he set up himself. He arrived to find a podium and chairs, a mike turned on and 30 shrink-wrapped copies of his new book, "Rush for Riches," on a table.

But the chairs were empty. The manager refused to make an announcement over the PA system, so Holliday plucked an audience of six from among the store's shoppers. "Look, I'm about to give a rousing speech over there," he said, putting a friendly arm around their shoulders. "Why don't you come over and listen to me?"

He talked to six people for half an hour and sold five books. Then he helpfully took the shrink wrap off the remaining books and signed them. The clerk was aghast. "You've torn the bar code off! We need that to sell the book! " Holliday fished the shrink wrap out of the garbage and restored the bar codes while customers watched, "amazed, no doubt, at the humiliation authors must wade in to make sure that a book gets sold," he said, laughing. Later he learned that every one of those books had sold, and the store had reordered.

When San Francisco's Kirk Read got his coming-of-age memoir, "How I Learned to Snap," published by Hill Street Press, an independent house in Athens, Ga., he understood that publishing it was all they could afford to do. "I told them,

just send me 200 books and I'll sell them," Read said. He drove to 100 tour dates in 40 cities -- everything from book group meetings to huge university lectures. He made purple T-shirts and buttons depicting a hand snapping and gave them out at each stop.

"A lot of authors are better at thinking outside the box than publishers because they live outside the box," said Gerry Howard, head of Broadway Books, a division of Random House. He offered as an example Dave Pelzer, author of the best-selling book "A Child Called 'It': One Child's Courage to Survive."

"He's on a permanent campaign," Howard said. "He travels the country in an evangelical way and sells lots of books in the back of the auditorium."

Even cookbook authors must -- literally -- cook up interest in their books. Joyce Goldstein of San Francisco flew to Miami with six pounds of fresh phyllo on her lap. The former owner of Square One and author of 19 books, she cooked all morning, making 300 "tastes" of bougatsa, a Greek phyllo pastry filled with cheese custard -- and sold five books. Soon she'll fly to Baltimore to attend a conference at the invitation of the Potato Board. She went to Copia in Napa to do "This Is Not Your Mother's Seder."

"I have cornered a rather funny little niche as the resident food Jew in the Bay Area," Goldstein said. "You sell them one book at a time. Drip, drip, drip.

"Bookstores? You might as well kill yourself," she said.

The imagination every author possesses goes to good use in these grassroots marketing efforts. When he isn't setting up readings at bookstores, Holliday speaks at Rotary clubs, always making sure they have his books there for sale afterward. In March he spoke to the American Glaucoma Society. "There are conventions and conferences in town all the time, and they need some alternative to their subjects," he says.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin of San Francisco, author of the story collection "The Hand of Buddha," traveled to 25 states on an Amtrak pass for a month. She taught workshops and stayed with friends. Constance Hale ("Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose") conducts writing and grammar workshops in bookstores and at Media Alliance, the Learning Annex and UC Extensions up and down the state.

"My publisher did next to nothing," she said, "but each time I teach a class there's a little notice in some catalog or mailer about my book."

Laurie Wagner, author of "Living Happily Ever After," said that an aunt threw huge book parties for her in Los Angeles. "At the first event I sold 160 books to family and friends. The next event I sold 120. And the events generate word of mouth."

The downside of all of this is the time taken away from what writers do best: write. The financial realities can be daunting, too. Most authors make $2 to $3 on a hardcover sale. An out-of-town reading might cost $300, even if you stay with friends. An author has to sell 100 books to break even, and bookstores rarely order that many copies.

Yet do-it-yourself promotion pays off, if not in huge sales then at least in keeping a good book in print long enough to find its readers. Joyce Goldstein says her editor knows how hard she works to sell the books and will keep that in mind next time he's considering publishing her. Kirk Read promoted his hardback so vigorously that the paperback was bought by Penguin. Holliday gets books from the publisher at a 40 percent discount, so when he sells them himself he not only makes a few dollars, but, more importantly, helps them stay in print.