Iraq? No, Georgia! Mary Helen Stefaniak Appears for The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia on Friday, October 22nd

If you read Mary Helen Stefaniak’s first published novel, The Turk and my Mother, you know it’s 1) set in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee and 2) it’s a novel not “in” stories but “about” stories. It’s a great immigrant saga that I particularly enjoyed selling at the Schwartz Bookshop in Bay View (2005-2008). Stefaniak’s novel has stories wrapped in stories, each revealing more about one immigrant family.

So it was a bit of a surprise to start reading Stefaniak’s new novel, The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia. Set in 1938 and told through the perspective of 11-year-old Gladys Cailiff, it’s about what happens when Threestep, Georgia gets in a new teacher in the form of one Grace Spivey, a Nashville girl who has traveled the world.

Grace brings her exotic interests into the classroom, particularly her fascination with 1001 Arabian Nights. Soon she’s organizing the Baghdad Bazaar, enchanting half the town, and perhaps enraging the other half, certainly her proper-yet-shrill student Mavis Davis, and Mr. Gordon, the town lawyer and Klu Klux Klan leader.

For Miss Spivey has no tolerance for the town’s antiquated notions of race. The Cailiff neighbor boy, Theo Boykins, is clearly the smartest in town, but as an African American, is consigned to a second rate high school far away. And the idea of using his brother Eugene in the Baghdad Bazaar play? Why, the only way to do that would be to convince everyone that a genie is a kind of slave.

So the narrative continues, surprisingly straightforward, a To Kill a Mockingbird kind of thing, or to use a more contemporary comparison, Mudbound. (I’ve got one more but I’ll save it for the big finish). And then the stories start—how the camels got to Georgia, the source of the ancient copy of the 1001 Arabian Nights book, how Spivey got to Baghdad in the first place to develop her fascination with all things Arabian.

I love the way that the racial divide in the small Georgia town mirrors many Americans current relations with Muslims, only in the 1930’s, the Muslims culture is so unknown that the folks of Threestep see the Baghdad culture as more exotic than other. In a sense, this story is about bridging the divide between Muslim and non-Muslim (the town is pretty much all Christian) as well as white and black.

I won’t give you the context of the stories, as that would give too much away, but it so reminded me of Rabih Alameddine’s last novel, where the characters would tell each other stories (some contemporary, some historical, some legendary) as they sat watch over the dying patriarch in a place (Beirut) where folks of different colors and religions coexisted peacefully. Storytelling is such an intrinsic part of Muslim culture that these stories within a story in The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia make perfect sense when viewed in this context. Muslim culture finds itself seeping into the town of Threestep, which yes, does get renamed Baghdad.

So yes (wait for it), this novel is The Help meets The Hakawati. Please feel free to use this hook when you talk this novel up to others.

Stefaniak will be at Boswell on Friday, October 22nd. Welcome her back to Milwaukee (she grew up here, her mom’s from Georgia, hence the locale of the new book (and the last one). Want more? Here's Stefaniak talking about her inspiration.

Amy Einhorn and I Chat About The Help, The Postmistress, and Well, Whatever My Rather Mixed-Up Brain Shoots Out

In yesterday's post, I noted that our top two hardcover bestsellers last week were from Amy Einhorn Books. I contacted Einhorn with some questions, and that answer led to an interesting email discussion about the line from there to here.

Goldin: How did you get from doing those Five Spot original paperbacks at Warner (Grand Central) to this? I see new imprints from editors all the time, but honestly, they aren't usually this successful right off the bat. Even Jason Kaufman's followups to The DaVinci Code didn't follow in Dan Brown's footsteps, thought folks may not know that he was the editor for the Darkly Dreaming Dexter series, which has won many fans through the spinoff cable series.

Einhorn:
Yes, I was at 5 Spot at Warner. But I had a long career before/after/during including stints at FSG (where I started), Washington Square Press, etc. I started 5 SPOT at Warner but that wasn’t really my own thing. The company wanted a trade paperback program and I was given marching orders to run it. Warner (Grand Central) was a commercial house, more so than what I’m doing now, but while I was there I published some very good titles/authors: Robert Hicks’ Widow of the South, Lolly Winston Good Grief, Amy Sedaris’ I Like You, and Min Jin Lee’s Free Food For Millionaires.

Goldin:
Oh, that makes a lot more sense, although of late, Washington Square Press is pretty similar to Grand Central in what they publish (meaning, when it became a feeder for Atria instead of for all of Simon and Schuster). The FSG start is interesting--did you acquire or just work "at the knee of." In a sense, I see what you are doing as FSG + Washington Square Press + Grand Central. Does this seem fair?

Einhorn:
FSG was my first job in publishing—I was a lowly assistant. But I got to be around Roger Straus, Jr., Jonathan Galassi, Rick Moody (then the managing editor)– pretty cool people to be around when you’re 22 (or 62, actually). I’m not sure your equation works, but yes, my imprint aims to hit that sweet spot between literary and commercial and I think we’ve been pretty successful at that.

Goldin:
It's almost like you picked up a new skill everywhere you went. I'm quite jealous of that. I don't really like change, but could have had a few more stints to get ideas. Fortunately (it didn't seem so at the time) I got to do some new things in the last years of Schwartz, or when our stores closed, all I would have known how to do was be a good buyer, and that ain't gonna keep a bookstore going.

Einhorn:
One of the good things about moving around is that you do pick up something from every place where you’ve worked. I think I’ve been able to put what I’ve learned into practice.

(Editor's note--I lost the transition here, but Ms. Einhorn wrote something to me about starting a bookstore, which is why I start yapping about it here. I can't find the comment that led me to this, but the point was that we were both jumping into change, but many would considered it old-fashioned change, behind the times.)

Goldin:
I'm generally in a panic about the opening the bookstore, but when I step back, I'm fascinated...which customers followed us and why, which publishers seem most interested in our success, how my booksellers have responded to a change in ownership and attitude--let's just say that they aren't always that thrilled with my disorganization, but running a bookstore on the cheap means less time to write up lots of rulebooks. That said, I promise to everyone that I will try to do better in 2010.

I did some shaking up at the beginning (mixing new and used, painting and fixture change, ramping up events), but now I feel like you have to keep moving along and throwing out new ideas. Last year we had a tango concert and an in-store farmer's market--now what?

Einhorn:
What about things like open mike readings like KGB does here with The Moth? Have you heard of them? I think they’re pretty successful.

Goldin:
I would like do to that. Stacie! Where are you?

I just came back from Winter Institute and my head is spinning. It was E-everything. I read the general media stories and think, "Who needs us?" I know we need to social network so we do it all, but some better than others. Our Facebook is ok, our Twitter sucks. Is email social media? I guess not because there're no comments. I am happy with that, though I break all the rules--way too long. I think the blog is our best thing, but I am more proud of some posts than others

Einhorn:
I’m not as up on the internet stuff as I should be. Recently six top bloggers started an “Amy Einhorn perpetual challenge” where they’re reading all the books I’ve published (or will publish) at the new imprint, and are then going to discuss them. It’s very flattering, and a great way to reach people. But I’m not sure that Tweeting (as some have suggested) or having a Facebook page is the way to go for me. I’d much rather have my authors be the ones out there in public, getting the attention.

Goldin:
OK, back to the books. It's just amazing how customers buy The Help. A couple years ago there was no hardcover fiction book selling like this--for years it was all nonfiction with Eat, Pray, Love or Reading Lolita in Tehran. You get a book like this and think, oh, it can be done--that mix of reading tastes that all coalesce over one thing, though admittedly, at least in our case, the taste has been decidedly female. (A note from the dinner party I recently attended. One writer asked me whether memoirs were still hot, the way her agent told her. I'd have to say no.)

Einhorn:
Yes, it’s been incredible how well the book is doing, thanks in big part to the handselling of booksellers, and the word-of-mouth recommendations from readers. It’s nice to see that at the end of the day, with all the marketing bells and whistles that we all try, this is what it all comes back to.

Goldin:
It’s all about the book. Hey, The Postmistress is just starting to pick up. We did a feature in our last email newsletter. Rebecca, who read it, liked it, but was curious about the focus on three protagonists when she thought it was really only about one.

Einhorn:
I think it is really about the three women, Frankie, although maybe it’s more about Iris and Frankie than Emma. Some reviewers have taken issue with the title, but I wonder if they’d be reviewing, or even reading it, if it were called "The Journalist."

Goldin:
As a publisher, you probably had more say in that than you would have back when you were just editing. Ever have a book leave your hands and then go in a direction you hadn't intended?

Einhorn:
Well, I think we (editors and publishers) have had books we love that go out into the world and don’t find their way—that breaks our hearts. The hope is that if we love it, the transitive property will apply and everyone else will too. I think one of the nice things about the success of The Help is that it worked exactly as I dreamed. You love it, the company loves it, and then it turns out everybody else loves it too. If it happened like this all the time, you and I would have much easier jobs!

Goldin:
And even more competition. It’s a good thing our careers are also filled with frustration.

Some of you may know that my family name on my mother's side is Einhorn. To my knowledge, we're not related. Oh, and at the end, I asked her to give a plug for a book that might not have reached the audience it deserved. Einhorn chose Kate Ledger's Remedies, a novel about a couple whose seemingly perfect marriage is scarred by grief from the death of their firstborn. The book came out last fall in hardcover. Perhaps Penguin will break out the paperback.

Next post: Daniel buys more plexy signholders!

Help, It’s Another Story About The Help.

It’s not often that books come out of nowhere to become huge bestsellers. And as we’ve beaten the one-year mark on Katherine Stockett’s The Help, it seemed like a good idea to ruminate on its success. Will publishers decide there was a formula and try to duplicate it? Will they be shocked when the formula doesn’t pan out?

Do I have to tell you about the book? No, you’ve probably already read it. If you haven't read it, it's success has already colored what you likely think of it. As I was saying to some friends this past weekend, at this point you're going to judge it based on its success, and so the book is going to read really differently than right out of the slush pile (remember all those successful books that were rejected 30 times) or as a book that was overlooked but you'd read a couple of good reviews and one of your friends said there was really something there.

Stockett hits the sweet spot between literary and commercial, which is much more likely to be achieved in trade paperback; this gives hope to hardcover publishers. I haven’t read it yet (it won’t affect my sales) but I actually have bought a couple of copies as gifts. Will I eventually? Probably. When a book is this book, you want to know what makes it connect.

One thing a lot of folks have focused on is that The Help was the first release of the eponymously named imprint Amy Einhorn Books. The imprint has a new book out called The Postmistress that is also getting a good amount of buzz. It is fitting that I bring this up this week; here are our top five fiction sellers for this past week:

1. The Help, by Katherine Stockett
2. The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

3. The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell

4. Union Atlantic, by Adam Haslett

5. Shadow Tag, by Louise Erdrich.

Wow!

I only remembered two things about Amy Einhorn:

1. She headed a paperback original imprint called Five Spot at Warner (now Grand Central) and had a decent-sized bestseller in Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (also a paperback original). The imprint, like Downtown Books at Pocket, was targeted to twenty-to-thirty-something women with escapist fiction.

2. I once ran into her in a cafeteria at the Book Expo convention where I chatted with her and Jon Karp the publisher of Twelve, an imprint at Hachette. Hey, I was the only person in that conversation who didn’t get my own imprint.

So I figured I’d ask about the road that led her to the AE colophon, a huge bestseller, and another perhaps positioned to be so. How did she get from there to here? I was a bit mystified.

What happened? Stay tuned until tomorrow.

***

I was doing some errands for my mom this morning, including making copies of some forms. Across from me was someone copying their book manuscript. Really? Not in a file? I'm not going to say the title (as that person might surf upon it), but if you were at a copy shop on Beacon Street with your manuscript, that working title doesn't work! Change it.

Who Got the Print Event Calendar/Newsletter and Why?

If you are a regular customer of ours, you may have gotten our new event calendar/newsletter in your mailbox. But you may not have. Here's the scoop.

We had enough budgeted to send a bit over 1000 newsletters. You you had to be on the Boswell Benefits program, you needed to give us your street address, and you had to spend, as it turned out, $31.27 since we opened on the program for qualifying purchases (newspapers, textbooks and certain other items excluded). And for the most part, we only sent locally, since the mailing was to try to get folks to come back to the store to shop. We've got lots of ways to keep in touch for folks further afield, such as the email newsletter and this blog.

Oh, and one other thing. If we added your info after your purchase, that purchase counted towards your Benefits, but not towards whether you got the newsletter. Hey, the system ain't perfect. Did I mention it's DOS?

Lanora at Next Chapter suggested to me that an occasional mailing is really worthwhile (Thanks, Lanora). Though folks often tell us they prefer email newsletters to print, it turns out they respond better to print mailings. We have many theories:

1) Overwhelmed by emails and they aren't opened. We currently have a 1/3 open rate, which I hear is actually quite good. We try to keep it high by limiting our mailings, by promising you that we will have interesting and unique writing inside (very little repurposing).

2. Emails are opened, but they aren't followed up on. Folks are afraid to print out emails. And sometimes they are very long. I printed out a friend's bookstore email and it was 19 pages. I've been trying to keep ours to five, but the last one was eight. But if you don't print it, you forget about it.

3. Emails disappear unless you actively find them; print newsletters stick around till you throw them away. There's also the bathroom factor. Everyone needs fresh reading material, right? Is this too gauche to mention? Maybe, but you know it's true.

4. And there's the clutter. Your email inbox is packed, but if you're like me, you get very little mail, and even less that's interesting. So we'll be very interested to see how folks respond to our newsletter. We've got over 20 events and most of them are book related. We've also got new Boswell's Best titles, and staff picks from almost every bookseller (see the newsletter for why one's missing).

Here are our picks:
Amie: Stitches, by David Small

Anne: The Calligrapher's Daughter, by Eugenia Kim

Carl: Love and Summer, by William Trevor

Conrad: Friends like These, by Danny Wallace

Daniel: Blame, by Michelle Huneven

Greg: The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

Jason: Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon

Jocelyn: The Child Thief, by Brom

Mark: Sleeping Naked is Green, by Vanessa Farquharson

Melissa: A Big Little Life, by Dean Koontz

Pam: Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins

Rebecca: This is Where I leave You, by Jonathan Tropper

Sharon: The Girl who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson

Stacie: The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood

It took a while for Bev to get into The Help, but she wound up liking it alright.

The letter from me that graces the first page? That's repurposed on our web site.

And yes, you can pick up the newsletter in our store too.

Team C.O.T. Celebrates "City of Thieves" in Paperback, Launches Next Initiative

In a blast from our past, Penguin Los Angeles-based sales rep Tom Benton detoured from a family gathering in Chicago up to Milwaukee to visit Boswell Book Company. Tom was an early champion of David Benioff's City of Thieves, and if you keep track of old Schwartz newsletters, so were we. In the end, the Schwartz stores did sell over 100 copies of the book in hardcover, but I learned from Tom that the wonderful Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colorado, sold over 400!

City of Thieves is now out in paperback and my dream is to sell tons. We have at least four booksellers who loved the book and I promise you this will not be my last post on this book. But just in case you're browsing randomly and came upon this entry, it's about two Russian young men during the siege of Leningrad on a wild chase to find a dozen eggs for a wedding, with execution in the cards if they don't succeed. It's dark and funny, working as a straight-ahead thriller and a stylized modern story. This is off the top of my head; wait till I practice better. I want to be one of those stores that sells 500 copies of something; why can't it be Benioff's novel?

Benton sat me down to chide me for not having more than one copy of Kathryn Stockett's The Help. it's the first released from the boutique imprint from Amy Einhorn, a lovely editor previously at Hachette who ran the Five Star program and also shares my mom's name (no relation to our knowledge). The Help is the easiest book ever to hand-sell, says Benton, a story of 1962 Mississippi with echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird. Since it is actually fabulous, we don't have to worry about steering anybody wrong. The reorder went in immediately.

What we're really gearing up for, however, is Ron Currie, Jr.'s Everything Matters, coming in July. He is over-the-moon about it, and the publicist Shannon at Viking/Penguin was already talking it up as well. It bodes well for us, because Schwartz in general, and the Downer location in particular, actually did pretty well with Currie's previous God is Dead, and that book was relatively quiet.

All in all, a lovely if short trip for Tom. First a pop in at Franklin's Chocolate, then lunch at TLC Soup, a short detour to buy lightbulbs at BBC Lighting, a coffee picked up at the lakefront Alterra. Yes, we've got a local source with national reach that's very competitive pricewise. If Tom had had more time in Milwaukee, I would have made him tour the fascinating showroom. Plus they have excellent initials.

Oh, and did I mention that Tom is Publishers Weekly rep of the year? I would link to the story, but I don't think it's been published. I know my friends at Tattered Cover, Vroman's, Boulder, Skylight and Book Soup are all huge fans. Congrats to Tom, my fellow member of Team C.O.T.

Yes, it galls me too that I'm not yet linking books to our web site. I promise we'll have something up very soon.