BESTSELLERS & BEST FRIENDS
My book publishing blog, with murder mysteries woven through it.
If this is your first visit, be sure to start with “1. Let’s do it!”
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I called Ligonier Police Chief Jim. Stuff’s happening. But I’ve been warned not to post any of it. As I suspected, it looks like one of you folks reading this blog is the killer. (I’m about as lucky at this blogging stuff as I was at the high school dating stuff.)
Anyway, yesterday, I mentioned Jack Keely, the guy I’m working with on a children’s book series.
And whose handy mystery writing guidelines look like they’re going to help me nail a real killer.
Jack and I first met when I hired him to illustrate a book I was publishing: Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things.
I had a children’s imprint (at Penguin). My Planet Dexter imprint published unexpected-one-of-a-kind, kid-appealing, parent-approved, stealth-learning books.
It was a wonderful enterprise. A solid backlist was forming, foreign language deals were coming in, and we sold school-book club/fair rights on every book to either Scholastic or Troll.
And with our staff doing most of the writing, we weren’t sharing rights income 50/50 with an external author. All of that income wonderfully fell right to our bottom line.
Then one day a brilliant manuscript arrived to my in-box. Its author was Sylvia Branzei and the title of her proposed book was Grossology: The Science of Really Gross Things.
Sylvia, an educator, had conceived of the perfect life sciences book.
Instead of teaching kids about their bodies via a predictable and boring presentation, she started her teaching units with gross things like farts, burps, bad breath, smelly feet, stinky armpits, and pimples.
And once her students were crazily engaged, she worked back to the science behind the grossness.
We luckily found Jack and merged Sylvia’s text with his brilliant art. I nearly fainted when seeing the first sample pages, they were so perfect, as if the publishing gods had intended the marriage.
And then we put fake (joke shop) vomit on the book’s cover. Oh boy, oh boy, if ever a book was going to get spotted in a crowded bookstore, this was it!
And if ever there was a book that kids would beg their parents to take to the cash register. This could be huge!
So with great hope and enthusiasm, the sales team went out to take orders.
And the response? A DISASTER!
This (above) is porno according to Walmart.
Bookstores refused to stock it, saying, “We don’t sell books with vomit on them.” WTF? Where did that policy come from? Has anybody else ever before pitched you a book with fake vomit on it? How the hell do you have a policy for that?! I hate stuff like that.
Walmart wouldn’t take it. Said it was pornographic, citing an illustration of a bare butt. To hell with them.
At the end of the day, the critical retailer was Barnes & Noble. If they’d stock it, other bookstores would have to come on board. They couldn’t afford to lose sales to B&N.
I much admired the B&N buyer, but something about the book made her nervous.
As always, the pressure was on the buyer to maximize the margin on the shelf space she was responsible for. I.e., just what margin was she earning off of each foot of shelf space she bought for? The determining formula included 1) discount from publisher, 2) co-op marketing dollars from publisher, 3) retail price, and 4) inventory turnover. If the cookbook buyer or the travel buyer made a higher margin per foot on their shelves, then the children’s buyer would lose shelves to those other buyers. Retailing is not for the faint of heart.
The B&N buyer kept refusing to stock Grossology. Damn it! I so believed in it. If we could just get it into stores, if kids could just see it, I absolutely knew it would take off. It was time to step up to that conviction.
I called the buyer. I told her I’d send her 300 free copies of Grossology. She didn’t have to spend a cent. I’d pay the shipping. If the book bombed, just trash them. Grossology retailed for $15. If she sold 300, she’d clear $4,500. That margin could not be beat. She hesitated…then agreed.
I pushed a bit more. I wanted it in the window of the Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan.
Another 50 free books got me that. We shipped the 350 books to B&N.
Just two days after those 350 books arrived at B&N, our sales rep walked into my office holding up a fax. “Order for 2,500 units of Grossology from B&N.” We smiled and high-fived. Four days later he walks in again, “Another 5,000 books from B&N.”
Our sales manager got on the phone to the sales team and told them what B&N was doing. They all called all their accounts. Within 24 hours, orders started pouring in from the other accounts. (But never from Walmart. Like I said, to hell with them.) And we started re-printing the book as fast as we could.
Within a month Grossology hit the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for a year.
Its success grew:
into a series—Animal Grossology with fake bird poop on the cover, Grossology Begins at Home with a rubber cockroach on the cover, etc.
a Grossology museum exhibit traveled to science museums all over the world (and still does)
an animated series showed up on TV
Sylvia toured (and still does) North America, visiting schools, science museums, and conferences.
Grossology was one of the biggest hits of the decade and a Top Ten moment in my career. Damn proud of it and the team behind it.
Thanks, Jack. And thanks, a second time for that mystery writing help.
Tomorrow: Why isn’t it, “Three women are at a bar.”