Archive for March, 2009

The Power of Bigmouth Marketing, Part Two: Glenn Taylor Gets His NY Groove On

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Since Richard Nash (@r_nash on Twitter) just tweeted a link to Part One, I thought I'd better get busy with Part Two.

When last I wrote, I told you about how I blogged a bit about M. Glenn Taylor's novel "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" from West Virginia University Press. 

A day or so later, I received a lovely email from the author himself, thanking me for the mention. I also received a lovely email from Dr. Mr. Reverend Neighbor's wonderful wife, thanking me for the mention. I was happy. I thought: I have done something good and honest, and the people involved noticed. 'Nuff.

So I was flabbergasted, a few weeks later, to receive an email from a young woman whose name was completely unknown to me — but her email indicated that she was with the Susan Golomb Agency. I know Susan Golomb! This new agent (a former big-publishing-house employee) wrote that she was a big fan of my blog, and particularly liked to check out what I was currently reading. "Because of you," she continued, "I've just signed my first client."

Guess who? Yes, M. Glenn Taylor!

Not only did this agent sign Glenn as a client of her agency — she (immediately, it seems, but I'm sure it took a little work!) got him a two-book deal with Ecco. They'll be re-releasing "The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" this summer, and Glenn is working on his next novel. 

Now, I have no idea how Glenn's book bubbled up the National Book Critics Circle voting tree this year. I certainly didn't get it onto the list nominees for the NBCC Fiction Award all by myself. I'm not claiming that I have special powers of literary discernment; many of my colleagues were evidently just as discerning as I am (joke!). 

However, I do know that my blog helped nudge a winner closer to the starting block. As I read that email from Glenn's new agent, I could not have been happier or prouder than if I'd just had my own first novel published (hey! pigs do fly!). 

"The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" did not win this year's NBCC Fiction Award — but I'm pretty sure Glenn Taylor didn't mind at all. His book had been considered in the same company as those of Roberto Bolano, Marilynne Robinson. But there was one more treat to come…

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The Power of Bigmouth Marketing: M. Glenn Taylor’s “The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart”

Friday, March 13th, 2009

This will likely be a rambling, digressive post, but plus ca change, plus c'est la meme Book Maven, after all. I promised earlier today on Twitter that I'd tell the story of how I came to know Glenn Taylor, the incredibly talented debut novelist whose "Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart" (West Virginia University Press) was one of the finalists last night for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the Fiction category. I do promise it's a story worth reading. 

My tale begins with the term "bigmouth:" for those of you not in publishing and/or PR/marcomm, a "bigmouth list" is a collection of people to whom you want to send a book not necessarily for review or coverage, but because they have "big mouths." In other words, they are mavens, connectors, talkers, enthusiasts — the kind of people who will chat up your book/author and tell others why they might love to read Novel X or Screed Y. I am on several "bigmouth lists;" what a surprise… I consider it a great privilege to know that publicists, editors, and authors consider my big mouth an asset from time to time.

However, not every publisher can send out that many books, and not every publicist has the same bigmouth list. That's when serendipity and love takes over. Read on and bear with me…

Every summer I spend some time at a family place on Cape Cod. Our next-door neighbors there are a retired Episcopal priest and his wife who are dear family friends (and he is a former rector of Mr. Bethanne's and mine, the man who baptized our younger Mini Maven; in other words, they're quite special to us). While we're up there our time is limited (coffee, kayak, beach, cocktails, Seafood Sam's; beach with dogs, nightcap outside, bed; lather, rinse, repeat), and so is theirs, but we always make time to spend part of a day together.

Last August, we joined our neighbors for wine and cheese in their lovely garden, and Mrs. Neighbor said: "Bethanne, I know your blog for Publishers Weekly (NB: I still did at that time). Would you possibly perhaps maybe only-if-you-really-want-to take a look at a book for me?"

As every book blogger, critic, and writer knows, those words are normally the kiss of death. How many horrid memoirs, bad thrillers, and bodice-rippers have family/friends foisted off on us in the name of "I'd love to get your professional opinion!" over the years? Mrs. Neighbor knows this, and she is far too refined to ever press anything on anyone if it doesn't have merit. I knew the book must have some.

As Mr. Reverend Neighbor explained, the author of said book had been a member of a youth group he'd run during a stint at a Huntington, WVA parish. He thought that the former lad was quite likely and that I would enjoy the book. They handed the novel over: The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart by M. Glenn Taylor. I promised to read it.

I let the book languish for a bit while I worked my way through the stack I'd already brought along on our vacation, but when I did pick it up, I was blown away and knew I'd found something special. I blogged about it being On My Nightstand in that former Publishers Weekly blog (which has morphed into this one!), and hoped that Glenn Taylor would be a tiny bit tickled to see the mention. Nothing more.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Recommended Reading: “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

36268589A few months ago I received an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) that intrigued me less because of its lovely cover design than because it is the first offering from a new imprint, Amy Einhorn Books (Penguin/Putnam). When you’re putting your name on the spine, especially in these trying book times, your maiden offering has to be something very special.

Fortunately, The Help, a debut novel from Kathryn Stockett, is something very rare: A work of near-literary fiction that has the accessibility and warmth of what we tend to call “women’s fiction” (when I figure out exactly what “women’s fiction” is besides marginalized, I’ll let you know). 

 

I say “near-literary” because I think Stockett stops short of what the best literary fiction accomplishes. I won’t attempt to define literary fiction, but one of the things it does do is allow inner lives to show without telling. There’s a great deal of telling in The Help, and not all of it is worthwhile. We might, for example, be able to understand more about Aibileen, the first African-American housekeeper we meet in Stockett’s early-1960s Jackson, Mississippi, if we saw more of her in her own home and in her own element. Stockett works very hard on making the black maids’ chapters authentic, writing in dialect and from their perspectives. I’ll let other critics cavil about the authenticity of the dialect — whether or not Stockett got it exactly right, she did make it consistent, and I found it helped rather than hurt my reading. 

 

What hurt my reading was being kept out of Aibileen and Minnie’s lives, yet on reflection I wondered (and this is my greatest weakness as a book reviewer — I reflect and forgive too much) if that doesn’t illuminate something about their lives in itself. Stockett, who writes in her Afterword about her own upbringing by a black maid named Demetrie, says that she didn’t know much about her beloved caregiver’s life or what it was like. Stockett says she wrote her book in part to fill in that gap. 

 

But women like Demetrie — and Aibileen, and Minnie — had to guard what small amount of private life they could. They were too accustomed to their time, strength, and knowledge being co-opted by the women (and men — after all, they were the ones paying the bills, even if they spent most of their time avoiding “the help” or acting as if their wives’ housekeepers were their personal nursemaids) who employed them to allow those women or their children much trespass into their private lives. Stockett does acknowledge this in the book’s scenes that take place at Aibileen and Minnie’s homes; the two maids are reluctant to allow Miss Skeeter, the increasingly liberal college-grad town daughter, to enter their houses. Skeeter, of course, thinks of this in terms of her own safety. Aibileen and Minnie know it’s actually for their own.

 

Stockett’s wisdom in choosing these liminal early years of a landmark Civil Rights decade is really an accident  of birth. Like Mae Mobley, the toddler in Aibileen’s charge, Kathryn Stockett was a tiny girl in 1960s Mississippi. But sometimes, knowing that your Fortuna-given perspective has a kind of power is wisdom. Regardless of the mistakes Stockett makes in dialect and nuance, her willingness to try and fill in the gap between her life and Demetrie’s is a worthy and beautiful thing. 

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