Poaching the Publicists

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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The Latest Truism: A Good Publicist Is Hard to Find

Judging by reports of empty cubicles in publicity departments at several large publishing houses, it seems the latest truism in the book biz is this: a good publicist is hard to find. While entry-level publicity jobs have always had precipitous burn-out rates, it seems that larger workloads, tighter media markets, and the promise of dot-com riches have combined to make the candidate pool as shallow as ever. And it doesn’t help that the publicist’s lot — described by one veteran as a service job akin to being “hairdresser to the stars” — has grown even more brutally unsatisfying in recent years.

“For the people in the trenches, the job has gotten harder,” says Jacqueline Deval, publisher at Hearst Books, who was previously publicity director at Morrow. “You used to say, this tour will book itself. Today, there’s nothing that books itself.” Because the media market has contracted, long gone are the days when you could blithely send an author on a 15-city tour and book a full day in each market. So as publicists work harder for each title, consolidation has resulted in more titles on everyone’s plate. All of which is compounded by the brunt of accumulated dissatisfaction that gets heaped upon you-know-who. “The publicist is the last great hope for the book and the author,” Deval adds. “There’s a lot of pressure put on junior people who often haven’t had much training. There’s a lot of acting out on them.”

Pamela Duevel, former publicity director at Pocket (she left when she had a daughter, and is now pursuing a writing career), adds that where books should be prioritized, editors tend to push for a campaign for every title, particularly when one is doing poorly. “It’s a way to save face and present an image to the agent and the author that the publisher is doing something,” she says. “But it drains the resources of the publicity department.”

The upshot? “Our biggest problem has been people leaving to go into dot-coms,” says Carol Schneider, dvp publicity for the Random House trade group, who just hired for two positions, one of them from S&S. “It’s partly glamour, and it’s partly rock-bottom economics.” Indeed, it seems that while cash obviously matters, there’s another factor driving the talent drain. “I’m not seeing floods of entry-level people the way we once did,” Schneider says. She notes that Random’s entry-level salary increase and other “enrichment programs” are aimed to keep the recruitment and retention gears in motion. However, “You have to believe in what you’re selling, and I think that’s easier in book publishing,” she says. As a cautionary tale, she mentions a publicist who once left to work at a regular PR firm. Schneider happened to be in the offices of a national morning show when the same person called — to pitch Mr. Potato Head.

Of course, there’s no such shame at One Potata Productions, the publicity firm Diane Mancher launched eight years ago after she tired of the routine as a publicist at St. Martin’s. She advocates the independence of the freelance life, which has been luring many in-house publicists with the promise of making more money with less experience. “All of my staff came from in-house positions,” she says, “and they left because they felt they couldn’t give the projects they were working on the kind of attention they were worthy of.” Similar frustrations lured away Marian Brown, a former publicity director at Basic who has been freelancing for a year and a half. “You can take on different projects without getting bogged down in the administrative and political complications that a full-time directors’ position would entail,” she says of the freelance life. And, says Caroline O’Connell, who has owned her own book-based public relations firm since 1984, most in-house positions call for three years of working experience, which limits the pool significantly. By contrast, she says, “I hire people right out of college and train them, and then the salaries aren’t sky-high.”

It may be well to note in closing that though the work can be punishing, publicity positions do offer rewards for those who stick with the book business. “Publicity trains you to think hard and nontraditionally about what you’re publishing,” says Hearst’s Deval. “I call on my publicity background every day.”

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Just-In-Time?

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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More Reprints, More Often Put Publishers In a Bind

Like many small and not-so-small publishing houses this year, Steerforth Press has done its share of begging. With printers, that is. Print capacity is so scarce, according to publisher Chip Fleischer, that trying to get books delivered on time is like contending with a creeping flight delay on a foggy night at JFK. “This is definitely the tightest we’ve seen it in seven years,” Fleischer says. “In a couple of cases this fall, we’ve had to pull film from a printer and move the job to another printer. Even then it still ended up being a couple weeks more than we had expected.” Other publishers are sharing the pain. “We are feeling the pinch of extended reprint periods,” says Laurie Brown, vp at FSG. “It’s not only that you get unacceptable dates to start, but then printers are failing to make even those promised dates. And of course, the reprint comes in, and the demand is long gone.” Even the bigger houses, it seems, are biting their nails. “I don’t think we’ve actually been out of stock,” says Tim McGuire, vp production for Simon & Schuster, “but we’ve had many more close calls and have worked much harder in forecasting. We’ve focused on our fast-selling frontlist, and we’ve struggled with our backlist reprints.”

It’s a litany that many ascribe to publishers’ efforts to get a handle on their out-of-control inventory. So-called just-in-time inventory management — lowering print quantities, keeping fewer books in stock, and reprinting more often — has undeniably saved publishers money. But those savings have come at a cost. Couple higher reprint frequency with booming educational and religious markets, factor in a labor shortage in a consolidating printing market, and throw a few million copies of Harry Potter into the works, and you’ve got a major production problem. Though the seasonal print crunch may ease up after the holidays, some observers are concerned that despite the best of intentions, just-in-time may turn out to be too late after all.

Riding the Logjam

“It doesn’t take too many titles to tie up a printer,” says one remainder dealer who’s been the indirect beneficiary of lagging delivery dates to publishers, “so you wonder what everyone was thinking when they invented these 3,500-copy reprints.” Indeed, for people like Fleischer, the print backup has certainly changed the way he does business. He reports that for the first time, printers have been fiddling with their promised delivery dates, and in one case, a printer called the day before a book was set to ship, to tell him it would actually ship the following week. He’s now learned to regale his account rep with complaints, which generally gets results. “You have to be a squeaky wheel more than you used to,” he says. “The printers were trying to fit in more important customers, and go back to press whenever they could.” Now, Fleischer has bumped up schedules for Steerforth’s winter and spring lists, the irony being that if the printers actually meet the current schedules, the books will arrive early.

Even a house like Hyperion has been caught between increasingly rapid production schedules and backed-up printers. “The logjam is easing up for Hyperion,” reports production director Linda Prather. But it hasn’t been easy. “Reprints used to have a two week schedule, and now you were looking at five, six, and eight weeks. And if you didn’t have a book scheduled, it was impossible to get print space. We have eight bestsellers on various lists, and a number of those went out and needed reprints immediately. I did a lot of begging.”

Of course, certain larger houses are the ones who are bumping the little guys off press. “We’ve consolidated our business to just a few vendors, so we have tremendous clout with the suppliers we’re doing business with,” says John Vitale, vp book production for HarperCollins. He explains that though printers are reluctant to add new equipment — having seen presses sit idle in years past — they’ve been able to increase productivity with their existing equipment. “One of our major vendors actually produced more books this past January than they did the year before,” Vitale says, “and they were full the year before.”

S&S’s McGuire doesn’t think squeezing more books out of the presses will have much effect, however. “It’ll be a permanent situation,” he says. “Publishers and book manufacturers will have to forecast their work better in the future, and very small publishers will have to find some alternative manufacturers they can partner with.” As for the present jam, McGuire cites slips in productivity at Quebecor and Donnelley, noting that plant production at certain vendors was off as much as 30%. “The closing of Quebecor’s Vermont plant in April at least temporarily took some capacity out of the industry,” he adds, noting that most of the equipment was moved to a new location, but did not come on line as quickly as Quebecor had hoped. (A Quebecor World spokesperson denied that the closure affected operations.) In the end, McGuire says, just-in-time management is crucial for publishers because their product is fully returnable. As corporations rush to cut returns across the board, though, it seems few actually gave the issue a title-by-title reality check — nor did they bother to tell the printers. And another attack on the persistent problem of returns has been nipped in the bud.

‘It’s Kind of a Crazy Business’

The presses may be rolling nonstop, but the printing market remains as competitive as ever. “We’ve been full or over the top for the last six months,” says John Edwards, president of Edwards Brothers. “Our problem is that we could make more books if we could get more skilled bodies. Unemployment in Ann Arbor is 1.2%.” Furthermore, with elementary and high-school enrollments “off the charts,” and as the baby boomlet moves through college, the educational demand will move right along with it. Edwards says printers and publishers must work to improve long-term planning and communications. “There’s a lot of horse trading going on as you get down to the wire,” he says. “It’s actually driving a better understanding of publishers’ needs.”

Peter Tobin, vp of Courier Corp., says that demand has been high for all of this year, and he’s one of the few printers actually investing in new equipment. “We spent $15 million in 2000, and we’ll do it again in 2001,” Tobin says, emphasizing that just-in-time is not bad for printers who have a structure that allows them to manufacture short runs or have digital presses. Unfortunately, the hope that digital technology might come to the rescue is a pipe dream for the immediate future, says Ron Weir, senior vp of portfolio management for Donnelley. “The technology is continuing to evolve in digital printing,” he says. “But the cost-effective point for those runs is still rather low. There was promise at the last DRUPA show, but for this fall it’s not a technology that’s solid or in place.”

Printers also cite the feverish pitch of the third- and fourth-quarter publishing cycle. “The big guys are very upset that their equipment doesn’t run at full capacity for six months of the year,” says Michelle Gluckow, executive vp at Book-mart Press. “The big cry was to even out the loads throughout the season. Publishers have tried to do it, but it just doesn’t work very well.” Now, everything comes at one time. “In March and April, we’ll all be looking for work. It’s kind of a crazy business, actually.”

The Remainder Game

Also crazy is the fact that despite just-in-time practices, the remainder business has never been better. “It’s an odd situation,” says Steven Sussman of Siegel/Sussman Associates. “On the one hand, you have publishers screaming that they can’t get print time, but on the other hand you have a CIROBE where they’re all talking about how great business is.” Sussman notes that a happy medium is hard to find. “If you run a one-out, one-in system, you’re in trouble if a book isn’t in the warehouse when the order comes in. To me, ‘just-in-time’ means losing sales.”

Remainder buyers, at least, report plenty of product coming down the pike. “If it is a tight printing market, it certainly hasn’t seemed to affect availability of remainders,” says Fred Eisenhart, director of remainder acquisitions for Barnes & Noble. Tamara Stock, co-owner of remainder dealer Daedalus Books, hasn’t seen a slow-down either. “From the big publishers that would use the just-in-time inventory, we’re seeing the same huge quantities that we always saw,” she says. Marshall Smith, CIROBE cofounder, thinks remainders are here to stay. “Even with just-in-time,” he says, “if you take the keenest publishers, nobody hits the mark with less than a 10% margin of error.” And now, if reprints are being delayed a month or so, it probably means more remainders, as books get funnelled into the system too late. Furthermore, as publishers bump up initial print runs to allow for delays — à la Walker’s George Gibson, who is hiking major runs by as much as 20% — this too may add to overstock.

If it’s any consolation, publishers aren’t alone in their struggles to perfect just-in-time inventory. As The New Yorker recently noted, product shortages have afflicted the electronics industry as well, partly because just-in-time simply shifts the inventory burden from manufacturers to suppliers: “Call it the conservation of uncertainty: you can pass it down the supply chain, but you can’t get rid of it.” Of course, wherever the uncertainty happens to land, some point out that a tight printing market is not exactly a bad thing for publishers. As Hyperion’s Prather says, “Most of us are happy to know that people are still buying books.”

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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Beat the Devil
Coelho Back in Brazil, Mortier in the Netherlands, And Pleijel Shakes Up Sweden

Brazilian high priest of letters Paulo Coelho has conjured up The Devil and Miss Prym after two years of soul searching, and the result is a half-million-copy catechism that’s been deemed a “parable in which the characters show all the contradictions of the human soul.” Taking on the cosmic themes of Good and Evil, and probing the consequences of human free will, the novel follows the ironically named Miss Prym as she and her Satanic sidekick tempt the righteous citizens of a remote community into breaking a couple of the Ten Commandments. (Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Coelho’s The Alchemist is nearing a million copies sold in the US, 200,000 of those in paperback, according to sources at Harper.) The new book is being simultaneously published in Brazil (Objetiva), Italy (Bompiani), and Portugal (Pergaminho), with numerous other rights sales made to date, while Harper has rights for the UK and will “most probably” publish in the US as well. See Mônica Antunes at the Sant Jordi Asociados agency, which controls rights.

Investigating temptation of a different sort, Erwin Mortier’s novel My Second Skin has hit the list in the Netherlands. Described as an “ode to the awakening human body,” the work follows protagonist Anton Callewijn as he ponders his preoccupation with an older male cousin, and consummates a relationship with classmate Willem. Though it ends on a note of desolation, along the way the novel gives rise to some exceptional prose (Mortier writes of one character: “his long arms had a way of slinging around his rump like the empty sleeves of a coat that didn’t fit”). Mortier’s 1999 novel, Marcel, is said to be a “sharp and at times hilariously ironic picture” concerning a young boy raised by his grandparents in the Flemish countryside. Critics called it a “dream of a debut,” and it won the 2000 Van der Hoogt prize, among other awards. English rights to that one went to Harvill, while other sales were made to Suhrkamp in Germany and Pauvert in France. For rights to the new one, see Gerda van Boom at Meulenhoff.

In Sweden, Majgull Axelsson’s Random Walk is meandering up the list. The book covers three generations of women and is a “sad but breathtaking” story delving into women’s sexual vulnerability and its potentially fatal consequences. The author’s earlier work, April Witch, sold 400,000 copies in Sweden and rights went to 13 countries, including the US, where Random will publish next year. The new book had a 60,000-copy first printing, plus 30,000 for a book club, with rights to Germany (Bertelsmann), the Netherlands (De Geus), Denmark (Lindhardt & Ringhof), and Finland (Werner Söderström). See Inga-Britt Rova at Prisma for rights.

Also in Sweden, Agneta Pleijel’s fifth novel Lord Nevermore has been dubbed “one of the major Swedish novels this autumn” (though it’s not currently in the top 10). With 50,000 copies in print, the book spans the 20th century and a few continents to boot as it follows the friendship of two young Polish men and explores love’s sweet sorrow during World War I. One critic’s appraisal: It “shakes you about a bit.” Pleijel won the Great National Book Award in 1987 for a first novel, He Who Observeth the Wind. The new book has been sold to Denmark, Norway (both Gyldendal), and Germany (Piper). See Agneta Markås at Norstedts.

In France, Camille Laurens hits the charts with In These Arms, a “splendid, smooth-reading literary novel” informed by the author’s interaction with men throughout her life. Laurens’s sixth novel delves into a woman’s relationship with her psychoanalyst, which is played out in a series of portraits of other men in the protagonist’s life. It’s been nominated for the Prix Goncourt, and rights are available from the French Publishers’ Agency. Also in France, Christian Signol’s White Christmases is the first volume in the series Thus Does Man Live, a multigenerational trilogy that will trace the upheavals in the town of Barthelmy over the past century. The first volume kicks off on a family farm at the turn of the century, but World War I soon drags the three children into its stupefying and interminable clutches. See the FPA.

In news from Spain, Pedro del Carril and Sigrid Kraus have acquired 100% of Emecé Editores Spain, and will be publishing under a new imprint, Ediciones Salamandra. All reprints and new titles for Emecé Spain will now be published under the Salamandra logo and trademark. The owners note that the salamander was chosen as a mascot due to its “shrewd and nimble” ability to survive in the most adverse circumstances: “This is the spirit with which we intend to face our future as independent publishers!”

Germany is atwitter about Urs Widmer’s Mother’s Lover, “a homage to a life difficult to live” that explores a woman’s “dumb, obsessive passion” as described by her son. The young, beautiful, and wealthy woman falls for a dazzling but penniless composer who ends up being a famous conductor, while she languishes in destitution, wracked by her obsession with him — which neither he nor anyone else knows about. The work “almost transforms pain into serenity.” See Diogenes for rights. Also in Germany, Walter Moers’ new novel, Hansel & Gretel, has been on the list for more than 10 weeks. Moers’ first novel, The 13 1/2 Lives of Capt’n Bluebear, has been on German lists for 47 weeks and is out in English from Secker & Warburg, and takes place in the same setting as the new one — the zany world of Zamonia, where “headless giants roam deserts made of sugar.” See Annika Balser at Eichborn.

A few notes from Greece: Maira Papathanassopoulou has brewed up The Toxic Compounds of Arsenic, a three-men-plus-one-woman admixture that turns flammable when three male roommates come to terms with the charming presence of Zoe. The author’s 1998 novel, Judas’ Wonderful Kiss, has sold more than 250,000 copies in its Greek-language edition, and rights have been sold to numerous countries, including Spain (Destino), France (Plon), and Sweden (Forum). Rights to the new one are controlled by Patakis Publications. Also in Greece, from the late Freddy Germanos comes The Object, a “shattering read” based on the life of Nikos Zachariadis, who was secretary to the Greek Communist party during the nation’s civil war. The book sold 20,000 copies in two months, and no foreign sales have yet been made; see Sophie Catris at Kastaniotis.

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Frankfurt Babylon

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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Nick Webb, MD Europe for Rightscenter.com, serves up an author’s-eye view of Frankfurt in this dispatch, which will appear in a longer article in the journal of the Society of Authors.

If you’re one of those authors who secretly feels low after nipping into Waterstones and seeing the sheer variety of books jostling for shelf space — all of them less worthy than your own — then the Frankfurt Book Fair is, in a word, depressing. The celebration of the competition is so vast that just in Hall 9, the Anglo-American axis, there are nearly 400,000 new titles on display. And here’s what you got: Wheelbarrow Decoration, Deathbed Visions, books on dinosaurs (still), Vocational Diseases of Professional Cooks, novels too numerous to count, anthropomorphic cutesie-pie animal character series (known as “merch”), How to be a Millionaire and Remain a Nice Person, How to be a Millionaire by Being a Complete Bastard, Salads with Edible Flowers, Porn, Porn with Marmite: It’s a body blow to any sense of uniqueness.

Don’t kid yourself that your publisher wants you there, either. No matter how urbane the professions of pleasure when you announce your interest in a visit, the publisher is thinking, “Oh, bugger.” Frankfurt is a market. The rights directors are copyright traders, and your work is currency. The presence of every one of them during the Buchmesse is a catastrophe for the old cash flow. They work like dogs. Let them get on with it. Authors are a pain, you see. They wander up and down those kilometers of exhibits getting melancholy and making injudicious comparisons between their display and that of Stephen King. Occasionally they get drunk, maudlin, stroppy, or randy, and they always need attention.

But, you might ask, what of the publishers? Aren’t they vain media trendies, staying out late at parties, drinking too much and shagging each other? Yes, some are. A bit of Frankfurt apocrypha would have us believe that the city’s prostitutes take the week off during the show because publishers only sleep with each other. Some publishers maintain an annual three- or four-day affair with the same person, an arrangement that may have lasted twenty years. It’s rather like the Book Fair itself, which feels like a continuous event from which you have 51-week breaks. As for publishers’ vanity, authors are the beneficiaries. When some wally wants to make a statement to the parish that here is a major player with a big swinging chequebook, it usually means a fat advance that will earn out when the sun goes nova. Undoubtedly there are some publishers who will be driven by winning rather than by passion for the text. But if publishers bid each other up for a book, the author can only chortle. Frankfurt fever is the name given to this syndrome; fortunately the condition has become less virulent as the importance of Frankfurt as a stage has dwindled.

Though you might think that the more senior the person at Frankfurt, the less he or she does, most publishers work very hard and are suffused with honourable fatigue by fair’s end. You can almost hear the relentless trading: the white noise of people air-kissing and crying, “Darling, super” against the hum of 20,000 people saying, “Oh really, how interesting” and maintaining those affable but non-committal conversations you have with people you know but whose names you cannot remember. But the real heroes are the rights directors and those agents who have non-stop appointments every half hour. By the weekend their eyes are the colour of Spam and their skin grey with exhaustion. Be kind to them if the translation rights into Estonian are taking longer than they should. It’s not for want of effort.

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‘Caveat Vendor’ at DMA

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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The prognosis for global clicks-and-mortar convergence was rather dire at the 83rd Direct Marketing Association annual conference — which is saying something, considering that this was where e-commerce and one-to-one marketing gurus had gathered to assess the state-of-the-art in web-based consumerism. Officially, of course, conferees boasted about the soon-to-be billion Internet users, and celebrated “The End of Business as Usual,” as The Cluetrain Manifesto author Christopher Locke put it. In his keynote address, DMA President H. Robert Wientzen even invoked a “Web-O-Rama!” and told his audience that “we have an amazing talent for adapting to the new!”

But in fact, our correspondent reports that the “end of business as usual” seemed all too near for a few direct-to-consumer strategists in the audience. First, there were jitters in the wake of Williams-Sonoma’s 30% stock plunge last month on news of flagging catalog sales and rising costs. Despite a bullish approach to its book program (see last month’s PT), sales were down for all catalogs, a drop linked to a dip in consumer purchases. (It didn’t help matters any that CFO John Tate jumped ship to take a post at Krispy Kreme.) Then the Federated department store empire announced layoffs in its Fingerhut catalog unit. The company will cut 25% of the Fingerhut work force, which supports Internet orders for Wal-Mart, and had been expected to aid the e-commerce sites for Federated units Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

Book publishing seemed even lower on the DMA radar than last year, though it did pop up here and there. In his presentation on “Writing for Eyeballs,” for example, design maven Otis Maxwell looked at the creation of e-commerce communities, comparing the websites for textbook retailers Bigwords and VarsityBooks. He found the former chock full of “value-added features” (the front page changes constantly, a free online magazine offers “content for the discontent,” and there’s a handy “big word” dictionary). VarsityBooks, on the other hand, was “based around selling textbooks, not building a relationship,” and its interactive features were designed to help the retailer rather than engage customers. The upshot was that far fewer people had heard of VarsityBooks than Bigwords prior to visiting the sites, and after viewing, 56% of users preferred Bigwords. Perhaps that’s why Varsity Group recently rebranded itself as a campus marketing juggernaut that will target college students for other companies, and junked its contract with ICQ. Elsewhere, Maxwell pointed out that “soft offers” are perfect for the web, because they’re great for building opt-in lists, and customers actually give you their correct contact information (hoping they’ll win a product or service), so you can hit them up later.

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Book View, November 2000

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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PEOPLE

Vivian Antonangeli, formerly President of Reader’s Digest Children’s Publishing, goes to Grosset and Dunlap as President and Publisher, while Jane O’Connor becomes editor-at-large, working on a part-time basis. . . Ivan Held is leaving Viking, where he is VP Marketing Director, to go to Random House, reporting to Ann Godoff. Word is he will take a publishing role . . . Ed Walters, formerly VP Associate Publisher of Adams Media, has become Publishing Director of Tuttle Publishing. . . It looks like Walter Weintz is moving to S&S, but no announcement as yet. He was most recently at OneBigTable.com with Molly O’Neill and Arthur Samuelson . . . Victor Navasky, whose The Nation is launching Nation Books this fall, has hired Dan Weaver as editor. Most recently at Faber & Faber in Boston, Weaver also did stints at Penguin and McGraw-Hill. The new list will be distributed by PGW under a business arrangement with their Avalon Publishing division. . . Susy Bolotin, recently of Good Housekeeping, but formerly a book editor, has joined Workman as Editor in Chief. Inside.com referred to Workman as a “benign mini-cult,” to which Michael Cader responds in publisherslunch.com, “I know Workman Publishing; I worked at Workman Publishing; it is many colorful things, but it is not a benign mini-cult.”. . . Glenda Howard has left St. Martin’s for Black Entertainment Television’s book division. . . Gordon Hardy has been appointed Divisional VP and Executive Editor for General Reference in Houghton Mifflin’s Trade and Reference group. This is a new position. . . Ginee Seo has left HarperCollins Childrens for S&S as VP, Associate Publisher of Atheneum Books for Young Readers, replacing Jonathan Lanman. . . Also widely reported is the move of Random supereditor Jon Karp to Scott Rudin Productions, and Rob McQuilkin to Boston-based Palmer & Dodge agency.

DEALS


UK publisher Pavilion’s Colin Webb sold The Book of Rock, a hefty tome written by former Virgin Publisher Philip Dodd to Thunder’s Mouth in the US, Glenat in France, and deals to be confirmed in weeks to come from Germany, Spain, Scandinavia (four languages), Portugal, and Brazil. Rough estimates of printing numbers could take the global co-edition to 125,000–150,000 copies. The book is designed by David Costa, whose firm, Wherefore Art, is probably best known today for the megabestseller, The Beatles Anthology. Webb says that part of the enormous co-edition success was that they produced a fully bound proof copy to show publishers — 350 full color, 150 b&w pics, in all their glory.

The option on Joe Kanon’s first novel, Los Alamos, has been renewed, and London-based Renaissance will produce and sell the film, which will be directed by Nick Hytner.

UPCOMING EVENTS


Basic Books is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a discussion at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on “The Future of the Public Intellectual,” on November 2nd at 6:30. Basic Publisher John Donatich will moderate. Call Morse Partners (212 734-5134) for details.

•The Washington Post’s Michael Dirda, who in 1993 received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, has been writing the often highly personal Book World column, “Readings,” one Sunday a month for nearly eight years. Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments, a collection of his selected columns, has just been published by Indiana U. Press. There will be a wining and signing at The Madison Avenue Bookshop on Wednesday, November 29th, 5:30-7:30.

• Publisherslunch.com is hosting its third luncheon, on Wednesday, November 29, from 12:30 to 2:30 on “Making Money Through Free Media.” Speakers will be Seth Godin, Mike Shatzkin, and horror writer Douglas Clegg, all of whom have experience and expertise on the subject. The price is $100, and the venue, tba.

•PAMA (Publishers Advertising & Marketing Association) is hosting a luncheon on “ePublishing: Why You Can’t Ignore It” on November 16 at the Hotel Intercontinental. Speakers include Roger Cooper, consultant for iPublish, John Feldcamp of Xlibris, and Annik La Farge from Contentville. Market Partners International’s Constance Sayre will moderate. Members’ price is $60, and nonmembers, $75. Email pama_ny@hotmail.com.

INQUIRING MINDS


Notwithstanding media coverage and a Frankfurt party to celebrate, there has been no announcement from Grove/Atlantic about purchasing Edinburgh publisher Canongate, according to Morgan Entriken himself. And no one seems to be able to determine whether this is an acquisition or a merger, as Canongate’s Jamie Byng describes it. Meanwhile Jack McKeown was one of the blowout party’s co-hosts, but whether he’s otherwise involved is unclear, though he did say in an email that “The [Perseus] Group is giving serious consideration to developing a publishing presence in the UK market.” He was more forthcoming on the subject of the Saturday night event, which was “fantastic, although Jamie was prevented from demonstrating his DJ wizardry because the promised turntables never made it to the event. But even the preponderance of European pop music could not keep the crowd from rocking.” Estimates of attendance at the Alte Oper, an ornate building which is still used for concerts (and where the Microsoft eBook Awards were presented), range from 400–800. Given that the party started at 11 pm on Saturday night, when many people had fled the fair, that says something about publishers as partygoers, or the venue or, perhaps, the reputation of the hosts as entertainers.

•When Barnes & Noble originally spun off BN.com, it looked as though the idea was to build another Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore whose stock would climb unencumbered by the demands of — not to mention the taxes levied on — bricks and mortar. But now that B&N stores are actively promoting BN.com and vice versa, instead of looking like Amazon, the Riggios’ book emporia begin to resemble that other rival, Borders, which has been touting its integrated re- and e-tail strategy. The final question to be answered is: Given Bertelsmann’s investment, will a new CEO of BOL expect to play a role in BN.com, as was rumored to be likely? And will BN.com ever hire another CEO, ten months after the last one, Jonathan Bulkeley, resigned?

•Blab Media has announced a strategic partnership with Random House Inc., to create and distribute greeting cards online. The cards will be based on selected RH titles (though so far Anne Rice seems to be the only author represented). Blab offers cards with greetings available in 14 languages, including Arabic, Polish, and Hindi.

DULY NOTED


The winners of Poets & Writers’ annual Writers Exchange competition for the best poet and prose writers from a chosen state (this year’s was Florida) were poet Rhonda J. Nelson and fiction writer Jeanne Leiby. Each received an all-expenses-paid trip to NYC in October to give readings and meet with publishing types that included Norton’s Carol Smith, Ginger Barber, the NYT’s Harvey Shapiro, and judges David Mura and Sapphire. This was one of the most successful competitions P&W has staged, with submissions — at 176 for poetry, and 182 for fiction — 75% higher than in other years. Past winners have included the fiction writers Fae Myenne Ng, Mona Simpson, and Susan Straight, and poets Mike Chitwood and Roger Fanning. Scott Manning tells us that four years ago, the winner of the fiction writing award was Sue Monk Kidd. She read her short story, “The Secret Life of Bees” — and agent Virginia Barber told her that the characters had the potential to be developed for a full-length novel. The unfinished novel of the same name arrived on the agent’s desk this year and she promptly sold it to Viking.

•The Meadowlands Racetrack celebrated the 4th annual running of the Matt Scudder stakes on October 28. Yes, the President of the track is a Lawrence Block fan. Morrow has just released a non-Matt Scudder book, Hit List.

Posted in Book View •

When Agents Become e-Publishers, Who Looks Out for the Writers?

By PT Editors
November 1, 2000
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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (11/6/00)

Shrewd advocate or two-faced monster? That’s the question currently confronting literary agents, as they depart from their traditional role as authors’ representatives and leap into the bracing — and perhaps perilous — world of electronic publishing.

”We’ve gone into it with both feet and over our hairline,” says Richard Curtis, the agent who many feel has strayed farthest to date into uncharted territory. After hanging out his shingle as an e-publisher , for example, Curtis has proceeded to aggressively seek rights to his own clients’ previously published work, and negotiated for rights with other agents and authors to content for e-books and print-on-demand editions.

It strikes some in the industry as more than a little odd to find an agent — whose mandate is to be the author’s trusted ally — stepping smack into the role of publisher.

It struck Curtis himself that way.

”No one was more keenly aware of the potential for conflict of interest than I was,” Curtis says of the birth of his company, e-reads, which now publishes some 1,200 titles (the e-reads.com site will launch in the coming months). While Curtis continues to do business as a traditional literary agent for such authors as Harlan Ellison, working in the genres of science fiction, mystery and romance, he says he has pre-empted cries of foul play on a number of fronts. He offers full disclosure to his clients, waives his agency commission on revenues generated to those authors by e-reads and gives clients the opportunity to engage other parties to negotiate on their behalf. He also submitted the e-reads contract to publishing attorneys and agents, and ”invited them to whack away at it.” The result, he says, is a ”model for author-friendliness.”

Certainly, the blurring of agents’ roles is nothing new in an industry famous for peculiar cross-relationships. ”We live in a business where levels of conflict are inevitable and everywhere,” says Arthur Klebanoff, president of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. ”The question is how you deal with them.” Klebanoff, who is plunging into the publishing arena with the coming launch of RosettaBooks, notes that an agent who slogs through contracts to drag out rights reversions, and then digitizes and markets the files as e-books, is arguably offering a valuable service for authors whose books have gone out of print.

As more agents reinvent themselves in a variety of new guises, however, others caution that under the wrong circumstances, authors may find themselves doing business with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

”A lot of what I’ve seen so far seems ethical,” says Joel Fishman, chief executive at Subrights.com and former owner of the Bedford Book Works agency. ”But if agents start to act like publishers on behalf of their authors, then who’s going to protect the interests of the author? If an agent becomes an e-publisher, then they’re pre-empting any other potential electronic publication of that book. Their incentive is to lock in those rights for their own business.”

And e-publishing also begs the question of quality, says agent Todd Shuster. ”Isn’t there a danger that in the hands of certain agents, material that really belongs in a graduate school writing program is going to get distributed before it should be seen?” he asks. On the other hand, the rise of the agent as publisher may be driven by the flexible roles all parties are playing in a collaborative publishing process, especially when editing is not necessarily being done by editors at publishing houses. ”In some ways, it may be out of necessity that certain authors are looking to their agents to edit,” says Shuster. ”There’s a very positive role that agents are playing now, because they’re picking up the ball and running with it.”

But some question the motives of increasingly self-interested agents. ”A lot of agents are trying to hustle at the tail-end of the whole dot-com bubble,” says Lynn Chu, vice president at Writers’ Representatives. ”But when you look at it carefully, you have to ask yourself, Do I really want to do this?”

For her part, Chu adds that the danger facing authors, regardless of who controls electronic rights, is in a publisher’s refusal to declare a title out-of-print — in effect squatting on electronic rights — with no immediate intention of reviving an all-but-moribund book. ”Authors are finding themselves in the position of losing total control over their rights forever to a publisher who has committed to doing only one thing for a limited time,” she says.

Indeed, it seems that as agents go boldly into the brave new world, authors and their representatives are the ones who have to sweat the bottom line. ”I thought the agent and I were on the same side of the table,” says a source who represents an estate handled by an agent turned publisher. ”But he wants to get as much from me as he can, now that he has his own agenda. I feel like I’m sitting with the wolf who’s dressed in grandma’s clothing.”

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Working the Crowds at PNBA, NEBA

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
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Reports from Regional Trade Shows

Synchronicity was the unofficial theme for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s annual fall conference, which returned to Portland on Sept. 15 – 17 after a three-year hiatus. At the show’s “Celebration of Authors,” for example, the self-deprecating Elwood Reid recounted his strange long trip from life as a “big dumb jock” to literary success with the Doubleday thriller Midnight Sun. He off-handedly mentioned that he owes his career to a tiny independent bookstore in Michigan that jazzed up his writerly ambitions — not knowing that the owner of the bookshop The Shaman Drum, ABA board member Karl Pohrt, was in the audience at the time.

Of course, that coincidence was a mere sidelight to PNBA’s fall program. Attendance of over 600 was up from the Spokane show last year — and included booksellers from 155 stores and exhibitors from 150 vendors. The numbers were down from three years ago, however, and it was clear that employee shortage is a chronic problem in this land of high-tech campuses, putting pressure on many a bookseller to stay home and mind the store.

Among the roster of Friday’s panels was the euphemistically titled “The Changing Role of the Sales Rep,” in which Graphic Arts rep Jim Harris and others noted the downward spiral of fewer stores and reps and the upward spiral of titles in reps’ bags. But the end of the session saw a sort of cathartic reconciliation, with Harris promoting his longstanding belief in “working for the store,” or having reps strengthen partnerships with bookstores via informed title suggestions targeted to a store’s specific market. As for BookSense, the ABA can rest assured: sign-ups came so fast and furious that staffers had to dash out to the nearest Kinko’s to run off more program materials.

Meanwhile, bookseller attendance was also up at the New England Booksellers Association, climbing more than seven percent during this year’s event at Boston’s World Trade Center, held on Sept. 22–25. As at PNBA, the dot-com drain on the talent pool seemed to be on everyone’s mind. As Harvard Book Store’s Carole Horne said, “We usually take as many of the floor staff and managers as possible to NEBA. This year, we just couldn’t because we don’t have them.”

But despite the staffing woes, NEBA executive director Rusty Drugan said that more than 1,538 booksellers were on hand, while overall registration rose six percent to 2,646. Drugan cited plentiful book orders (David Godine boasted that he had written “50 orders” himself) and record seminar attendance. At the opening day luncheon, NEBA awarded, posthumously, the Saul Gilman Award for outstanding New England sales rep to Marc Seagar, a NEBA founder and a popular 34-year bookselling presence. Seamus Heaney received the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement; Heaney accepted as a “New Englander” (he teaches part-time at Harvard) and donated his $1,000 prize to the Irish Immigration Center.

Despite brisk orders, some publishers noted that the Northeast remains “depressed.” One sales manager mentioned the closing of Lauriat’s, while Waterstone’s and LearningSmith have also shut down in recent years. The venerable Bookland of Maine chain, meanwhile, has been in bankruptcy court this year, and its usual show presence was missed. “But,” said another sales manager, “New England is a briar-patch. Many older communities are just too small for a chain to invade. These stores are professional ‘survivors.’” Of course, non-indies were welcome at the show as well. Borders reps were plentiful, and B&N’s new Northeast regional buyer, Noel Pasco, was sighted in the company of B&N small press director Marcella Smith.

We thank Jennifer McCord and Christopher Kerr for their contributions to this article.

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Packaging Luxe

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
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Want a Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to Go With That $379 Toaster?

No retailer engenders guilty pleasure quite like Williams-Sonoma, the high-end purveyor of “home-centered” furnishings. Universally known for its $159 bottles of balsamic vinegar (“a unique viscosity and sumptuous flavor”) and $379 toasters (“this versatile appliance can also toast a sandwich”), Williams-Sonoma has invented a whole new genre of conspicuous consumption: decor porn. But the San Francisco–based retailer’s commitment to “furnishing every corner of our customers’ homes” has also left no bookshelf unfilled. With some 12 million copies of branded cookbooks in print — 7.5 million of those coming from the sprawling Kitchen Library series — the retailer’s cookbook collectibles have become the must-have kitchen artifact for a certain upwardly mobile demographic.

“They’re like Pokémon for the 45-year-old woman,” says Terry Newell, president of Weldon Owen Publishing, the packaging firm that over the last eight years has brought the likes of Williams-Sonoma Risotto and The Mayo Clinic Williams-Sonoma Cookbook to a solid-maple sideboard near you. It’s not just the compulsive collector, however, that gives this program its interest. Together, Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen have worked symbiotically to publish cookbooks that are both custom-tailored to the retailer’s target audience, yet easily repurposed by the packager for electronic or promotional formats. With 16 million people in Williams-Sonoma’s customer database — and the retailer’s growing nexus of catalogs, retail concepts, and websites — what Newell calls “branded packaging” stands at the busy intersection of direct-to-consumer retailing, book packaging, and cross-channel sales.

Beyond Shake-’n-Bake

The road to Pokémon luxe originated in the early 90s with the custom publishing division of Time-Life, as then VP Publisher Susan Maruyama recalls. She signed on Williams-Sonoma and Weldon Owen for the first such deal any of the companies had done at the time, and refers to the project as an “innovative, gutsy business collaboration.” (John Fahey, now CEO of the National Geographic Society, was then Time-Life president.) Maruyama, who is now CEO of San Francisco Internet startup The Hive Group, says that all of the companies made an investment in the joint program, but she and Newell credit the Williams-Sonoma gestalt to the legendary zeal of founder Chuck Williams — and his frequently plundered box of thousands of 3 x 5 recipe cards, assiduously notated over the years. According to Weldon Owen consulting editor Norman Kolpas, the octogenarian Williams remains “totally involved” in the publishing program, reading and approving every last soupçon of cookbook text.

More than 100 titles later, the cookbooks have splintered into series such as New American Cooking and the Savoring line, while the Williams-Sonoma empire has in turn racked up annual sales of $1.3 billion from all its product lines, and is heading toward the $2 billion mark this year. While the publishers like to credit the books’ lavish quality for their success, it’s clear that the Williams-Sonoma series benefits from the chain’s massive, multi-channel infrastructure and humongous brand presence. There are now five direct-mail catalogs (Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, Hold Everything, and Chambers), with 192 million mailed last year. Add to those over 350 retail stores — the principal distribution point for Williams-Sonoma books, followed by warehouse clubs and bookstore chains. Then there’s williams-sonoma.com, for which Weldon Owen helped create 500 recipes for the site’s database, and last August saw the launch of potterybarn.com. All in all, the company aims to sell $40 million worth of goods on the Internet this year — which may be possible, given an average browsing-to-buying conversion rate of 8%. The site’s cookbook pages sell both Williams-Sonoma cookbooks and those from other publishers, aiming to be a clearinghouse for cooking lore, and you can search the recipe database by course or ingredient. Each recipe, natch, is accompanied by relevant product suggestions.

All of the company’s books, in fact, are designed with cross-merchandising in mind to drive in-store sales. Bastille flatware, microplane graters, linens, practically everything but the cajun-style meatloaf itself can be conveniently purchased in stores — though the cookbooks almost never overtly refer the reader to Williams-Sonoma products. Cookbook lines also echo retail concepts: the new title The Kid’s Cookbook, for example, should fit right in with those $269 toy stoves available in the Pottery Barn Kids stores (two launched in California last month; observers dubbed them the newest leisure activity for “yuppies in training”), and a dedicated line of Pottery Barn Kids books is forthcoming. Cross-platform synergy is at play in marketing tactics as well — web kiosks are available in most retail stores, while the online services are promoted in catalogues. A customer database of 70 million purchases from 20 million households is just the icing on the old-fashioned vanilla-seed pound cake.

Nonetheless, only about a third of the cookbooks are sold through the retailer’s channels, a proportion that initially had store managers livid at seeing their own books heavily discounted right across the fashion mall at Barnes & Noble. The company says heightened brand awareness has been well worth the cost of selling to chains, and in fact store managers report customers tromping around with cookbooks in hand, seeking relevant kitchen accouterments. As for international sales, they’re split up depending on whether Williams-Sonoma is active in a particular market. Where the retailer operates stores, the books go out under the Williams-Sonoma mark; otherwise, Weldon Owen publishes without the brand name.

Collaboration between the packager and retailer also extends to market research. Store managers pass along observations about which products are moving, and comment on the life cycle of certain fads. Kolpas says that focus groups are de rigueur for books and magazines, recalling a memorable “store intercept” foray while researching the Kitchen Library series. In a Beverly Hills store, a woman was asked how many books in the 25-volume series she had bought. “Oh, I have 50,” she replied. “One set for my Beverly Hills home and one set for my Aspen home.” While perhaps an extreme example, the appeal of continuity-style publishing was not lost on Williams-Sonoma. “It underscored the collectibility of the series,” Kolpas says. “The old continuity clubs may be a dying breed, but the collectors are still out there.”

And that brings us back to the Pokémon phenomenon. “For almost everything we do, we own copyright,” says Newell, explaining that John Owen launched the company 15 years ago with the aim of collecting pictures and words that could be repurposed and reused. (Copyright is now shared with Williams-Sonoma, however, and the two companies have a long-term royalty agreement.) Typically, the packager creates and sells the initial books to Williams-Sonoma, while reorders go to the trade publishing partner. Weldon Owen also uses its Fog City Press imprint to reformat content, such as the recent 100,000-copy printing of Williams-Sonoma Simple Classics, which combined two Chuck Williams titles in a larger format. Fog City titles are printed to order and sold nonreturnable to the general retail trade; almost a million copies were shipped last year.

As for new series, look out for Pottery Barn House next fall and the Pottery Barn Design Library in 2002, while a partnership with The Body Shop is spawning The Body Shop Body Care Series and The Body Shop Make-Up Book, both due out next fall. Following changes at Time-Life in the wake of the AOL–Time Warner fallout, Weldon Owen is currently looking for new publishing partners, particularly to advance brand-specific programs. As Newell puts it, “There are a lot more lifestyle opportunities out there.”

Move Over, ‘Saveur’

And here’s one new twist coming at you. In November, Weldon Owen will be rolling out the new quarterly magazine Williams-Sonoma Taste, which will weigh in at about 75% food, the balance being entertaining and travel. UK-based magazine publisher John Brown Publishing will also have a hand in the project. Circulation for the launch issue will be 240,000 copies, with about 25,000 going to newsstands and the rest sold through the retailer’s distribution channels. Customers can buy a subscription at a Williams-Sonoma store and walk out with a discounted first issue in hand — perhaps the latest novelty the increasingly hybridized magazine biz.

Though Taste could easily be conceived as a sort of pay-per-view catalog, the publishers insist that the magazine is not a vehicle for Williams-Sonoma products. Chuck Williams — who takes the title of magazine founder and editorial adviser — wants the glossy to be of use to customers whether or not they frequent retail stores, and views the magazine as just another way to build customer relationships. Indeed, advertisers are courted with the proposition of reaching a “well-defined customer lovingly nurtured for over 40 years,” with a household income of $75,000. To top it all off, Weldon Owen hopes to carve out a visual niche with a “European-inspired format and design ethic.” In other words, its just the kind of thing you wouldn’t be the least surprised to find on your $145 coconut-fiber doormat.

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International Fiction Bestsellers

By PT Editors
October 1, 2000
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Frankfurt Forecast
St. Martin’s ‘Starting Over,’ Harcourt’s ‘Algorithm,’ Plus Hansel and Gretel in Germany

When the Buchmesse opens its doors on October 18, what are Sub. Rights Directors planning to pull out of their book bags as they cozy up to editors from Europe and beyond? Herewith, a sampling from some of the major players:

The S&S group has a slew of big-name books, including the latest from Jimmy Carter, Kissinger, and Bob Woodward; Stephen Ambrose’s latest, Nothing Like It in the World; Tina Sinatra’s bio of Frank, My Father’s Daughter; Mary Higgins Clark’s most recent bestseller, as well as her co-authored (with daughter Carol) Deck the Halls. Scribner has Kathy Reich’s latest and Sarah Ban Breathnach’s A Man’s Journey to Simple Abundance (published under the new Simple Abundance Press imprint). Free Press will be pushing The Power of Positive Thinking in Business (Scott Ventrella) which, given the original’s long run in Germany, should be a big hit at the Fair.

Holt, meanwhile, is excited about three Jack Macrae titles — Eric Lax’s The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat (How Penicillin Began the Age of Miracle Cures); J. Robert Lennon’s novel, On The Night Plain; and Max Phillips’s The Artist’s Wife, a novel about the life of Alma Mahler, “the lovely, aristocratic fin de siècle composer who abandoned her own art to become a collector of geniuses.” Metropolitan Book has New Yorker writer Mark Danner’s Haiti, about American foreign policy and its political consequences in Haiti. Times Books has a great-sounding title, Leadership Ensemble (Lessons in Flat, Flexible, and Fast Management from the World’s Only Conductorless Orchestra), by Harvey Seifter and Peter Economy. Apparently the Orpheus Orchestra has had no conductor for three decades, and the “Orpheus Process” is attracting the attention of the business world. Also coming is Peter Ward and Don Brownlee’s The Ends of the World (The Second Half of the Life of the Earth), a scientific narrative chronicling Planet Earth’s long journey into eternity. It is, claims the publisher, “Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die on a cosmic scale.”

St. Martin’s is bringing Robin Pilcher’s Starting Over (Thomas Dunne), confident that the success of An Ocean Apart — which sold 40,000 hardcovers and 400,000 paperbacks, and was sold to 10 countries — will help. James Brady’s Warning of the War, also a Thomas Dunne book, is being shown, as is Stephen Cannell’s latest, The Tin Collector. Gail Tsukiyama’s as-yet untitled next novel will be discussed, though the mss. is not in yet.

An eclectic list is on tap from HarperCollins, with books by Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jack Lemmon (Regan), Jane Goodall (with Mark Beckoff) and Eminem (Regan), but Brenda Segel predicts that Peter Duffy’s The Brothers Bielsky will be huge. French, Dutch, and Greek rights have been sold, and there are offers in Italy. Miramax has the movie option. Ecco Press’s The Blue Bear by Lynn Schooler is another big Frankfurt book, and Linus Torvalds’ Just For Fun would be, if rights hadn’t already been sold to seven countries, including China and Korea.

Houghton Mifflin looks at the effects of a volcanic eruption in the Andes in Surviving Galeras (Stan Williams & Fen Montaigne), about a 1993 expedition that killed nine scientists. Stan Williams was the only survivor. In The Seven Sins of Memory, Daniel Schacter, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Psychology, describes the nature and basis of what he calls the “seven sins of memory”: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence, and offers ways to counter their effects. And Alice Randall reworks Gone with the Wind from the perspective of Scarlett’s mixed-race half-sister in The Wind Done Gone.

Harcourt has a decidedly scientific bent this Frankfurt, with titles like A Hole in the Universe (K.C. Cole) with quotes from Dava Sobel and Oliver Sacks; The Riddle of the Compass (Amir Aczel of Fermat’s Last Theorem fame); The Monkey in the Mirror (How We Combat Our Irrationality With Science), by Ian Tattersall); The Advent of the Algorithm; and Aristotle’s Children (Richard Rubenstein). Like Holt, they have a (nonfiction) book about a composer’s wife — Frida Strindberg — as well as biographies of Albert Speer and Benedict Spinoza, not to mention fiction by George V. Higgins, and Fred Reiken’s second novel Lost Legends of New Jersey.

And a few notes from elsewhere on the bestseller lists: Metaphysics of the Gut, by the prolific Amélie Nothomb, is the author’s 10th novel in as many years and hits #2 in France this month. Nothomb’s previous novel Fear and Trembling was a breakout at over 500,000 copies, and will be published by St. Martin’s next spring. Incidentally, Nothomb will be Stateside this fall promoting a 1993 title, Amorous Sabotage, to be published by New Directions. Her books are short and precise, following the trajectory of her life, and Metaphysics takes her from birth to age 3, a time “when parents view their kids as no more than a digestive tract with feet.” It’s all told in a child’s first-person voice — and apparently done admirably well, according to French reviews.

Also in France, Frédéric Beigbeder rings up a sale with the “potentially explosive” 99 Francs, a novel that delves deeply into the “tendency of advertising to turn us all into morons.” The narrator toils in an ad agency and, following frequent episodes of cocaine-driven self-loathing, attempts to escape but finds it impossible to leave. While praising the 34-year-old Beigbeder’s ambition (the author works in an ad agency and apparently wrote the novel to pull himself out of the muck), a review of the title by a member of one of France’s largest ad agencies naturally finds the book a “mediocre” product. The public apparently thinks otherwise — the ad-biz bomb has arrived to much éclat in France, shooting to #1.

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