The Secret of Stealth Bestsellers

Every author’s fantasy is a huge advance, a big marketing budget, and a review in the New York Times. That’s how your book becomes a bestseller.

            It’d be nice, sure. But rare to the point of being fantasy.

And it’s not the only way to go big.

            True story: Paul Harding wrote an elegant, slim novel, Tinkers, and a very small press, Bellevue Literary Press, printed a modest number of copies. BL Press felt it was the kind of book that needed to find its readers.

            Skip forward: A friend tells another friend that he’s read a fabulous book. Not knowing that that year, his friend is head of the Pulitzer Prize fiction committee (a secret society of sorts). His friend reads it, loves it, and has BL Press send copies for all the other judges. And that’s now Tinkers became the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

            But wait. Here’s an even more incredible story.

Terry Kay is a Georgia writer of uncommon talent as a storyteller and writer. He’d had several novels published by the time he wrote To Dance with the White Dog, a hauntingly beautiful story. His agent sent it around to New York publishers. It was unanimously rejected. So Key sent it to a small press in Atlanta. They liked it – and published it. But Kay got no advance. No budget. He was essentially given a box of books to go sell. Not exactly the road to stardom.

            Then a distant friend reads it, loves it, and gives it to his friend. His friend happens to be Paul Harvey, the late, great heartland radio host with a huge national following. Harvey reads it, likes it, and talks it up on air. The book takes off. It gets made into a fetching Hallmark movie, starring the late Jessica Tandy and the late Hume Cronyn, two great, classic American actors. (Husband and wife, they starred together in numerous movies, and on stage.) To Dance with the White Dog turns out to be the last film that the two of them made together. 

            “And now the rest of the story” (Paul Harvey’s signature on-air line).

            To Dance with the White Dog gets translated, one version into Japanese. It does modestly. And then one Japanese store clerk reads it – and goes wild over it. He begins telling everyone who comes in that they have to read the book. They do. And they tell their friends. And their friends tell theirs. And before you know it, To Dance with the White Dog becomes a gigantic Japanese bestseller – more than 2 million copies going out the door.

In the bookstore trade, this is known as “hand selling.” If you don’t get picked by Oprah, there’s always the hope that legions of bookstore people reading it will love it – and fervently tell customers they’ve got to buy.

            Call it the “power of the hand.” The most intimate connection a writer can hope for. It is the essence of the potential power of books to move us. As readers, we want to be entertained, but we hunger to be moved.

            So kudos to all readers. Telling your friends about books you love is tribal. It builds an intimate, organic “community.”

So read those books – but don’t forget the power you hold in your hand. It’s more powerful – and tremendously more meaningful to writers – then getting a mammoth advance and a treasure in marketing dollars.

            Go out and hand sell! Please.

Dream Singer, by Frank O Smith, has just been published by Artisan Island Press, a small literary press dedicated to “curating books worth publishing.” Dream Singer was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize, created by best-selling novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, “in support of a literature of social change.” Order a copy – and start talking.

www.frankosmithstories.com

The Backstory on Race in America

“Waking Up White: And Finding Myself in the Story of Race,” is an honest, apprising look at race, and why it has remained such an intractable issue in America. Author Debby Irving writes that race is “the elephant in the room.” Her cultural memoir is, as she describes it, “my story of racial ignorance.”

“I was talking with a friend of mine, a woman who came to America from Trinidad, a black woman,” Irving told me, speaking about the beginning of her journey toward greater understanding. “She was telling me about a group in her church she was involved in, and that it was amazing to her that white people didn’t think they have a race.

“That actually included me. It was a moment when I chose to be silent – yet it could have been a perfect moment to speak up – to wake up,” she said.

“Whites I meet now will commonly say, ‘I’m so afraid of offending people.’ But when I dig deeper, it’s much more about revealing their ignorance on race.”

“Talking about it is messy,” said Irving. “When you live in a culture that is risk averse, we don’t learn how to talk about conflict. For a very long time, I didn’t have the confidence that a blowup in such a conversation could be resolved.”

“Waking Up White” is a long conversation about race and how messy it can be. Irving tells the story of her own messy journey, growing up middle class, of good New England stock, thinking that race was a story about other people – people of color. How she had no understanding of the invisible, systemic racism that had favored her race, her family – herself – at the expense of people of color. Her book is neither preachy nor condescending. It is informative – and enlightening. And though it fundamentally stays grounded in her own experience, it invites readers to assess their own backgrounds and beliefs, too.

She speaks of the elephant, and how difficult it was for her to learn how to speak to others, black and white. She told me, however, that “it is very important for white people to do their education on their own. People of color are exhausted from having tried to educate us for four hundred years.”

Read her book. It’s an important one, and it offers a ray of illumination for how we might move to new place ground on race in America. 

Note: Read the afterword from my novel, Dream Singer, on my website: http://www.frankosmithstories.com/dream/afterword/afterword.html,

where I write about race as relevant to my novel.