The Education of Stacy Sullivan
A First-Time Nonfiction Author Learns That Getting Published Is Not Necessarily the Hard Part
THE VAST OCEAN
One evening in 1998, a week before leaving New York to cover the war in Kosovo and long before she ever thought she’d write a book about it, Stacy Sullivan went to see a movie — Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco. As she waited for the film to start she thought about a book she had been reading, Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent, by Blaine Harden, the former sub-Saharan Africa correspondent for The Washington Post. In the book was a photograph of Harden, appearing like a midget next to Manute Bol, the seven-foot-seven former NBA basketball player who came from the cow-worshipping Dinka tribe in Sudan. Glancing around the theater, she realized that the man sitting next to her was Harden. She let out what she calls a “squeal of delight.” “Blaine probably never ran into squealing fans before,” she says, “let alone at a movie theater.” A few days later they had lunch together. Harden suggested that while in Kosovo, Sullivan keep a journal and write in it every night, no matter how tired she was. You might get a book out of it, he told her.
This all happened before — when the world of books was still enchanted and an author a kind of magician who existed only on book jackets; before Sullivan learned about disengaged and overloaded editors, about the central importance of your publicist, about the necessity of preferred placement in bookstores, about the impossibility of getting your book reviewed, about the tyranny of publishers’ catalogues and Barnes & Noble book buyers; before she came to understand that to be an author is to struggle, not just to get people to read your book (this has always been hard), but just to get your book in front of potential readers’ eyes.
It’s difficult to fathom, but nearly 175,000 books were published in 2003, a 19 percent increase from the previous year, and a mountainous climb from the 45,000 published in 1991, when the number started rising exponentially. Mostly, the difference is the output of thousands of new small publishers and self-publishers that seem to multiply, rabbit-like, every year. At last count, the Publishers Marketing Association tallied 86,641 legitimate publishers with at least ten books in print. Of those, 1,804 were more substantial, with two hundred or more books to their name. Meanwhile, the miles of shelf space at Barnes & Noble outlets and the vast virtual warehouse of Amazon have made this abundance easily accessible.
But this literary cornucopia is only half the story. The past fifteen years have seen great flux in the publishing business. It is a world caught between its storied past, when challenging, risky books were championed, often at a loss, and its apparent future, one modeled on Hollywood, where only the certain blockbusters get their names on the marquee. As soon as chain stores presented the possibility of selling huge quantities of books, marketing took center stage at most publishing houses. More and more houses were also bought up by giant media conglomerates, and these new owners raised the pressure on publishers and editors to increase profit margins. An industry that for decades saw only single-digit profits was expected to match the much higher profit margins of other communications sectors. This naturally led to a concentration of resources and marketing dollars on the big books, the ones sure to sell in the millions.
In this environment, the smaller books — travelogues about Africa, biographies of Napoleon, reconstructions of World War II battles, explorations of U.S. foreign policy — began to be seen as a liability. Such books sell, at their absolute best, no more than ten thousand to twenty thousand copies. Those that can’t make this now nearly mandatory minimum have been forced to migrate to university presses and independent publishers.
Yet in spite of being increasingly driven by market pressures, publishers do still acquire thousands of serious works of nonfiction and literary fiction every year. Editors can’t help falling in love with these books. For most, this is the reason they entered the business, not to publish politicians’ memoirs and the latest diet books. And it’s undeniable that a certain percentage of the small books, for reasons only a ouija board could predict, do catch fire and become best-selling hits — Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit come to mind. For these books, for some reason, the stars aligned. But in general, the market-driven focus of the houses means that resources, both editorial and promotional, get diverted to the safe bets. The small ones get commissioned, but then are left in the lurch, with near zero support.
Sullivan, a thirty-six-year-old journalist who reported on the Balkan wars for Newsweek, has just published one of these small books. It tells the story of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the home-grown guerrilla force made up of students and farmers that fought Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian paramilitaries for control of Kosovo, a conflict that led to NATO’s 1999 intervention. She found a compelling and narratively rich way to tell the story, through Florin Krasniqi, a Kosovo Albanian émigré working in Brooklyn as a roofer, who built up the KLA with an elaborate gunrunning operation and fund-raising that brought in more than $30 million.
In many ways, the saga of doing this book, one Sullivan often refers to as a “nightmare,” is typical of first-time book writers. She approached the process naively, without understanding the realities of the publishing industry. Now, with her book published and reviewed in The Washington Post’s Book World (purely coincidently by none other than Blaine Harden, who called it “irresistibly readable”) she can’t help but feel accomplished. But she also feels something else: exasperated and sailing alone on a vast ocean of books, counting largely on luck to navigate her way through a publishing world grown increasingly cold.
A PERFECT ARC
In 1998 Sullivan was about to leave for Kosovo to report for The New York Times magazine on the emergence of the KLA. In a province that had stayed out of the Balkan wars and pursued a path of peaceful protest, these new insurgents, with their clumsy raids on Serb police stations and checkpoints, seemed to have emerged out of nowhere. Among other things, Sullivan was puzzled by the strange accoutrements of the nascent force — Radio Shack walkie-talkies and U.S. army fatigues. If the Americans weren’t supporting the group, who was? She asked around the Albanian community in the Bronx for someone to explain things, and one day she received an anonymous e-mail pointing her to Florin Krasniqi, the gregarious roofer with the blow-dried hair who would become her book’s central character.
Before Sullivan left for Kosovo, Krasniqi handed her contact information for a few of his family members. But it wasn’t until she came up against the denials and roadblocks of the notoriously reticent KLA that she realized what a valuable resource she had found in Brooklyn. Krasniqi had failed to mention that some of these family members were actually major figures in the KLA. Stuck at a roadside security barrier, she set up her satellite phone and soon found that one word from Krasniqi opened all doors. Suddenly she was allowed into training camps, shown smuggled weapons, and able to interview formerly tightlipped commanders.
It was clear that she had a great story on her hands. “I had this guy in New York who was raising money, the guys in Albania who were buying the weapons and moving them, and the family members across the border in Kosovo doing the fighting,” Sullivan says. “It was a perfect triangle.” It ran as a six-page spread in the Times Magazine in November 1998.
NATO began bombing the Serbs in March 1999. What had started as a small guerrilla force attacking Serbian targets in Kosovo led to brutal retaliatory massacres by Milosevic’s forces, and ultimately a decision by the West to intervene, a war that would last seventy-eight days and cost $45 billion. For the first time, the United States chose without invitation to use its massive military force in the service of humanitarian intervention. It seemed to augur a new phase in American foreign policy in which the U.S. and the West would become more active in quelling the many ethnic and territorial battles that raged in the cold war’s wake.
With the contacts she had cultivated, Sullivan was able to cover the war closely from the KLA’s perspective. And she also had a personalized view of how the war came to be. This kind of narrative arc was perfect for a book. As soon as the war ended she began writing a proposal. But before she could finish, she was contacted by a Manhattan literary agent, Esmond Harmsworth. He had read a piece she’d written in the now-defunct women’s magazine Mirabella, about a sixteen-year-old Albanian-American volunteer, Linda Muriqi, and her decision to leave the Bronx for Kosovo and fight with the KLA.
Harmsworth says he often finds his clients by following up on articles that strike him as “exceptionally well written and exploring a new subject.” He pursued Sullivan by telephone until she decided to let him represent her. She told him she already had in mind a book that would be much more expansive than just the story of Linda Muriqi.
Although Sullivan had a crystallized idea of what the book would be about, Harmsworth says they spent hours discussing “how much she would include, where she would start, where she would finish, what the narrative structure would be.”
These days, agents set the bar for entering the world of publishing. There was a time when getting an agent was the easy part, when even without a polished proposal, an agent might be willing to take a risk on a writer who showed promise and to develop an idea with the writer. And although agents such as these might still exist, they, like editors who actually mold a text, are becoming exceedingly rare. This makes sense. If it is harder to find a publishing house to acquire a serious book, then agents, who depend for their livelihood on selling books to these houses, should be more reluctant to spend their time on tomes that may never find their place next to a Frappuccino at a Barnes & Noble café. Harmsworth is not alone when he says, “I don’t take on a writer unless we know exactly where the idea is going.”
With Sullivan this was clear from the get-go. And by early 2001, the proposal was ready to send out to about a dozen of the top New York publishing houses. Knopf, PublicAffairs, and St. Martin’s immediately expressed strong interest. Together, they represent the range of styles at the elite houses. On the one hand there is Knopf and PublicAffairs, which take on a very limited number of books, but can invest a lot of energy and resources in their select few. St. Martin’s, on the other hand, has a much larger list, with many books that might not have found a home anywhere else, but with a staff that often gets spread thin and has a throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks attitude about promoting smaller books.
The three interested houses were not all owned by the same company, which was lucky for Sullivan. With increased consolidation, where a giant like Bertelsmann owns a huge percentage of the market through imprints like Random House and Knopf, this happens often enough. When a situation does arise in which multiple houses owned by the same company are interested in acquiring a book, they caucus to decide who will get it and what kind of bid will be offered. Whereas many houses competing against one another once might have produced a larger advance, now a group of houses can fix the price.
Sullivan met with the interested editors at all three publishing houses. In an age of marketing, these pre-acquisition interviews have become standard. They are a way for the house to see if the author is presentable and can articulately explain his or her book. Gayle Feldman, who has worked in publishing since 1976 and is currently a contributor to Publishers Weekly, wrote in her report for the National Arts Journalism Program, Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, 1975-2002, that “whether publishers like to admit it or not, an author’s telegenicity, promotability, and age enter increasingly into the acquisition equation, particularly for new authors whose careers need to be ‘made.’” Feldman herself, who wrote a family history of cancer, was asked at one of her meetings with potential publishing houses if she would be willing to cry on camera.
At Knopf and PublicAffairs, Sullivan met one-on-one with the editors. But at St. Martin’s she walked into a large conference room filled with about a dozen people, from publicists to marketing people to the editor-in-chief. They asked questions and Sullivan had to sell her book to them, referring to the numbers of educated Albanians living in America and her vague connections to prominent writers and high-ranking government officials involved in the war in Kosovo. Also in the conference room was Diane Higgins, the interested editor. An author can “come off very well on the page,” she says, “but it’s just as important in this media-centric world that the author comes off well in publicity as well, in person.” Sullivan, well-spoken and charismatic, impressed them all. It was a good thing. Sales and marketing technically can’t veto a book, Higgins said, but “they can express an opinion and it will have a lot of weight.”
Eventually, although all three houses had professed strong interest, only St. Martin’s made a bid. At Knopf, Jonathan Siegel, who had edited an earlier, critically acclaimed but poorly selling book about the Balkans by Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, was the interested editor. Sullivan says Siegel told her, “Sales won’t take another book about the Balkans from me.”
St. Martin’s offered a $35,000 advance. Sullivan had expected more, but it seems that although publishers insist there is no “typical” advance, this sum was fairly standard for an unknown writer taking on such a serious subject. Diane Higgins explains that the advance is the result of a profit-and-loss analysis. “If sales and marketing and our editorial intuition tell us that this book will find x amount of readers, it’s from there that we do a computerized analysis,” Higgins says. “We figure in all the given marketing expenses and production expenses and from that decide what kind of advance we can afford. It’s a calculated risk. But it’s all computerized these days.”
Higgins had a reputation Sullivan was familiar with. She had recently edited a memoir by Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World, about Maynard’s affair with J.D. Salinger, and had brought St. Martin’s commercial success with the Holocaust memoir The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilman, later made into an Oscar-winning movie. But interestingly, as Higgins notes, she got her start working as a publicist and it was as a publicity director that she began acquiring books. “That gives you an idea of how the company has looked more toward sales,” she says.
At a celebratory deal-signing lunch, Sullivan told Higgins that she was hungry for a lot of editing. Higgins said she hoped this would be the first of many lunches. As it turned out, throughout the next three years, Sullivan would see Higgins only once more (by chance, as she stopped by St. Martin’s to drop off some photographs). For a book like Sullivan’s, not a high-priority acquisition, this was not unusual. What it meant, though, was that she was about to enter the solitary cave of book writing without so much as a pocket flashlight.
FROM EIGHTY TO ONE HUNDRED
The book party for Be Not Afraid for You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War was on a terrace overlooking Bryant Park, the smidgen of green amid the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. It was a muggy day, and even toward evening the temperature was in the nineties. Sullivan had thrown out her back the week before and was on pain-killers, but stood smiling in the center of the party dressed in a rhinestone-fringed, salmon-colored sleeveless blouse that set off her thick auburn hair. She kissed cheeks and shook hands in the sweltering heat.
Swirling around her on the crowded terrace were representatives of the two worlds that had never been far from Sullivan’s mind as she sat for the past three years in front of her laptop. Members of the publishing world stood around in sunglasses, eating grilled shrimp on skewers and recognizing one another from yoga class. Among them was Esmond Harmsworth, looking the dandy in a blue plaid jacket that he kept on in spite of the heat, greeting everyone as “Stacy’s agent.” Chris Hedges, the New York Times war correspondent who wrote a blurb for the book jacket, stopped in for two minutes. So did an editor from Vogue.
On the other side of the terrace, mostly drinking Heinekens, were the Albanians. Florin Krasniqi signed copies of the books and greeted everyone with bear hugs. The men all had cell-phone holsters clipped to their belts, faces weathered like sandpaper, and capped teeth. Most were former KLA fighters. Sullivan said one invitee had called St. Martin’s to r.s.v.p. for the party and asked if there would be a cover charge.
Every once in a while, one world would try to approach the other. Midway through the party, Haxhi Dervisholli walked over to a woman in Jackie O sunglasses sipping white wine and said, “I am in book.” “Oh really, who are you?” she asked. “I am man what lost his leg.” Spotting a copy of the book sitting nearby, he grabbed it, and turned to the index. Finding his last name, he read out loud: “Dervisholli, 244, 270 to 273, 298.” Behind him sat Florim Lajqi, a young American-Albanian fighter for the KLA profiled in the second half of the book. “That’s nothing,” he said. “I’m, like, the whole last three chapters.”
For Sullivan, though slightly drugged and frantic, this was the reward: to watch her book out in the world, held in someone’s hands, discussed. This was the magic. But the writing had been lonely and difficult. Her small advance meant she needed to secure grants, one from the German Marshall Fund, another from the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She also worked as an editor for the Crimes of War Project Web site. Even larger advances than Sullivan’s become almost financially inconsequential when you consider that an agent’s 15 percent is removed and that the money is paid out most often in thirds (when the contract is signed, the manuscript delivered, and the book published). Jacob Levenson, whose first book,
The Secret Epidemic: The Story of AIDS and Black America
, was published earlier this year, says that the “grueling financial burdens” of writing a book are substantial. He spent much of the year after he signed his contract for a fairly small advance writing grant proposals to foundations. In the end, he says, if you become too fixated on the financial rewards alone, you can drive yourself crazy. “I’ve heard people get buried in the calculus of how much they made and was it really worth it,” Levenson says. “But you really need to think of it as an investment in a subject and an investment in your career and the community of people you are going to work with — the nonfinancial rewards.”For Sullivan, the most difficult pressure came not from financial burdens. It was the isolation of writing a book without getting feedback from an editor. As a magazine writer, Sullivan was used to a continuous and sometimes daily conversation with an editor. There was something alienating, and at times paralyzing, about being suddenly left alone.
Sullivan sent drafts to Higgins and kept waiting for comments that never came. And Higgins doesn’t deny that she did almost no editing on Sullivan’s book. “Because Stacy has such inner editorial talent as well as the journalistic gift, she self-edited much of the book without needing my guidance,” Higgins says. She adds that a book’s marketability plays no factor in deciding how to allot her time and energy. “There are no such calculations,” she insists. “It’s not as if I say, ‘This book is going to be bigger. It’s projected to sell more copies. It’s projected to be more marketable. Therefore I will spend more time on it.’ I don’t edit that way and I don’t acquire that way. It’s really just the need of the author and what the manuscript is crying out for.”
While this may be true, there is nonetheless an overwhelming trend in publishing of editors who don’t really edit. And for the most part this is a function of the increasingly market-driven aspect of the business. Elisabeth Sifton at Farrar, Straus and Giroux is quoted in Gayle Feldman’s report as saying that by the 1990s, it was clear that “editors were valued for the deals they could do, not for work well done or talent nurtured.” This is not true across the board. There are still many editors who painstakingly pore over many drafts and develop collaborative relationships with their authors. But more and more, editors are busy looking for the next big book and simply ask to see a manuscript when it’s done and then send it off to a copyeditor.
Alice Truax can attest to this shift in the status quo. A former editor at The New Yorker, Truax is now one of a growing number of freelance editors whom writers pay out of their own threadbare pockets to get additional editing for their books. She recently had her first big success with the critically acclaimed Random Family, by the first-time author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Truax says she gets offered more work than she can take on. The reasons authors come to her vary. Some have simply had a bad relationship with their editors or the publishing house. Others come to the realization that they aren’t going to get edited at all. But editing is crucial, Truax says, and can greatly improve a book, either through line edits or larger restructuring. Yet “it appears that many houses have abandoned the practice of a stringent final edit, the belief that an extra week or month at the end of the process is necessary and can radically improve a book’s quality,” Truax says. “But the difference between eighty percent there and a hundred percent there is a big difference, the difference between a book that is acceptable and a book that is truly memorable. And if the houses are no longer willing to make that investment, it’s everybody’s loss.”
Sullivan signed her book deal in mid-2001, and her first deadline was September 15 of that year. She realized, a month before the date, that she would have only half ready. Then came September 11. It had taken her time to focus and settle into the writing, but after spending a few weeks transfixed, like most New Yorkers, in front of the television, she began to feel completely incapacitated by the shift in the world’s attention. The book just didn’t feel relevant anymore. When her idea was sold, the war in Kosovo had seemed to be a key for understanding future U.S. foreign policy. Her book was to be a ground-level account of this new era of humanitarian intervention. In a matter of minutes, this storyline had been eclipsed by terrorism and holy war, and all her journalist friends were rushing off to Afghanistan. Adding to Sullivan’s woes, she had also grown disillusioned with her book’s heroes. Once the NATO bombing ended and the Serbian paramilitary was forced to leave Kosovo, the Kosovo Albanians quickly began harassing the small Serbian population. From once being the victims, they had become the perpetrators of the violence. “I felt sort of betrayed and distraught and I started hating all my characters and I just had a hard time writing it,” Sullivan says.
She sent the first half, waited for feedback, and says all she got back was a note saying, “Excellent work. When can you be finished?” Discouraged by the lack of substantive response, she nevertheless kept working.
Her new deadline was July 2003. After two more years of work, she managed to turn in a sprawling 600-page draft that she hoped her editor would then slice in half. It was all the material she had amassed, including a long digression in the form of a travelogue of her time on the road with the war photographer Ron Haviv. In short, nothing that was ready for publication.
A few weeks later, waiting for a call from her editor, Sullivan got a package in the mail containing her 600-page ramble — copyedited and with an attached index. She panicked. “I had turned in what I thought was a draft and I had gotten back this copyedited manuscript,” Sullivan says. “They were just going to print that. And it was so rough. There was no way.” But the book was already on the conveyor belt. It was listed in the next season’s catalogue and the sales representatives had begun pitching it to booksellers. Everyone, including her agent, told her there was really nothing to be done. But Sullivan insisted they pull the plug. “It wreaked such havoc,” she says. “They had to take it off the production train, where it takes on a life of its own.”
She then edited it herself, cutting out about three hundred pages, drawing on her boyfriend, whom she calls a “business type,” to help her. Still, battles raged. The art department kept giving her inappropriate covers. One had a picture of Albanians wrapped in the American flag at a demonstration, which would have been fine, “except that they were all cross-eyed and ugly.” Another was an almost exact copy of the jacket design of Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. According to Sullivan, “They just said, ‘Stacy Sullivan is writing a serious book about Kosovo. That’s sort of like Philip Gourevitch’s serious book about Rwanda. Let’s do it like that.’” Finally, she approached the art department herself, suggesting what photo and color to use.
By the end of last year, the book was out of her hands and in print, at an initial run of 5,000 copies. By this point, she had long abandoned the illusion that her publisher cared about her book’s fate. “It’s your book,” Sullivan now tells herself. “It’s not your agent’s, your editor’s, or your publisher’s. It’s your baby and you have to nurture it.”
BETWEEN MILK AND YOGURT
In a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Brooklyn, Sullivan’s book sits on a table with about sixty other new books on current affairs. Hers is an ordinary-looking book with a simple black-and-white photo on the cover, easily missed among the screaming Bush books competing for attention (Michael Moore’s huge grizzled face, Bush holding hands with Saudi Prince Abdullah, Cheney’s snarling mug). Hers is a guppy in this vast ocean of books, swimming among the sharks.
Sullivan’s publicist, Gregg Sullivan (no relation), is the person most capable of saving her from her guppy’s fate. But he is also overseeing the publicity for Newt Gingrich’s new book. To Stacy, there is little doubt about where he is going to spend his time. In the past there used to be a rule of thumb that a dollar per book printed would be spent on publicity. But this practice has long disappeared. Not only does it cost so much more to support traditional promotion, such as an author’s book tour, which now costs about $1,500 a city, but today, with the advent of the mega-bookstore, there are many more factors involved.
In a 2000 report for The Authors Guild, David Kirkpatrick, now a New York Times reporter, made explicit the effects of chain stores on what are commonly known in the industry as midlist books — those like Sullivan’s that aren’t expected to be bonanzas for publishing houses. “If there is a single reason why midlist book sales are lagging, it is the chain’s merchandising policies,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “First, the chain’s aggressive discounting of bestsellers diverts sales away from other books. Second, the chains have used their market clout and organizational sophistication to win a variety of payments from publishers that have the effect of putting midlist books, independent booksellers, and small presses all at a constant disadvantage.”
Sullivan doesn’t know how her book got on a table with the new releases in that Brooklyn Barnes & Noble. As Kirkpatrick explains, chain stores usually take money for such preferred placement. Or, as some like to say, they’ve gone into the real estate business. Here’s how it works: publishers buy what is called advertising co-op space. Chain stores and an increasing number of larger independents are allowed to retain 3 to 5 percent of each year’s net sales for advantageously promoting certain books — this sum can be significant if you consider that Barnes & Noble might order 100,000 copies of an anticipated hit and receive from $50,000 to $100,000 from the publisher. Largely on the recommendations of those publishers, booksellers decide which books will be promoted with the money. This means that profitable books are moved to the front of the stores and showcased in windows, on tables, and at the more heavily trafficked ends of aisles. This places books like Sullivan’s at a disadvantage. No ad co-op money was set aside for her book. This, along with the fact that the best-selling books are discounted as much as 25 to 30 percent, all leads to, as Kirkpatrick puts it, “a reverse Robin Hood effect.”
Independent bookstores have a tradition of promoting the diamond in the rough and igniting the crucial word of mouth that can make a book hot. But since the 1940s these stores have been in decline, and today they account for only 18 percent of retail book sales, according to the American Booksellers Association. Chains, mostly Barnes & Noble and Borders, account for 30 percent. The remaining sales are made on the Internet, through mail-order book clubs, and by mass merchandisers like Wal-Mart.
Sullivan says her publicist has told her that her book’s publicity will be “review-driven,” that he won’t do much more than send galley copies of her book out to the national media. He will not arrange book readings or signings, get her interviews, or push for reviews. As with the editing, Sullivan is once again on her own. “I’ve come to see a publisher as a distributor,” she says. “They just print it and distribute it.”
Sullivan knows that her best bet is to try to generate as much discussion of her book as possible. This means trying to get it reviewed, getting other people to talk about it, appearing on panels, writing op-eds, everything short of walking around Times Square wearing a sandwich board. And not only do writers have to hustle to get their books noticed, they have a limited time in which to do it. Bookstores don’t like to keep books on the shelves for more than three months (Calvin Trillin has famously described the shelf life of a book as somewhere between that of milk and yogurt). So this is the window of opportunity. If it passes without one review, one book reading, one feature article or segment on NPR, it can be as if the book was never published.
FINDING THE DINNER PARTY
Be Not Afraid for You Have Sons in America came out in late May, and Sullivan’s first real publicity coup was an interview on The World, a show co-produced by the BBC, Public Radio International, and WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston.
After the show, Sullivan watched her ranking on Amazon go up to a high of 2,000. The Web site has become a sort of stock market of books, where obsessive writers can check how they are doing hourly. Writers have almost no other way of learning if their books are selling, even though very few really understand what the number means. The truth is that the Amazon ranking is based, like most bestseller lists, on how fast a book is selling against other books at any given moment on Amazon’s site (it is updated hourly for the best-selling 10,000 books, daily for the top 100,000, and monthly for the rest). For example, if your book is ranked 20,000 on a given day, 19,999 books are selling more quickly than yours. It is not a marker of how much a book has sold over time, which would offer a more accurate sense of how a book is doing. Nevertheless, it’s all that’s out there that is up to the minute, and Sullivan watches it intently. Right after her interview on The World, it shot up from around 1,200,000 to 2,000 (before eventually settling in the 40,000 to 60,000 range). People were listening and then going online to buy the book.
Sullivan looked for other ways to get her book noticed. She tried to set up readings and got one in a Balkan cultural center and another at the Half King, a bar in Manhattan. Her publicist warned her not to bother trying to get any Barnes & Noble events. But she knew of one store at Astor Place in Manhattan that had a Human Rights series in conjunction with Amnesty International. After she contacted the organizers, they decided to give her a reading, albeit many months away from her publication date.
She wrote letters to all the media contacts she had cultivated from her years as a journalist. One of the brighter prospects was a friend who is an executive producer at 60 Minutes and could mention her book as part of a segment on guerrilla insurgencies.
But what she really wanted, what she was praying for, were reviews in the national media. For a book like Sullivan’s this is the most effective way to induce sales. It also happens to be the most difficult. Book-review sections have been steadily shrinking over the last fifty years. The reason usually given is decreased advertising, a rationale that Steve Wasserman, book review editor at the Los Angeles Times, thinks is a “canard.” He says it is absurd to rely on publishers to pay for space in newspapers. “I can’t recall anyone demanding of the sports section that they begin to carry ads by the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers,” Wasserman says.
Whether it be lack of advertising or, as Wasserman supposes, a “strong anti-intellectual tradition that still beats at the heart of most newspapers,” or simply that readers just don’t care for reviews, there is less space devoted to books. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1940s, an average issue of The New York Times Book Review was sixty-four pages long, more than twice today’s length. And those influential major newspapers that still devote pages to books cannot possibly cover even a small fraction of the books published. Wasserman says that at the Los Angeles Times only 1,500 books a year are reviewed or mentioned out of the more than 100,000 published. Like most book-review editors, he finds them by going through the catalogues of publishing houses and trying to anticipate “the more important, significant, or entertaining books.” He then finds “authoritative and occasionally mischievous” reviewers who are good matches for the books. He describes the process as akin to assembling a dinner party. But ultimately, Wasserman says, “the process of selection is inherently subjective, deeply unfair, almost whimsical by turns.”
Sullivan worried that her book might not get noticed for purely superficial reasons. The production had been rushed, due to her missed deadline. Also, the galleys had gone out to reviewers with the wrong subtitle and no blurbs. Instead of How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War, it read How Albanian Americans Fought for the Freedom of Their People, or, as Sullivan puts it, “How Not to Get People to Read a Book.” But on Sunday June 13, The Washington Post Book World, one of the more influential review sections, ran the unequivocally laudatory review by Blaine Harden under the headline A WAR GROWS IN BROOKLYN. Sullivan was gratified. “And he’s one of my favorite writers,” she said the following day.
The Washington Post review solidified her Amazon ranking in the low 20,000 range for a good many weeks. A link to it a week later on a much-visited Web site, Arts & Letters Daily, made it rise to 7,000 for a day. But then it dropped back down to the 20,000 range. Sullivan watched these small changes with excitement. It all felt out of her hands. In her naiveté she had thought that all serious books were reviewed in the major newspapers, especially The New York Times. A writer friend had told her, “Unless you get the Times, you’re dead.”
But her publicist informed her that she wasn’t on the list of books to be reviewed by the Times. Sullivan started writing letters to all the people she knew inside the paper, to see if they could make sure the book got the attention of the Book Review staff. This was exactly what she should do, her agent told her. But then she did something everyone advised her not to do. Thinking her book had been overlooked because of the less-than-enticing subtitle, she wrote a letter directly to the new editor of the Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus. “I tried to be as polite as I could be,” she says, “I said I hope I hadn’t overstepped my bounds.”
As of this writing, Sullivan’s book has not been reviewed by the Times. It sits on the shelves in the Eastern European history section of most Barnes & Noble stores and, in that one Brooklyn store, by some fluke, on the current-affairs table. Her editor promises, though, that if she manages to get that 60 Minutes spot, St. Martin’s will find a way to get more prominent display. Meanwhile, she sends out letters, calls all her journalist friends, tries to set up more readings. In a way, she’s lucky. Her book has won more attention than most. But she is hoping for more — that the strenuous and financially unrewarding effort will at least spark a discussion, will entertain a few people with a good story, will contribute to an understanding of foreign policy or of the Balkans. Her fear now, the fear of most writers, is that none of this will happen, that her work will just get lost, that it will just soundlessly vanish into that huge ocean of books.
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