"Go, L i t t l e B o o k . . . ". G e t t i n g a B o o k to R e a d e r s

Larry Brown, Liz Darhansoff, Richard Howorth, Shannon Ravenel, Ina Stern

An author, editor, agent, marketing director, and bookseller describe in turn how one book--Facing the Music: Short Stories by Larry Brown--made the journey from a writer's brain to readers' brains.

S HANNON RAVENEL: Our p lan is to plot the rou te f rom the wri ter ' s brain to the reader ' s brain; that is, to tell you someth ing abou t the t e a m w o r k in-

vo lved in get t ing a b o o k into print, into the publ ic ' s consciousness , and finally into its shopp ing bag and onto its beds ide table. To do this, we ga thered a sample b o o k team: the writer , the editor, the agent, the marke t ing director, and the books to re owner . You are the readers.

The wri ter is Larry Brown, a l ifelong res ident of Oxford, and the au thor of four books of fiction--Facing the Music, Dirty Work, Big Bad Love, and Joe. His first w o r k of nonfiction, On Fire, will be pub l i shed in February 1994. Larry was g radua ted f rom Oxford H i g h School and joined the Mar ines dur ing the Viet- n am War. After the war , he re tu rned to Oxford, marr ied, and sett led d o w n to make a life for his family. H e w o r k e d at m a n y jobs, beg inn ing wi th one in a s tove factory. In 1973 he jo ined the Oxford Fire Depar tment . Seventeen years later, in 1990, hav ing taught h imsel f the craft of wr i t ing fiction, hav ing col- lected 250 rejection slips, hav ing pub l i shed three books and abou t to publ i sh his fourth, wi th the rank of captain, he m a d e the decis ion to leave his job as full-t ime firefighter to b e c o m e a full-t ime writer . M y favori te definit ion of Larry ' s w o r k is f rom a r ev i ew in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger: "Larry Brown ' s wr i t ing is like Mozar t set t ing open-hear t su rgery to music."

I am the editor, and I'll tell y o u more abou t me in a minute.

Larry Brown is the author of two novels, Dirty Work and Joe, and two short-story collections, Fac- ing the Music and Big Bad Love. His next book, On Fire, is a nonfiction account of his experiences in the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. Liz Darhansoff is a literary agent with Darhansoff and Verrill Literary Agency, New York. Richard Howorth is an Oxford bookseller who serves on the Paris Review's Booksellers' Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Associa- tion. He chairs the ABA's Publisher Relations Committee and in 1986 was awarded the Charles S. Haslam Award for excellence in bookselling. Shannon Ravenel is editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and the editor of its annual New Stories from the South. From 1977 to 1990 she was series editor for Best American Short Stories, and she edited The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. Ina Stern is marketing director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

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The agent is Liz Darhansoff, the legend, agent to Larry Brown, Kaye Gib- bons, and Barry Hannah, to ment ion just a few of her clients. Her firm, Darhansoff and Verrill, represents a wide range of literary talent, from Pacific Rim poet Garrett Hongo, to Tabitha King, the wife of Maine native novelist Stephen King. Liz, who began her literary career as a publicist first for Atheneum and then for Random House, opened her own agency in 1975. Four years ago she was joined by her partner, Charles Verrill, a former editor at Viking/ Penguin. Liz has long been a friend to Algonquin Books. She has seen us through thick and th in- -and even thinner. And we are much in her debt.

The marketing director, Ina Stern, like Liz, is a Yankee. In fact, they both grew up within spitting distance of each other on Long Island. And they are both New York City freaks. Ina has moved to Chapel Hill to direct Algonquin's sales and marketing. She began her professional life as a speech therapist in the San Antonio public school system. Sometime in the early eighties she moved back to New York and into publishing, first for New York Zoetrope and then for Workman Publishing Co. Workman bought Algonquin in 1989, and in 1991 Ina was named our sales and marketing director. You will soon hear w h y Algonquin considers itself very fortunate indeed.

The bookstore owner, Richard Howorth, is the owner of Square Books, On the Square, Oxford, Mississippi, recognized in the book trade as one of the best independent bookstores in America. Richard is a Mississippian. His birthplace is Marks, Mississippi. He was twelve when his family moved to Oxford, but he didn' t think of opening a bookstore there until the mid-seventies. Then he and his wife, Lisa, went to Washington, D.C., where they worked at the Savile Bookshop for two years to learn how to open a bookstore. In 1979, they did just that. Square Books opened in space over Neilson's shoe department. Eight years later, they renovated the old two-story bui lding at 1126 Van Buren where Square Books continues to thrive.

Now, from writer to reader. Each of us will tell one part in the intrigue. LARRY BROWN: When I first started writing, about 1980, I was always intrigued

by the question about a person who went into a room by himself and created a book where nothing had existed before and wondered if it was something a person could teach himself in his spare time like a part-time job. I finally decided I would undertake it, and I wrote a novel. It took about seven months. It was a pretty horrible piece of work. It was about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone National Pa rk a place I had never been. It was full of sex and man-eating and I was pretty sure I was going to mail it off and New York City was going to mail me back a check for a million dollars, but it didn ' t turn out like that. I consider most of the stuff I wrote back then to be apprentice work. I think the writer or any writer has to go through an apprenticeship period and no one can really tell h im how long it's going to last. You've got to write X number of works. It might be a million. You don' t know until you get there. Most of the stuff that has gone unpubl ished of mine I think needs to stay unpublished. As a matter of fact, I burned one of my novels. I wrote one in like

Brown et al. 43

32 days and burned it in the back yard. You find something that you like once in a while and it just doesn't work. I 've got one called "Crossing the River" that doesn't work and one called "Commerce" that doesn't work. I like them. They are good in a way, but they are not good enough to publish and so you just kind of hang onto them.

I began to discover that there's a thing called the apprenticeship period that a writer must go through. All these things dawned on me very slowly. I was writing some short stories at the same time and trying to write everything I could. In 1983, ! wrote thirty-nine short stories and a couple of novels, too. That went on for a long time. I started going to Richard's bookstore. I took a course at the university in 1982 under Ellen Douglas. She introduced me to literature.

Actually, wri t ing is what brought me to an appreciation of literature. I read extensively when I was a kid. I read Greek mythology, Jack London, Moby Dick, Edgar Allan Poe, all kinds of things, but I really didn' t know what I was reading as a kid. Later on, when I started writing, I began to discover people like Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Wolfe, and people that I found to be like role models, which is a beginning every fiction writer needs. You need a standard of excellence to look up to because one of these days when you are writing along you are going to see that there is a great gulf between what you are writing and what you want to write, the stuff you admire most. You have to have something to aim for. It's a long process.

Richard tried to help me out. He tried to help me publish my stories. I had a difficult time getting most of my stuff across until about 1987, when Shannon saw one of my stories in the Mississippi Review. She wrote a very nice letter that kind of changed everything around, and she offered to publish a book for me. This is after I had written five novels and about a hundred short stories that had all gone unpubl ished except for two or three stories. It's been something I have done in my home like a part-time job. It's not something you go out and tell the whole world that you are doing. The first thing people are going to ask if you tell them that is, "Well, what have you published?"

"Well, I haven' t published anything." But I 've been real lucky. I 've had a lot of people here who have supported

me and helped me out. I finally began to realize that I had found what I had to do with my life. Firefighting is a very noble profession, but writ ing is some- thing ! discovered that I wanted to do more, and that's what I 've been trying to dedicate my life to.

SHANNON RAVENEL" Algonquin was founded by Louis Rubin in 1982. He asked me to join him in his extraordinarily risky and gutsy venture. You couldn' t have kept me from it. It's been ten years since we published our first list in the fall of 1983. And despite a roller coaster financial history, every day on the job has been pure exhilaration for me.

From the beginning, my main responsibility has been to find the best new fiction writers for Algonquin's imprint. One of the ways I do it is by reading

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literary journals. As series editor of Best American Short Stories, I had subscrip- tions to more than two hundred journals, and I read two thousand short sto- ries every year for fourteen years. So I knew who the good story writers were, who already had publishers, and who was new. One of my favorite journals has long been The Mississippi Review. Edited by Rick Barthelme and appearing semi-annually, the Mississippi Review has a great eye for offbeat, excellent con- temporary fiction. I always read mine the day it comes in the mail. In the spring of 1987, my copy came in the mail the day before I had to go to Wash- ington for the ABA, so I read it on the plane. The first story I read was this breathtaking thing called "Facing the Music." I didn ' t recognize the author's name, but the story was so good, so accomplished, so sure-footed` I figured it had to be by some established writer who didn' t usually frequent the little mags. I looked in the back at the contributor's note and learned otherwise. The author, Larry Brown, it said, was a firefighter from Oxford, Mississippi. And this was his first published story. (I learned later that wasn't strictly t rue--he had published an experimental story called "Boy and Dog" in Fiction Interna- tional but it looked like a poem, not a story, so I hadn ' t read it when it came out.)

"Facing the Music" is a masterful story. It evidences Larry Brown's trade- mark attribute as a writer. He does not avert his eyes from painful scenes. I thought about the characters in the story all the way to Washington.

At a dinner party the night before the ABA opening, a lobbyist friend of mine who had once asked me for a list of the best literary magazines (he wanted to subscribe to some) sat next to me. Before we 'd finished our soup, he turned to me and said, "Last night I read the best short story I think I've ever read." I made a great dinner party coup by betting him I could guess what the story was. I guessed "Facing the Music" by Larry Brown, and I was right. The dinner party audience was impressed.

The next day, manning the Algonquin booth at the ABA, I noticed a very tall, very nice-looking young man kind of loitering nearby. Finally, he approached and said, very hesitantly, "You edit the Best American Short Stories, don' t you?" His ABA ID badge said, "Richard Howorth, Square Books, Oxford, MS." Then he said, "I 'd like to recommend a story to you for the Best American Short Sto- ries. It's the best story I've ever read." I felt myself becoming prescient as I said, "I bet I know what the story is." He said, "Oh, yeah. Really." And I said, "Facing the Music," by Larry Brown. He was impressed, too.

I had already planned to write Larry Brown to ask whether he had enough stories for a book. Now that I knew there were two other people in the world who also believed the "Facing the Music" was the best short story they had ever read, I wrote my letter immediately. I asked him if we could include "Facing the Music" in the 1988 edition of New Stories from the South, an anthol- ogy Algonquin had established two years before, and I added, "Richard Howorth mentioned that you have some other stories coming out . . . . Do you think you have enough to consider the possibility of a collection?"

Brown et al. 45

Larry's answer took a week to get to me. I have Larry's permission to quote a little of it:

I'll be totally honest with you. I 've written 100 [stories], but I wouldn ' t want to show 90% of them to you because they are apprentice work, and not good enough to publish. The other thing is that the other nine or ten I want to send you are not like, or maybe not as good as "Facing the Mu- sic." I guess what I am trying to say is that maybe some of them have too many dark resolutions and unhappy endings, al though I think they are honest.

After I read the stories Larry sent, I wrote him back: "The question is not WHETHER your work will be published, but HOW." then I gave him a very conventional scenario. I knew he had at least three novels in manuscript and I suggested that Algonquin bring out a novel first and then a collection of sto- ries. Even so, we got to work pulling a collection together. This was because I just couldn' t keep myself from want ing to work on it with him.

Ultimately, another fan of Larry's, Dudley Jhanke, who was at that time doing Algonquin's marketing, said, in essence, to hell with conventional wis- dom about introducing new writers with novels. These stories are too strong to keep in manuscript.

So, flying in the face of an old publishing rule of thumb, we introduced Larry Brown to the literary world with a first collection of unrelated short stories instead of a novel. Facing the Music: Short Stories by Larry Brown, was published in the early fall of 1988. The book was dedicated to Mary Annie, Larry's wife. The title story was dedicated to Richard Howorth.

In a tiny company like Algonquin Books, the editor's job is not confined to acquiring books to publish. That's a big part of the job, but once a book is contracted for, then the really hard work begins. In order to get any attention for Larry Brown's first little book of stories, I had to try to do several things:

First: stir up excitement within the Algonquin staff. I think I probably drove the staff crazy with my own enthusiasm for the work of this writer. But as soon as each person had a chance to read the final manuscript that came out of Larry's great revision abilities, he or she was on the bandwagon. Louis Rubin himself spoke about Larry at the Faulkner Conference that year, saying that I had nearly driven him crazy talking about Larry, but that he saw that I was right to be excited.

Second: get blurbs. This is a very big deal. Nowadays, you have to get blurbs from the most famous people you can possibly think of. The whole trade trades on blurbs. Endorsements. So I set out to do a job that usually proves to be an exercise in futility because all the famous people in literature are sick and tired of being asked to read galleys and give blurbs. In more cases than you might believe, they have quit blurbing. But with Larry Brown it was a breeze. Every person I asked sent a blurb. So the book went out with a truly

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remarkable set of endorsements, from Jack Butler, Harry Crews, Ellen Dou- glas, Barry Hannah, and Willie Morris.

Third: get more stories into bigger magazines before publication of the book. This is done to create a wider audience, people out there who, when the book is published, will remember reading a great story in a magazine and think about buying a whole book full. Here, I failed. Esquire, The Atlantic, Playboy, Grand Street, and The Quarterly were all much taken with the strength of Brown's writing, as one editor wrote me, but found the stories "not quite right for our magazine." Not quite cheerful enough, is what he meant. Some risk-loving littler magazines did publish some, though. Susan Ketchin published "Samari- tans" in St. Andrews Review, and Jim Clark bought "Kubuku Rides" for The Greensboro Review.

Fourth: get the reviewers softened up to review the book. Mimi Fountain, who was doing Algonquin's publicity in 1988, wrote to hundreds of reviewers about Larry and his first book. She sent out dozens of galleys. And when the bound book was ready, she sent more than a hundred copies to even more reviewers. Tough sell, though, a first collection of short stories by a totally unknown writer. We shamelessly used the fireman-turned-writer hook. And it worked.

Facing the Music received more than thirty national reviews. The first one that appeared, from the prepublication review service Kirkus Reviews, kicked it off by saying this: "Ten raw and strictly 100-proof stories make up one of the more exciting debuts of recent memory--f ict ion that's gritty and genuine, and funny in a hard-luck way." Larry was launched.

LIz DARHANSOFF" One day in the fall of 1987, Barry Hannah, the author, called. "Darlin'," he says, "there's this fireman. He writes stories." Like Shannon, the first story I read was "Facing the Music." My response to Larry's stories was much like Shannon's response and that of the fellow she met that same day. Their ruthlessness, their power, their unpredictability, their complete lack of sentimentality, and most of all, I guess, their humanity. Boy, was I excited. I reached for the phone. I always do that when I get excited. I called Shannon. Barry had told me that she had the stories, too. "About this Oxford fireman?" I asked. "Enough," she said, "you represent enough of our writers." "Never mind. I'll find him." That was nearly six years and five fabulous Larry Brown books ago.

Here's what I have discovered during the twenty years I've been an agent. If when I've read something new, I don' t feel that I must have it; if I don't pick up the phone to tell a bunch of people about it; if I don' t feel, as they say, the real thing, it's not for me. If it is, the initial excitement will carry the day because quite frankly, the work of it is talk, ta lk talk, the relationships we build up through the years of this business, the people who believe you, who will take those calls, and who will pay attention. The rest is in the details.

So, what about the details? In the case of Larry Brown, the publisher was already in place. I couldn't have selected a better publisher. I 've been involved

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with Algonquin since they published their first list a decade ago. In my experi- ence, no publisher can match the care, thought, and energy with which Algonquin publishes. Much of the work in putting a contract in the works is collaborative: Who knows who? Who will write the letter? Who will make the call? Who owes who a favor? Agents are in constant touch with the publisher and involved in each step---the jacket, the copy, the promotional tour. I like to think we are partners with the publishers and not, as Alfred Knopf once de- scribed the relationship between agent and publisher, as a knife to a throat. Though in some cases that analogy is apt.

At the same time the publisher is readying a book for publication, the agent is at work on rights retained by the publishers under the publishing contract. Those include first serial rights, which is selling parts of the book for publica- tion in magazines before the book is published, audio recording rights, foreign translation rights, and of course, film rights. In the case of first serial, it is frequently impossible to find a cut from a novel that hangs together well because magazines are looking for stories that are stories and have a begin- ning, middle, and end. Most often you need the room of a novel to write a novel, and it's very difficult to make those cuts.

We are very hopeful of selling portions of Larry's new nonfiction work On Fire, to the magazines. It's a wonderful work and everybody is waiting to see it. Given the obvious translation problems of vernacular fiction, we've been very lucky to place Larry's work with publishers in Denmark Holland, Norway, Sweden, England, and France. I think the new book will open additional mar- kets. We'll likely wait for galleys and the ammunition of blurbs and whatever Algonquin has put together to do our submissions to Europe, because conditions there are now pretty terrible. They are severely affected by economic problems, and publishers' willingness to take risks at this time is not great. We hope things in that line will improve soon.

We have a wonderful company called Pleshette and Green in Los Angeles with whom we work on film and stage rights. When Larry's first collection of stories was published, a director in New York named Rick Cofley discovered the collections and mounted a dramatic reading performance of three of them downtown. I saw them. I was very impressed by them and in fact, at that time, I had a galley of Dirty Work which I gave him that evening. I suggested to him that it might lend itself to stage production. We also at that time contacted American Playhouse, that wonderful series on PBS. They were interested in vari- ous things--small films and occasionally a stage play which they would film for television after it was mounted. They agreed to finance Larry's develop- ment of the play, and it is being considered by the Arena Stage in Washington and is being shown to some small theatrical companies in Los Angeles. When Larry's second novel, Joe, was completed, we showed it to the producer who had originally been involved with the Dirty Work project. By then, he had moved to California and was involved in a respected production company called Spring Creek which had produced The Fabulous Baker Boys, Dry White Season,

48 Publishing Research Quarterly / Winter 1993-94

and Presumed Innocent. They, with Warners', agreed to finance the script that Larry has written, and he will go back to write a second draft now that On Fire is complete. Our agent in California is presently reading On Fire, and we'll talk about it and determine how to sell it for film.

INA STERN: Although I am supposed to talk about the market, I think it is only fair that since everybody else has gotten to talk about how they first encoun- tered Larry Brown, I should have the same opportunity. It was May 1989, and I was living in New York City working for Workman Publishing, which had recently purchased Algonquin. Larry was on his first-ever trip to Manhattan to read from his soon-to-be published first novel, Dirty Work, at the Algonquin sales conference. Somehow I was nominated to be Larry's escort on his first night out in New York. Much to his dismay, I had a car, a very small, old car which he reluctantly agreed to get into. As we criss-crossed the island, running yellow lights and zig-zagging between traffic lanes and trying to avoid cabs and buses, honking at everything that came into our path, I casually pointed out all of the wonderful sights of New York as we whizzed by them and I tried to explain to Larry that that is how you drive in New York.

He asked if we could stop for a d r ink so we drove down to my neighbor- hood, which is at the southern tip of Manhattan near the South Street Seaport. We stopped for several drinks. We spent several hours talking and around 2 A.M. found ourselves wandering around the Fulton Fish Market, which first comes alive around then and is a great place to get a glimpse of Manhattan that tourists never see.

Joe, Larry's second novel, was one of the first books I worked on after becom- ing marketing director of Algonquin Books. In order for Joe to reach its audi- ence, it really had to be sold three times. First, we had to pitch it to our sales reps at our annual sales conference. Then, the reps had to persuasively present it to the booksellers and wholesalers across the country. And then booksellers like Richard had the job of convincing people to buy it.

Our sales conferences are held twice a year, in May and December. We have approximately forty commissioned reps in the United States and Canada. Since Joe was scheduled to be published on the fall list, in October 1991, Shannon presented it to our sales reps at our May 1991 conference. Preparations for that conference begin months ahead of time when the editorial, marketing, and publicity departments all meet for the first of many all-day sessions. Our aim is to figure out the best way to get our sales reps excited about the b o o k its literary importance, and its commercial viability. We had to come up with a marketing plan that would show our commitment to the book through a major publicity and promotion campaign. At these brainstorming sessions, no idea is judged too ridiculous, too inappropriate, or too expensive. At least, not at that point.

We compared and contrasted Joe with Larry's other works, with other books on our fall list, with other books by other writers from other houses. We talked about sales tools that might help the reps present Joe to booksellers. We looked

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at the kinds of point-of-purchase materials that might generate sales in the bookstores. We started our all-important wish list of potential blurbers. Only dead people were excluded. We were fortunate enough to get quotes from some of the people we most wanted to see on that back jacket, including William Kennedy and Cleanth Brooks. Several meetings later, we had dis- carded 95 percent of what we had come up with at the first meeting because it was either too expensive, too ridiculous, or too inappropriate or because the author flat out refused to do it. For example, we abandoned our original idea of having Larry do a kind of barnstorming tour through America via pick-up truck. That fell into the too ridiculous category. We pretty much abandoned the whole idea of Larry touring at all, which fell into the "author flat out refused to do it" category. We finally settled on a limited tour by commercial airline. In the end, our plan for presenting Joe at the sales conference included slides of the author and the proposed jacket art and sales pitch materials for the reps to use in their presentations. Our basic marketing approach included promotion, publicity, and advertising designed to position Joe as a major work destined to become an American classic. This included limited author appear- ances, a large number of very cleverly designed advance reading copies, a massive media campaign for review attention, and an advertising budget which included full-page ads in the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and assorted seasonal book catalogs since the book would be on sale for Christmas. We came up with a bunch of nifty in-store promotional materials. Shannon's pitch to the sales reps reinforced the importance of Joe in establish- ing Larry as a major American writer. Because the reps had received manu- scripts prior to the conference, after Shannon's presentation we asked for their comments. This is always a risky thing because our reps are famous for being extremely critical.

The first rep who offered up a comment happened to be a very well-read man with many years" experience selling fiction whose opinion is very well respected by his peers. What he said was, "Well, I started reading and after the first 50 pages or so, I thought, 'when is this story going to get rolling?'" As the beads of sweat were forming on everybody's brow, we waited for him to conclude his comments: "And then the book exploded. I couldn't stop. I couldn't put it down. It's one of the best books I've ever read." A collective sigh of relief escaped from all.

One of the advantages or disadvantages of being on the fall list is that your book is promoted at the annual booksellers convention or the ABA, usually held on Memorial Day weekend in exotic locations like Anaheim, Las Vegas, or Miami, where publishers assemble to hype their new books and throw lavish parties where the press gathers to schmooze, and booksellers convene to meet their favorite authors, get free reading copies, and place a few orders. Since Joe was the lead fiction book on the list, it became the prominent feature in our ABA booth, or rather Larry became the prominent feature when we enlarged his photo ten times life size and used it as a backdrop. Advance

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reading copies and fold-out brochures that featured articles, interviews with Larry, and review excerpts were distributed free to booksellers and to review- ers. This was a great opportunity to get a buzz started about Larry and his latest book.

Shortly after the ABA, the sales reps hit the road to pitch the fall list. They had approximately three months to sell Joe before it was scheduled to begin shipping. Bear in mind that they only have about three minutes to pitch each book with the customer. Prior to publication, we began to receive extraordi- nary prepublication reviews in the trade journals. We launched a separate telemarketing campaign to supplement the reps' efforts, encouraging stores that had ordered too conservatively to increase their orders. We had also sent advance reading copies to the collection development specialists at 325 of the largest library systems in the country. Books began shipping to the stores approximately four weeks before publication date, which was unfortunately two weeks later than we expected. Due to a printing problem, the entire first print run had to be rejected. Luckily, perfectly printed and bound books were in the stores and at the wholesalers by the time our ads were scheduled to appear. All of us involved with the book's publication believed that it could very well be Larry's break-out book-- the one that would deliver on the prom- ise of his earlier works.

Although it is okay for us to say that about our own authors, it is much better if we can get somebody unbiased to say it for us of their own accord. Thanks to those advance reading copies distributed to the booksellers, there were plenty of people who were eager to say just that. Larry has many fans in the bookstores. So our full-page ad in Publishers Weekly, t imed to coincide with publication date, was the testimonial from booksellers and the media. Our full- page ad in the New York Times, which ran a few weeks after publication, was also a composite of blurbs and review quotes, and of course we made the most of Larry's good looks. To date, Joe has received more than a hundred reviews and feature articles in national and regional media. Mirabella, Vanity Fair, Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and the Washington Post are among them.

I believe that, with the exception of two or three newspaper reviews, Joe was highly acclaimed by all. At the end of 1991, Joe held a place on virtually every reviewer's list of the best books of the year. The American Library Association selected it as one of the twelve best fiction books of 1991. The Southern Book Critics' Circle honored Larry with their 1991 award for fiction. Publishers Weekly, the trade journal of record, not only ran an interview with Larry, but gave the book a starred review, selected it as one of the best books of the year, and even ran two pieces about Larry in their gossip column called "Talk of the Trade"---one about Larry's reading at Square Books in Oxford and the other about one of his fans who made the mistake of hiding three hundred dollars inside her copy of Big Bad Love.

Reviews don' t do anybody any good if the customers don' t see them. To

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help the booksellers' sales efforts, we produced bordered photocopies of strong local reviews and sent them out to the bookstore managers in those areas of the country and asked them to post them in their store and tell their staff and customers about Joe. The photocopies were accompanied by bookmarks which had jacket blurbs on one side and that very sexy picture of Larry on the other. Shortly after Thanksgiving, approximately three hundred of our best accounts received what we jokingly refer to as our Brown Bags---the perfect size for two copies of Joe, one to keep and one to give for Christmas. Not only did Joe get great reviews, but so did our promotion. Booksellers told us that the materials we supplied generated great word of mouth, and that's what we set out to do. It's always a real challenge to bring a book into the marketplace and make it stand out and make it shine amidst all the other hundreds of thousands of other books out there. Joe's critical success combined with our not-too-subtle promotion had set the stage for Larry's future books, which are eagerly awaited by his growing army of fans.

RICHARD HOWORTH" I first want to talk about the ABA conference and the blow-up of Larry Brown's face. It was so huge that all over the convention hall, you could see the top of Larry Brown's forehead. When I first got to the convention, I was hundreds of feet away from the Algonquin booth and I saw Larry Brown's forehead and recognized it. I said, "There's Larry Brown's head!" It was sort of a landmark for the whole convention. The Brown Bags are great fun. In Oxford, these were quite a thing, walking around the Square. I always wondered how Larry felt about his face walking around town.

I will talk briefly about how I first came in contact with Larry or with that particular story, "Facing the Music," and I'll try to relate that to bookselling. I generally stay away from manuscript material. That's the publisher 's job, and they do it well. They do it far better than I do. I am too busy reading finished books or near-finished books that are going to be published so I can sell them to the customers that I don' t bother with raw material. Larry was a friend. He called me up on the phone one day and said that he was depressed. He 'd been sending out a lot of stories and they 'd been rejected in a lot of places. He just wanted to know what he was doing wrong. I said, "Come on over and we'll talk about it." He came over. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon. He brought two or three stories which I had not read. I had never asked to read his stories, and he had never asked me to read them. The first story he handed me was "Fac- ing the Music." When I began to read it, a bolt of lightning hit me directly in the spine. I knew then that it would find an audience. The only reason he dedicated the story to me was because I just happened to be the first person to read it. Anybody who had read it at that point would have had the same enthusiasm. I believe one or two people had rejected the story for literary magazines. I think they probably just hadn ' t read it.

It was a great experience to see what happened with Shannon and Algonquin and Larry's later books. It has been one of the finest bookselling experiences I've had. It relates to bookselling in the notion of enthusiasm, which I think is

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the key thing, the most important thing I can do. Having been a bookseller all these years, I 'm at the top of the Square Books pyramid in terms of manage- ment, bookkeeping, inventory control, and all the things we have to do to run that store. Still the most important thing I can do is read. That is still the best way, the easiest way to sell books. In doing that, I listen to other customers who are reading. I am at the bottom of the food chain listening to publishers and trying to find out from them what their genuine enthusiasms are for. There's a lot of false enthusiasm, but you can always tell when it's real. With Larry and the people at Algonquin, it was always real and it still is.

There have been other examples. I know that when Ann Patchett's book was published, it was her first novel. They called and wanted to see if we could have her come to our store and sign books and read. That's generally a risky proposition because nobody had heard of the author. You put an ad in the paper, "Reading by Ann Patchett," and everybody asks, "Who is Ann Patchett?" The attendance isn't very high and the author is embarrassed. So you learn to stay away from those things. When they called from Houghton Mifflin, I could just tell by her voice that the person I talked to was completely carried away with the book. She said that everybody on the staff was also carried away with the book. She offered to send me five copies to send around the staff to see what they thought. I knew by that time that it was probably the real.thing, and it was. All the people on our staff read the book. We all loved it. It was a successful signing.

The whole process of buying books for the bookstore is very complicated, and I don' t really want to get into it. But again, you're always looking for the real thing. Trying to find that out is what being a bookseller is all about. One of the great things about bookselling is that what you are selling is such a fine and good thing that you can go to the lowest depths to promote it, and I do. I have worn animal suits, yellow hats, and everything else in order to sell a book, and I will again and I don' t mind.