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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Randy quickly moved to secure the license to produce books bound-on-the-right-for-left-handed readers. He tossed $100 per title to book publishers for the exclusive global license to publish editions bound-on-the-right (although he skipped the Hebrew market, as that got complicated). For decades, he grabbed that license for most every fiction and nonfiction bestseller.
At the same time he built a massive mailing list of left-handed readers who wanted such books. He created catalogs, exhibited at left-handers conferences, celebrated official lefties days, worked with international left-handers organizations, and soon, just as Curtis did with OEM, Randy secured both ends of the lefty book business — the demand and the supply — and their connectivity.
It turned into a solid business.
With Randy having quickly secured the bound-on-the-right license for the most popular books, nobody else could enter the market once they saw what he had pulled off.
And nobody else had the amazing list of customers he did, or the brand that he established with the core market. Hell, every literary left-hander out there knew of Randy House: Publisher of Books Bound-on-the-Right-for-Left-Handed Readers and looked forward to its quarterly catalog of new books.
In fact, he sold the hell out of one of my Planet Dexter books, Lefty, a celebration of lefties, already bound on the right, for kids.
“This Planet Dexter release, published to coincide with International Left-handers' Day on Aug. 13, outs Julia Roberts, Whoopi Goldberg, and Brad Pitt as ... southpaws.” -- Entertainment Weekly
Randy, like me, moved from Boston to Manhattan. He bought a loft in SoHo back when lofts there could be had cheaply. He worked and lived out of his. And one year, when Randy was off to the Frankfurt Book fair, his loft was used in the Tom Hanks movie, “Big.”
One of Randy’s fantasies was to have a hidden room with a secret door disguised as a bookcase (a lifelong fantasy for many of us). He talked about having one built into his loft. I don’t know if he ever did. There certainly was room for one in his loft.
The two of us always met for drinks and dinner on the last night of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. It was good to get away from all the conference madness, and talk of the old times at Little Brown, the state of the book publishing industry, and how our own businesses were going.
We were best of friends. He even claimed he was going to leave me his business and his loft should anything ever happen to him. Back in those early days, we laughed, because the loft would have been more trouble (security, heating, AC, elevator, etc.) then it was worth.
So yep, Randy lived the really good life.
Until 1989.
When his intern was murdered.
For the stupidest reason ever.
Tomorrow: The murder of Gen Grau