Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [278]
Unlike most novelists, Shirley was a known factor to talk-show hosts, because of her self-help book, Superwoman, so we planned a full-scale publicity tour, for which Shirley planned her wardrobe with the care of a general organizing an assault and prepared herself, in the meantime, by going on a strict diet and visiting a health spa. In short, we gave it the full Jacqueline Susann treatment, and—no surprise—it worked. Lace bounced onto best-seller lists all over the country (and soon the world) and sold a ton of copies in hardcover, in paperback, and for the Literary Guild. It even got made into a trashy miniseries, always a sign of success. Actually, it passed my personal test for women’s popular-fiction success, which is that substantial numbers of women could be observed reading it on the subway and on buses. (Airplanes were the place to test the success of men’s action novels and self-help books.) Jackie Susann had used this as one of her tests to determine if we were reaching the real heart of the market for her kind of fiction, so it had been one of my happiest moments to ride the D train one morning and count the number of women who were absorbed in reading Queenie. Lace worked on the D train, which meant we were home free.
Naturally, her second novel, Savages, was eagerly awaited, and when she delivered an incredibly detailed outline, it seemed like a sure thing—it was to be the story of a group of glamorous young women who become stranded on a tropical island during a vacation trip and are forced to survive by their wits and their meager survival skills. We bought the book and went through the long process of getting it written—a group activity involving Shirley, her assistant, two editors (me and Joni), a freelance line editor, a researcher, and a staff of people doing roughly the same tasks on the other side of the Atlantic. Once again, Shirley moved into S&S with her wall charts and a chronology that unrolled on the floor, with every event in the book neatly marked off and described. By this time, Shirley was a known quantity to fiction buyers, but we did not scale down in any way our promotion plans. A lavish press kit was prepared, reading copies were printed, and we arranged a full author’s tour; in short, everything was done to ensure that the book would sell like Lace.
Instead, it bombed, dismally, completely, absolutely, from the very first moment it hit the stores. The campaign was there, the ads were terrific, Shirley did her number on TV, the stores took huge numbers of the book, all the elements of success were present and accounted for. The one thing we hadn’t foreseen was that even Shirley Conran’s loyal fans hated the book.
It wasn’t the reviewers who killed the book. The problem was that Shirley’s readers evidently didn’t want to read about women eating raw fish or building a raft or learning to kill with their bare hands. They associated Shirley with luxury, glamour, sex, and wealth, and somehow, as if by magic, they sniffed out the fact that this wasn’t the mix that Shirley was selling in Savages. They walked right past the huge piles of it in the bookstores as if the expensive four-color jacket and the displays were invisible. It’s one of those mysteries of the book trade, the way readers know when an author has failed them and how quickly the word of mouth spreads. The public knows the book is dead long before the stores, let alone the publisher, have worked it out.
As one of the older sales reps said about Savages, “It’s Shardik all over again—you can spend all the money you want, you can’t make ’em read what they don’t want to read.”
PERHAPS