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Literary
Nirvana
By Bill Zahren
(Posted 07/11/00)
Damn that J.K. Rowling. Damn
her! How dare she create the screaming mega book-buying festival
of consumption ahead of me? (Trend speakers, it's a "popular
fiction tsunami.")
Harry Potter. In case you live
in a Martian cave -- because surely even Martian plains dwellers
have heard by now -- Harry Potter is taking over the world.
Since 1997, Former British nobody J.K. Rowling has published
four Harry Potter books, each volume causing a more frenzied
response than the previous. At 12:01 a.m. July 8, Harry Potter
book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, came
out causing hockey scrums as kids and their parents cued up
in front of bookstores around the country.
OK, "hockey scrum" is a bit
much. We're talking about book people like me after all --
physically imperfect beings, often wearing glasses, a bit
reserved and usually relentlessly polite, even by Iowa standards.
A book person's idea of trash talking is saying something
like, "Actually, I like the sub-plots in Tolkien's Lord of
the Rings better, but that could just be me." That's some
serious literature smack-talk for us.
By the time I made my routine
paperback mystery buying run to Borders
books in West Des Moines, Iowa, at 6 p.m. July 10, it was
mostly over. Nationwide, Borders sold about 200,000 copies.
By Monday, the crowd had thinned to odd stragglers looking
to get on the waiting list for the next shipment.
Meanwhile, J.K. continues to
piss me off by taking her fame so well. The numbers for the
734-page book four, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,
make aspiring authors like me lightheaded. I am now engaging
MS Word Auto Bullet Mode. BAM:
- 3.8 million-copy first run, the largest first run of
any book ever. Barnes & Noble sold about 860,000
copies at stores and online (www.bn.com),
the biggest single-volume sales in its 127-year history.
- Amazon.com,
sold 350,000 copies before it even came out and
then moved another 40,000 copies Saturday.
- Rowling will make more than $10 million just on the
first printing alone. At $25.95 per copy retail, that
means others in the book printing food chain will split
the remaining $88.6 million in first-run revenue.
When authors like me drift
off to sleep, our brains in that happy, pre-sleep narcotic
state, we have visions of jacking one out of the book-selling
ballpark as Rowlings did with Potter. That's not so much a
home run as a Howitzer blast, complete with violent recoil
and a gun crew kicking the steaming, spent shell out of the
cannon.
Especially "authors" like me
with drawers full of snide-ass form rejection letters. Oh,
it's a cruel game, getting your book published. I "finished"
(I say "finished" because books are never really "finished"
until they are, in fact, printed) my book, Officer Involved,
something like two years ago and have been looking for a literary
agent off and on since then. I'm currently tweaking through
the book for the 349th time. I'm thinking about publishing
it online.
Typical rejection letter: "Dear
Author. Thanks for asking me to represent your book but, hey,
it sucks. Good luck with your futile agent search. Sincerely,
Acme Literary Agents. P.S. Rot in hell." OK, they're really
much more polite about it, usually sending a form letter that
works the "your book just doesn't fit out needs" theme. The
shortest rejection letter I've gotten so far was a one-inch
by three inch slip of paper that came back in my business-sized
SASE that said, I swear, "No thanks" and had the agency name
stamped under it. It was a rejection fortune cookie slip.
That's cold, man.
Rowlings finished Harry
Potter I in 1995 when she was so poor that nobody would
even look at her and finally got it printed in 1997. Her initial
pay for the book? $3,300. Wow. If I'm Rowling, about now I'm
sending a collection of press clippings AND a picture of me
with my $10 million check (striking!) to EVERY agent and publisher
who turned me down, along with a note that says, "Who sucks
now, Sparky?"
But, that's just me. I'm sure
Rowling wouldn't stoop to such total payback. I've
not yet read the books, but I just ordered one online and
will soon begin reading it to my daughters. It's the least
I can do for sister Rowling.
Two other great things about
this Potter phenomenon. First, it has kids lining up and voraciously
consuming books. It's so breathtakingly beautiful to have
some national buzz about a book. A BOOK. Not the latest CD
from a made-for-TV musical group. Not some grotesque TV pap
that features people eating rats and backstabbing each other
on an island. They're eating frickin' rats. You're about $9
million south of my minimum price for me to eat roasted rat
on TV when options B through Z aren't all starvation.
The second cool thing is how
the Potter idea came to Rowlings. She got the idea for the
books in 1990 while on a train stuck between Manchester and
London. It's amazing how the best creative ideas come while
your brain is just idling. You'll just be driving down the
road, or walking the dog, or hitting range balls, mind drifting
and BANG, it hits you so hard your face starts to sweat.
Said Rowling in Newsweek:
"I had this physical reaction to it (that first image of Harry
on the train), this huge rush of adrenaline, which is always
a sign that you've had a good idea, when you've a physical
response, this massive rush, and I'd never felt that before."
Rowling's experience is what fiction writers call "The Big
One." Hope of having the Big One keeps us all slaving away
in our writing caves. I hope lightning hits me some day just
as hard as it hit Rowling.
"I literally don't feel quite
right if I haven't written for a while," Rowling told Newsweek.
"A week is about as long as I can go without getting extremely
edgy. It's like a fix. It really is a compulsion."
Testify, sister.
© 2000 Bill Zahren
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