Why Hasn't Any Journalist Tried to Unravel the Mystery of Harriet Klausner?

This week, when I was preparing for our book club discussion of Herta Muller's The Passport, I was browsing various web sites and came across one called "Genre Go Round." Surprisingly enough, it was an blog that indexed all the reviews by Harriet Klausner, the #1 reviewer on A-zon.

Folks have been trying to figure out if this person is the real deal for years. She has claimed to read two books a day, but the review all sound like jacket copy. And while I have previously noticed the large amount of reviews posted on A-zon-mart and Barnes and Noble's web site, it hasn't really been laid out so bluntly:

224 books reviewed in the month of February, 2009.

2882 books reviewed in 2008.

By the way, that is almost triple the number of books reviewed in 2006, though this blog might not include the higher year.

I can't figure out what they get out of project Harriet K. There is no advertising on the blog. It doesn't seem to be some trick to get you to upload a virus. It's obviously a scam, or a big practical joke, or a cult. Folks on A-zon-mart's discussion board contemplate the options.

Here's her post about Noah Boyd's The Bricklayer. Note that the second link is to our web site. Klausner likes it!

"This is an action-packed investigative tale starring a man’s man antihero who does what he believes is right especially using his contacts, fists and guns, but infrequently his brains. The story line is fast-paced from start to finish though one wonders when the Bricklayer gets any sleep. Although the finish is abrupt and the Machiavellian villain obvious from someone at the top of the Sears Tower looking down at the street; readers will enjoy this testosterone thriller."

I particularly like the part about not getting any sleep.

Writing Off site at the Writing Offsite

Another day, another offsite. Actually, we did almost none of these in February, which both gave me a rest, yet also had me more worried about monthly sales. The days when you could just throw open your bookstore doors and do business have been over for years.



This weekend I've been selling books at the UWM Spring writers festival. What I like about this crowd is that they are a bunch conducive to bookselling. Even though they know that they will be doing a lot of their business online, they are aware that a bookstore can also spread the word about their work.

It's two and a half days of lectures, panels, and every other conceivable kind of programming to help a budding writer. The keynote speakers were Agate Nesaule, Anthony Flacco, and Mukoma wa Nugugi. Flacco has some true crime, a mystery, and a writing book, which he cowrote with Sharlene Martin, another attendee. His newest is The Road Out of Hell, which tells the story behind the movie, "The Changeling." I love this description on our website because...

"In dramatizing one of the darkest cases in American crime, Flacco constructs a psychological drama about how one man is able to detoxify himself from the evil he'd encountered, offering the redemptive story of one man's remarkable ability to survive a nightmare and emerge intact."

...I have no idea what the book is about after reading it. (Editor's note--what I mean by this is that it's a really bad description that I have no control of. It doesn't indicate that it is the true story behind Clint Eastwood's movie "The Changeling", or even hint at what the crimes were. And who is "one man"? The killer? A relative? The author? I actually talked to Sharlene Martin, the book's agent, about perhaps fixing the copy on Ingram's database, which is used for all ABA e-commerce websites. For more background on the book, you might do better to look at the Wikipedia site on the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders.)

Ngugi has written Nairobi Heat, a noir mystery about an African man who return to Kenya for some crime solving, but gets caught in the world of violence, greed and prejudice. It's published by Penguin South Africa. The good part of that was that Penguin did import some copies to the U.S. The bad part is that it's a $26 paperback.

This program has been running for eight years, and last night, everybody gave a round of applause to Yolanda, who has been attending since the beginning. Several of my regular customers are in attendance, which is fun, as is Rochelle Melander, who helped with our NaNoWriMo program last November.

I expected to give out a lot of business cards, but...I forgot to bring them. Hey, they know how to get a hold of me.

Thank you to Anne for setting this up. If you are interested in getting on the mailing list for next year's program, contact Anne O'Meara at the School of Continuing Education at UWM.

Knit Local with The Loop on Humboldt, Cosponsor of Our Kyoko Mori Event on March 19th

I'm so excited about our event with Kyoko Mori on Friday, March 19th, at 7 PM. When I was at Winter Institute, I was speaking with Julia Cowlishaw, my old bookselling colleague who is now an Ingram rep, and she told me that she had recommended Yarn at a lot of her fall presentations.

Then on my trip to Brookline, I ran into PW correspondent Judith Rosen, while we were both visiting our mothers. (They live in the same building, and are very happy about the new chef in the dining hall. You really had to try the lamb!) I asked her what she was reading, and imagine if she didn't also pull out of her bag Kyoko Mori's memoir!

Our friends a The Loop are also excited about the event. I'm hoping that by copresenting, we can double (or almost double, as I'm sure we have some customers in common) the potential audience for this book that really incorporates knitting into the story, both in plot and theme. I love the way that Mori finds herself separated from her community, doing something solitary, and yet longs for the community to do that solitary activity in a group.

I visited Caitlin at the store on Humboldt (just next to the Alterra, north of Locust) and they let me take a few pictures to post. I asked about some of their nice fixtures, and got a good rec that I might find myself using. I asked if they had moved their fixtures from Bay View (which, yes, I had visited) but that store was half the size and utilized more wire fixturing than the friendly wood that's in their Riverwest location.

It's my feeling that just like people need to be taught the joys of an independent bookstore, they also need to know there are interesting, wonderful, community-oriented places to buy yarn, needles and patterns beyond Jo-Anne, Michael's, and Walmart. One of the saddest parts of Yarn is when Mori gets to Green Bay, only to see the knitting store go out of business. I think the other place that closed in the book in Milwaukee she referenced was the grand old Kovack's Fabric on Broadway. Sigh.

Just for the record, I did try to teach myself to knit with one of the kits we sold at Schwartz. In the end, I couldn't seem to get the hang of it.

While in Riverwest, I bought some toffee at Burke's. They were selling some at the Downer Sendiks, but I needed dark chocolate and they only carried milk. I'd been hearing about this place for years. It's just off Capitol.

Join The Loop's email list here. Or just email them to say hi.

March is President's Month at Boswell

You'd think all these events would be going on in February, but we have not one, but two presidential events at Boswell in March.

On Tuesday, March 9th, join University of Wisconsin Parkside Professor Sandra Moats for her talk on Celebrating the Republic: Presidential Ceremony and Popular Sovereignty, from Washington to Monroe. According to Moats, the presidential culture we have today has been with us from the very beginning.

From the catalog, which says it better than I can:

"Moats details the trials and errors of our founding fathers as they tried to symbolically establish the authority of the office of the president and the federal government. An elaborate machine designed to “crown” Washington with a laurel wreath at his inauguration shows the struggle of early leaders to invent appropriate and inspiring signs and rituals compatible with republican ideas. We now take for granted the trappings of our government, but titles, accessibility, protocol, tours, and inaugurations were all topics of great debate and deliberate decision making in the early republic."

Then on Thursday, March 18th, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor Glen Jeansonne, along with Dave Luehrssen, discuss Barack Obama's formulative years, tieing into their new book Changing Times.

It would look lopsided if I didn't have a similar catalog piece here:

"Changing Times tells the story of Obama's formative years, the family and educational experiences that shaped him, and his private life and public career. It examines the role of religion and culture in molding Obama and his public image, his status in America's class system, and the role of his wife Michelle. Changing Times finds the source of his politics less in ideology than in his personality, which is conciliatory. Obama is a man in search of what Americans hold in common instead of what keeps them apart. He has proven himself comfortable in many roles, including political activism, holding political office, practicing law, and teaching in college."

We don't have an event with David Remnick, but his new book on Obama, The Bridge, arrives April 6th.

Really. A Post on the Plexy Signholders I Just Bought

It started as a joke post, because I felt I'd done way to many intesnse, interviewy-type pieces, but we really did buy a bunch more plexy signholders, and it's actually worth noting.

When I opened the store, I added to our store with six 8x11, two 11x8, and two 11x17 plexy holders. I like signage on tables, and I like things that take a little bit of extra time to read, history or trivia or local interest, or a poem. I don't make all the signs in the store, but if I can say one thing to my other booksellers, it's to go slightly crazier when coming up with a sign idea.

I'm convinced our customers don't follow the regular consumer research. I use the model of the book Mavericks at Work, or so I think, as it's been several years since I've read the book. If I'm going to break the rules of business, I'd rather do so in an interesting way. And one of the ways I like to do them is by giving my customers the benefit of the doubt by saying something more than "Remember your mom on Mother's Day."

Let me just say I don't quite have everybody I work with on board with this. But that's ok too. Some straightforward signs will ground customers from thinking a crazy person is running things (maybe).

So with our extra tables and our obsessive sign making (we also affix signs to the walls when necessary, using plexy and that removable double-sided sticky stuff from 3M, we found we quickly ran out of signs. I got ten more. We've also taken to these little 4x6 plexys that perfectly highlight a gift item, or perhaps display a small news column (like The Onion's amusing Salinger obit, which was put on his memorial table). So we got a bunch more of them. Had I known about them, I wouldn't have spent so much time at Schwartz making do-it-yourself tent cards!

No picture, because they were copyright protected. So you can figure out how to find the site to buy some on your own.

***

Since Jason watched it at least twice, I'd be remiss if I didn't lead you to the Huffington Post's link to Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. Beware, as it's too gruesome for me to watch myself.

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.

Why Dream House Makes a Great Book Club Recommendation

The following is a letter I wrote, talking up Valerie Laken's Dream House in paperback, which I think is a great book for book clubs. Valerie is going to be my special guest at our first book club night on Wednesday, March 24th, at 7 PM. I'm convinced enough that this is a great book club book that I took the liberty of writing a letter promoting it, which I passed on to our great rep Cathy at HarperCollins, to do with as she wished. But why not share my thoughts on a grander canvas...

When I moved to Milwaukee many years ago, my first apartment was a studio in a grand old building called The Blackstone. I’d settled in pretty well, unfazed by the lack of stove or kitchen sink. Laurie Colwin washed her dishes in the bathroom, as chronicled in Home Cooking; why couldn’t I? And for such a small apartment, it had such a nice-sized tub, perfect for relaxing after a long day on my feet, selling books.

I befriended a tenant down the hall, a young woman who did promotion for a local record store, Radio Doctors. One day we were hanging out together, and the conversation turned to the man who lived there before me. “Poor Joe,” my new friend sighed, “What a good guy. He died in the bathtub, you know.”

Well, that’s nothing compared to the premise of Dream House. What if the house you bought turned out to be the scene of a murder? That’s the situation Kate finds herself in when she and Stuart impulsively purchase an old fixer-upper in Ann Arbor.

Needless to say, it puts a bit of a strain on the marriage. And Kate’s already got issues with her own family (coincidentally, they work in construction), and can’t understand why she hasn’t followed their lead and invested in new construction in the suburbs.

The story is told through Kate’s perspective, her husband Stuart, and Jay, one of the other teachers at Kate’s high school, who also has a link to Kate’s house. Oh, and did I mention the story is also Walker’s, the man who just got out of jail for committing the crime?

In many ways, the story reminds me a bit of House of Sand and Fog. Laken does a wonderful job jumping getting the reader to empathize with characters that are strongly at odds. She captures the pressures and stresses of family and relationships, and how that combustible energy can be bottled up in houses.

I’m always looking for great book club books. If you have any sort of program, I’m sure you are too. I’m looking for that sweet spot, the book that appeals to your types that are interested in theme and character, demand great writing, and want a good story as well.

I think Dream House is a book that has all those things. It’s edited by Claire Wachtel, the guiding light behind many wonderful authors like Manette Ansay, Jennifer Haigh and Thrity Umgrigar. Just to switch things up a bit, she also edits Dennis Lehane. You can also see the influence of Charles Baxter, one of Laken’s mentors, in her writing.

Here’s hoping that you pick up Dream House and find yourself recommending it your friends at other book clubs too. And here’s really hoping that some of them come back and thank you afterwards.