HelenKay Dimon

Many book covers look the same. Now, the titles are sounding a bit similar as well. This week’s EW calls this Title Fights – with all these lifesavers hitting bookstores, who needs CPR?

Body Piercing Saved My Life by Andrew Beaujon – About the Christian rock movement.

How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed – Described as a “rom-com” novel, but what I want to know is if the author’s name is really Mameve Medwed.

How Nancy Drew Saved My Life by Lauren Baratz-Logsted – Described as “part Charlotte Bronte, part chick-lit, part Nancy Drew” – that’s a lot of parts, but I like Baratz-Logsted’s voice.

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life by Lyah Beth LeFlore – Something about a party promoter…

Last Night A Drawing Saved My Life by Stefan Wissel – I can’t figure out how to describe this, so we’ll go with what EW says: “A diary made of 100 drawings that can be torn out and reassembled.” Uh-huh.

This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes – Day trader, panic attacks…this one is getting a lot of press, so you’ve likely seen it somewhere else.

At least the covers don’t look alike. That’s something.

Here’s a different take on the role of chick lit in bringing about change in women’s lives throughout the world. Different in the sense that chick lit = good, not chick lit = evil. Yeah, I know the whole “bringing about change” thing sounds kind of grandiose, but check out The Chick-Lit Pandemic from the NYT Book Review. Somehow I missed this when it was published in March. Not sure how, but I did.

Some highlights:

In the near decade since Bridget Jones first hit the world stage — endearing, hung over and running late for work — an international commuter train of women has been gathering speed close behind. From Mumbai to Milan, Gdansk to Jakarta, regional varieties of chick lit have been sprouting, buoyed by the demographic that’s both their subject and readership: 20- and 30-something women with full-time jobs, discretionary income and a hunger for independence and glamour.

Sometimes dismissed as a marketing ploy, Western cultural imperialism or a throwback to pre-feminism, chick lit is proving an extremely adaptable genre, one that has tapped into larger social shifts in places like India and post-Communist Eastern Europe, where traditional values collide in unexpected ways with a new economic order. Trailblazing imports like Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding, and Sophie Kinsella, author of the wildly popular “Shopaholic” series, still far eclipse local writers in terms of sales, but they’ve helped create a market, aided by “Sex and the City” (either in dubbed or knockoff versions) and local editions of Cosmopolitan. All appeal to city-dwelling office workers who came of age with more prosperity — and social and sexual freedom — than their mothers had. “I think it had far more to do with zeitgeist than imitation,” Fielding said via e-mail. If the chick lit explosion has “led to great new female writers emerging from Eastern Europe and India, then it’s worth any number of feeble bandwagon jumpers.”

The article does a round-up of chick lit offerings in different countries. There are some surprises. Who knew chick lit was alive, well and thriving in Hungary?

In Hungary, Zsuzsa Racz’s “Stop, Mamma Teresa!” — which has sold 130,000 copies in a country where novels typically sell in the low four digits — follows its idealistic heroine from the provinces to Budapest, where she shares a two-room apartment in a rough neighborhood with her recovering drug addict brother and tries to prevent her desire to help everyone — her Mother Teresa complex — from driving her boyfriends away.

Or in Indonesia?

Meanwhile, there are signs of daring writing by young women in some unexpected corners of the world. In Indonesia, a genre called “sastra wangi” or “fragrant literature” — a name some of its authors find condescending — has been gaining popularity since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998. The genre isn’t chick lit per se, although it’s quite frank in its treatment of sex and politics. But “the really interesting thing,” said Helen Fielding, “would be to see chick lit coming out of Africa.” Not to mention another great frontier: Neither “Bridget Jones’s Diary” nor any of Fielding’s other books have been translated into Arabic.

Wonder if those young women at Ivy League schools who have been blaming all of society’s ills on chick lit saw this article…

I attended a book party last night. Great food. Free drinks. Beautiful flowers. Lots of people. Lots of fun. The best part – it was for me!!!

My law firm threw a bash to celebrate the launch of my April release When Good Things Happen To Bad Boys. In a lovely and generous move, the firm ordered 50 copies of my book from Amazon. I signed them and gave them away. Also signed copies people had already purchased and brought with them (that was pretty cool, too). They (the “they” here is my partner Cindy who has been amazingly supportive and excited about the book) blew up my Viva Las Bad Boys! cover and had that by the door for all to see. Here is a photo the hubby took pre-party:

Most of the attendees were friends, lawyer colleagues, therapists and other folks we divorce lawyers deal with all the time and some folks from the courthouse. My very supportive hubby and parents were also there. Here is a tired-looking me and the hubby posing pre-party:

General mingling:

Now, a bunch of lawyers gathered together in a room may not sound like much fun to most of you, but it was. Honest! We didn’t talk lawyer stuff. We talked about non-lawyer stuff, which was just great. Stepping out of our everyday litigation mode and celebrating something different, yeah, that felt good.

Since we couldn’t find anyone to review my book for PBR, we went with an interview. Go check it out.

For those too lazy to click on the link (these things can be exhausting), I’ll provide some entertainment. Here is an interesting story from Publishers Weekly about another romance writer, Rebecca Brandewyne. Sounds as if she’s had a tough time with the ex but things are looking up now:

A Kansas jury last week found print-on-demand subsidy publisher AuthorHouse guilty of publishing a work that libeled the author’s ex-wife, and ordered the company to pay $230,000 in actual damages to Rebecca Brandewyne, a bestselling author of mass-market historical romances. Brandewyne is best known for Outlaw Hearts and Upon a Moon-Dark Moor, both published by Love Spell, an imprint of Dorchester Publishing. Her next novel, Crystal Rose, is due from Mira Books.

According to court documents, AuthorHouse published Paperback Poison: the Romance Writer and the Hit Man by Gary D. Brock, with his current wife, Debbie Brock, in November, 2003. Some of the more incendiary claims in Paperback Poison include allegations that Brandewyne broke laws, committed adultery, plagiarized several of her books, and hired a hit man to kill her ex-husband, the book’s author.

Documents filed with the court by Brandewyne’s lawyers assert that the Brocks had informed AuthorHouse that the book had been turned down for publication by at least one other publisher due to concerns about its libelous content. “AuthorHouse knew or should have known,” the complaint reads, “that in publishing and distributing the book, [Brandewyne] would be injured.”

Here’s my favorite part in that it provides a little insight into AuthorHouse print runs:

Fowler said that AuthorHouse claims 74 copies of Paperback Poison in total were printed, 21 were given to the author, three were sold, and the company destroyed the 50 copies they had remaining in stock after receiving complaints about the book from Brandewyne and others. “But that book’s still out there,” Fowler said. “Sometimes, [the online seller] says the book is published by Lightning Source, sometimes 1stBooks, sometimes AuthorHouse. But it all flows back to AuthorHouse.”

I’m over at Access Romance’s All A-Blog today chatting about publisher loyalty. Go check it out. Will be back here tomorrow chatting about something else…

Whenever my hubby sees my book somewhere he takes a picture on his phone and sends it to me. This week he was in Charleston, SC on a business trip. On the way home he saw When Good Things Happen To Bad Boys at the airport. Here it is:

That just made my day. Hubby is a good man.

Why this one?

1. Do you see the title and cover of this book? How could I not pick it?
2. Somehow this one got past me. Haven’t heard of it. Haven’t heard about it. Author’s name isn’t ringing any bells. I think she’s new, but I could be wrong.
3. The cover blurb made me smile:

She sees dead people Beautiful, smart, and chic, Pepper Martin never had to work a day in her life — until her surgeon daddy was convicted of fraud, her wealthy fiancé took a powder, and the family fortune ran bone dry. Suddenly desperate, the inexperienced ex-rich girl was forced to take the only job she could get: as a tour guide in a cemetery. But a grave situation took a turn for the worse when a head-on collision with a headstone left her with an unwanted ability to communicate with the disgruntled deceased . . . and now Pepper has a whacked Mafia don demanding that she hunt down his killers — and threatening to haunt her until she does.

But…the author needs to put up a website or get her bio up at her publisher’s site or something. How dare she be hard to track down when I want to, ummm, track her down.

[UPDATE: Casey Daniels does have a website here]

The answer: Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

The question (as posed by the New York Times):

Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

The theory on why the experts picked the books they did (as set out in an essay that will appear in NYT’s May 21st Book Review):

The best works of fiction, according to our tally, appear to be those that successfully assume a burden of cultural importance. They attempt not just the exploration of particular imaginary people and places, but also the illumination of epochs, communities, of the nation itself. America is not only their setting, but also their subject.

The reality of the vote total – ie, how many people voted for the top vote getter (again, as set out in an essay that will appear in NYT’s May 21st Book Review):

They are – the top five, in any case, in ascending order – “American Pastoral,” with 7 votes; Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and Updike’s four-in-one “Rabbit Angstrom,” tied with 8 votes each; “Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” with 11; and, solidly ahead of the rest, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” with 15. (If these numbers seem small, keep in mind that they are drawn from only 125 votes, and from a pool of potential candidates equal to the number of books of fiction by American writers published in 25 years. Sometimes cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

I was following along just fine until that last part. The 15-people-voted-for-Morrison’s-book-and-therefore-it’s-the-best idea made me blink about 600 times in confusion. This Best List was decided by the votes of 15 people? Not sure I’m buying the “cultural significance can be counted on the fingers of one hand” theory. So, 125 people voted and 15 picked Beloved and that really means, well, what? One could argue that the “cultural significance” of this poll is zero. I’m just saying…

Looking for something to do in August? Well, after running to the store that first week to buy 40 copies of my release Viva Las Bad Boys!, you can get in a plane, train, metro or car and get to New York to see J.K. Rowling, Stephen King and John Irving in “AN EVENING WITH HARRY, CARRIE AND GARP” at Radio City Music Hall. No, not a musical. Not a play. It’s described like this:

Both evenings will feature King, Irving and Rowling reading selections from their own works, surprise guests and an audience question and answer session. The evenings will benefit two non-profit organizations; The Haven Foundation which helps performing artists whose accidents or illnesses have left them uninsured and unable to work; and Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), an international independent medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters, or exclusion from health care in more than 70 countries.

Get thee to Ticketmaster since chances are you’ll only get one opportunity to see/hear this trio together as a trio. And, really, NYC is only about 180 degrees that time of year. Very, very pleasant…

This I get:

FICTION: WOMEN’S/ROMANCE
Jennifer Estep’s KARMA GIRL, the humorous adventures of an intrepid Lois Lane-style reporter whose forte is unmasking — and sometimes disrobing — America’s most illustrious superheroes, to Cindy Hwang at Berkley, in a two-book deal, by Kelly Harms at Jane Rotrosen Agency (NA).

This I don’t:

FICTION: MYSTERY/CRIME
Actress Adrienne Barbeau and Irish author Michael Scott’s THE VAMPIRES OF HOLLYWOOD, about a policeman searching for a Hollywood murderer, and the horror film actress/vampire who helps him, and VAMPIRES OF BROADWAY, to Erin Brown at Thomas Dunne Books, by Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.

Adrienne Barbeau? Maude, Love Boat and Fantasy Island - that Adrienne Barbeau?

And, for the record, I was about 10 years old when she appeared on those shows…