HelenKay Dimon

First, I read this sale in Publishers Marketplace:

FILM RIGHTS
Catherine Bourne’s NIGHTINGALES, called “a literary Jacqueline Susann” — like THE BEST OF EVERYTHING but set in the world of three sexy nurses working in a big city hospital today, optioned to Bradford Smith at the Christine Peters Company, in a good deal, by Barbara Zitwer Agency.

Second, I googled Ms. Bourne because, thanks to a literature class flashback, I always associate the name Catherine Bourne with Hemingway’s The Garden Of Eden. Never mind the fact I barely remember the names of the heroines in my own books. Somehow I always remember this one, which ticks me off since this is not Hemingway’s strongest work. In fact, it’s really strange. A messed up couple on their honeymoon, sexual identity questions, fidelity questions….and Catherine, well, she’s one messed up chick.

Third, the Catherine Bourne chat above is totally irrelevant to this sale. I inflicted it on you because the memory of the book hit me and this is my blog.

Fourth, with sexy nurses as the stars I’ll be able to get the hubby to see the movie. More than once if Scarlet Johansson is in it.

Fifth, what in the hell does “a literary Jacqueline Susann” mean?

Speaking of Harry Potter…

A general question: do the authors of young adult titles hate children?

JK Rowling is very big on continuing the “Harry might die in the last book” rumor with regard to poor Harry Potter. In a CNN interview about two months ago we got this:

In her Monday interview on the “Richard and Judy” show, Rowling said people are sometimes shocked to hear that she wrote the end of book seven before she had a publisher for the first book in the series.

“The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly. One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,” she said. “A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well, I do.”

The Lemony Snicket series likely will end in death as well. Newsweek had an article a few weeks ago that said this:

Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler, 36) says at least two characters will die in his 13th and final “A Series of Unfortunate Events” book, “The End.” The fate of the Baudelaire orphans and their nemesis, Count Olaf, will be revealed when 2.5 million copies go on sale at 12:01 a.m. on the appropriately unlucky day of Friday, Oct. 13.

Did I miss the new rule where kids must die in popular young adult book series? I know, death is a part of life and bad things happen to good people…but these orphan kids have suffered enough, no?

Shelf Awareness provided some interesting book sale figures this week. Specifically, thanks to the lack of a hardcover Harry Potter offering this July as compared to July 2005, children’s/YA hardcover sales were down 82.9% this year. Anyone still think JK Rowling hasn’t made an impact on the literary world?

Sales of paperbacks rose. Sales of hardcovers fell. Shelf Awareness blames increasing energy prices and shrinking family budgets for the book sale decreases. The stats look like this:

Categories with sales growth in July included:

Children’s/YA paperback, up 18.7% to $49.7 million
Adult mass market, up 15.2% to $83.5 million
Adult paperback, up 13.6% to $114.1 million
University press paperback, up 6.9% to $8.4 million
Professional and scholarly, up 1.4% to $98.5 million

Categories with sales drops:

E-books, down 5.1% to $1.2 million
University press hardcover, down 5.4% to $6.7 million
Religion, down 27.6% to $16.4 million
Adult hardcover, down 30.5% to $61.5 million
Audiobook, down 72.3% to $9.3 million

That’s B&N’s word. Don’t blame me.

Seems B&N has a new program. It works like this:

Unputdownable.

It’s not in every dictionary, but it’s a word booksellers use when they find an unusually exceptional book. Barnes & Noble Recommends is our way of sharing just such a book with you. From the thousands of titles published each season we will select one book we love — a book that we know is a riveting read and a work of extraordinary quality worthy of stimulating discussion.

The first selection is The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. It’s one of those books on every Must Read List this fall. It is also the #1 seller at B&N…or was when I wrote this blog. All of the reviews look good. The book has been compared to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca as well as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Yeah, no pressure for a debut author.

The book is considered a modern-day gothic. Ghosts, suspense, history, rumors and legends. Actually sounds interesting. In case you’re wondering about the plot, here’s a brief view:

Margaret Lea works in her father’s antiquarian bookshop where her fascination for the biographies of the long-dead has led her to write them herself. She gets a letter from one of the most famous authors of the day, the mysterious Vida Winter, whose popularity as a writer has been in no way diminished by her reclusiveness. Until now, Vida has toyed with journalists who interview her, creating outlandish life histories for herself – all of them invention. Now she is old and ailing, and at last she wants to tell the truth about her extraordinary life. Her letter to Margaret is a summons.

Somewhat anxiously, the equally reclusive Margaret travels to Yorkshire to meet her subject – and Vida starts to recount her tale. It is one of gothic strangeness featuring the March family; the fascinating, devious and wilful Isabelle and the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline.

Margaret is captivated by the power of Vida’s storytelling. But as a biographer she deals in fact not fiction, and she doesn’t entirely trust Vida’s account. She goes to check up on the family, visiting their old home and piecing together their story in her own way. What she discovers on her journey to the truth is for Margaret a chilling and transforming experience.

Saw this sale in PW and ended up on a stroll down memory lane:

FICTION: WOMEN’S/ROMANCE
Jennifer Oko’s debut GLOSS, a peek at the ratings-driven, celebrity-mad world of TV news, told through the eyes of a young morning show producer who finds herself in jail after working on what she thought was just a fluffy feature, to Selina McLemore at Mira, in a two-book deal, by Stephanie Kip Rostan at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency (World).

The subject matter of the upcoming book didn’t do much for me, but for some reason I googled the author. She’s Jennifer Cohen Oko and produces features for the CBS Early Show. She also wrote a memoir a few years ago called Lying Together: My Russian Affair. The book’s description stuck with me. It goes like this:

In January 1998, while the rest of her newsroom is chasing the Monica Lewinsky story, television journalist Jennifer Cohen gets a lead that takes her out of covering that scandal and deep into another one—the trafficking of sex slaves from the former Soviet Union into the United States. Knowing that the college crush she never quite forgot works for a St. Petersburg newspaper, she hires him to help out. Much to their surprise, they fall madly in love over thousands of miles of telephone line. Within weeks, Cohen finds herself engaged to marry a man she barely knows and on a plane to Russia. No one could have predicted the total collapse that followed—of the Russian economy, of her fiancé’s sobriety, of Cohen’s mental health and physical safety, and of her professional aspirations.

Cohen’s vivid descriptions of her life in anything-goes Moscow—bribing government officials, meeting pimps in back alleys for interviews, being told by her boss to perpetuate American clichés about Russia in her pieces—are a colorful counterpart to the despair and loneliness that replaces the love between Cohen and her betrothed. Their battles with prescription drugs, alcoholic rages, and physical abuse are recounted with perspective and wit, offering a smart, poignant, and unvarnished look at a complicated relationship in a complicated land.

I traveled to the then Soviet Union for Spring Break in 1988 – 10 years before the timing of the memoir. Only I would go to the snowy USSR while all my fellow Syracuse University London program mates went to Monaco and the South of France and anywhere else the sun could be found. Tempting, but instead I picked a place with secret police, a heartbreaking history, stunning scenery, a different alphabet and absolutely no toilet paper. I still chuckle when I think about a train ride I took from Moscow to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Never drank so much vodka in my life. If you’d been there, you’d have been drinking too. Trust me.

My visit took place during the Gorbachev/Glasnost Era. The end of the Cold War. Let’s just say the Soviet Union of 1988 (which ceased to exist somewhere around 1991) differed greatly from the Russia of today and even the Russia of 1998.

Truly, this was one of the most fascinating trips of my life. Even though I vowed to take a memoir break for a month or two, I have to get Lying Together: My Russian Affair probably less to learn about Oko’s travels then to remember my own.

Brad Meltzer has a new book out called The Book of Fate. Kirkus Reviews says this: “Trying his hand at a star-spangled version of The Da Vinci Code, Meltzer produces his biggest, dumbest book.” In case you’re wondering, I read the entire review from Kirkus and it doesn’t get any nicer. The reviewer even talks about how Meltzer’s next book is likely to star the Mickey Mouse Club. Yeah, not a positive review.

The interesting thing to me about this book is the publicity-gone-wild thing Meltzer is doing for this book. According to USA Today, the campaign looks like this:

Barbara Bush, Terry Bradshaw and others have taped interviews with the author for release as the book goes to the stores.

NASCAR racing fans in Richmond, Virginia, this weekend will see FitzBradshaw’s No. 12 car emblazoned with the logo of “The Book of Fate.”

And when it comes to the fair play of turnabout, the paperback edition of “The Book of Fate” will have material from the “Justice League of America” in it.

“Look, I was sitting in a room at Warner Books,” Meltzer said, “and they asked me, ‘Where can you put this book?’

“I said, ‘How about the Justice League over at DC Comics?’ They loved it.

“So, hey, you read a 48-page comic book, turn the page and get the first chapter of ‘The Book of Fate.’ It’s a double cliff-hanger.”

Kind of over the top, isn’t it? Seems like a bit much to me. And what exactly is the tie-in between NASCAR and Meltzer other than the obvious part where many people like NASCAR? The book isn’t about NASCAR, so this just seems silly. I prefer the method where I beg people to buy my books…

According the the Wall Street Journal this fall is the “Battle of the Big Book” with releases from John Grisham, Stephen King, John le Carré, Michael Crichton, Clive Cussler, Janet Evanovich, Charles Frazier, Margaret Atwood, Mitch Albom, Cormac McCarthy, Isabel Allende, Gore Vidal and others. Specifically, “There are 15 new titles on the way from writers with No. 1 best sellers to their credit.”

Yeah, not a good time to be a debut fiction writer, I’d guess.

While this may seem like a bonus for readers, the publishers are a tad nervous. After all, if these previous No.1 bestsellers are releasing books at the same time someone isn’t going to be No.1 this time around. I’m not a math genius, but even I can figure that out. All of this seems to go against the basic publishing priniciple set out in the article: “Planning book releases is akin to scheduling summer movies — with publishers, like film companies, trying to avoid opening one big title against another.” If that’s true, someone messed up big time.

The article contains some interesting information. To me, this part is the most telling:

Given the crowded field, even big-name writers will be out courting readers. Mr. Grisham, usually scarce on the media circuit, will be making appearances to promote “The Innocent Man,” his first nonfiction book, due in October. He even addressed his publisher’s sales force recently.

Grisham is concerned? Yep. This should be interesting to watch. It’s a good time to be a reader…well, let’s hope that’s true.

I warned you the Fall Book Previews were coming…

This time it’s USA Today’s turn. The paper offers 10 categories of books. None are romance or chick lit so don’t get excited. According to the USA Today editors, this is the Fall of the “big guns” in publishing. You’ll notice the phrase is in quotes because it’s not a phrase I’d normally say. Didn’t say it this time either. Just repeating.

If you want to check out that Big Gun Theory, check the link. The genre-specific categories go like this:

-Graphic Novels : Clearly I do not know what graphic novels are since the ones highlighted…well, let’s just say I’m confused.
-Literary Fiction: Margaret Atwood. Really? been a long time since I connected with Atwood.
-Humor: I like funny. Writing funny is really hard. These don’t sound that great but, again, I like funny…
-Memoirs: Must admit I’m a bit tired of memoirs. Dysfunctional families, bad mothers, alcoholic fathers. yeah, need a reader break from memoirs.
-Mystery/Suspense: Love this category. Not really excited by any of these, but still love the category.
-Debut Fiction: Love debut authors almost as much as I love mysteries and suspense. Thought this one had a lot of potential since it mixes debut and thriller:

The Meaning of Night: A Confession by Michael Cox (W.W. Norton, $25.95, Sept. 18). A killer “confesses” his crime in this erudite historical thriller that unfolds in 1854 London.

-Commercial Fiction: Not loving these either. Hmmmm….
-Science Fiction: Yeah, don’t know a darn thing about science fiction. Zombies sound cool.
-Thriller: Totally intrigued by this one:

With a dazzling jacket sure to lure buyers and a half-million-dollar marketing campaign behind it, The Interpretation of Murder arrives as the splashiest launch of the fall. But is this the next Alienist? It has a Gilded Age New York setting, a sadistic murderer and “alienists” (in this case Sigmund Freud and a creepy Carl Jung, also possible suspects!) weighing in on the case.

-Nonfiction: Love, love, love Erik Larson. And, he has a new book coming out – yay! It goes like this:

Erik Larson finds fascinating — if gruesome — true stories. In his best seller The Devil in the White City, he blended history (1893 World’s Fair in Chicago) and crime (a serial killer who preyed on young women). Thunderstruck has the same winning combination.

The tale unfolds around the early 1900s, mainly in England. There’s Guglielmo Marconi, the young inventor developing the first wireless. Then there’s Hawley Harvey Crippen, a mild-mannered doctor who kills his wife. Thunderstruck comes together when wireless telegrams (called marconigrams) are used to capture Crippen. Larson alternates the stories and makes both gripping.

A little something for everyone.

That still is the question.

I’m chatting about this topic over at the Brava Authors Blog. Come over and say hello.

That is the question.

For the next two days I’ll be mulling this over while I blog at Access Romance and the new Brava Authors blog. Today is Access Romance. Come visit.