Are all booksellers writers? Not quite, though it often feels like
most of my colleagues are "working on a book." So, when a bookseller
finally does "break on through to the other side," it's a noteworthy
event.
Linda Urban, former marketing director at Vroman's Bookstore, Pasadena, Calif., is the author of A Crooked Kind of Perfect
(Harcourt, $16, 9780152060077/0152060073), a middle-reader novel about
11-year-old Zoe Elias, who dreams of playing piano at Carnegie Hall
(see Shelf Awareness review, August 2, 2007).
How do you get to Carnegie Hall (or even to writing a novel about wanting to get to Carnegie Hall)?
Read, write and rewrite.
According to Michigan-born Urban, it all began when she read Little Women
at nine and decided to become Jo March. "Jo, you may remember, wrote in
her freezing cold attic, so I dragged a card table and a folding chair
into the unfinished room above our garage. There I wrote long stories
in which nothing much ever happened."
Becoming a writer
was not an option for her then. "I loved writing when I was a kid, but
never really considered creative writing as a career path. My parents
raised me to be more practical than that, and when my dad died while I
was still in high school, I clung to that practicality."
At
Wayne State University, she focused on journalism and advertising,
earned her Master's in English, and then moved west to study film and
television critical theory at UCLA. She also began working at Vroman's
"and discovered that bookselling was a lot more fun than writing my
dissertation. In fact, it was more fun than any other job I had ever
had. I was hooked."
Her writing life was still on hold. Urban's
father had died at 40, and she believed that she would die by the time
she was 36. "I turned 37 and was suddenly struck by what a gift that
was. It gave me the courage to try something highly impractical.
Despite the fact that I was still working and now raising a child, I
decided to try writing again. I got up every morning and wrote for an
hour before going to work."
She submitted picture book
manuscripts to publishers "and received rejections--but nice ones, with
encouragements to send more things. That was enough to keep me setting
the alarm clock."
Her first sale, Mouse Was Mad,
"is currently being illustrated by Henry Cole and is scheduled for
release by Harcourt in the spring of 2009. I had a two year old when I
wrote it and--surprise!--the book is about tantrums."
A Crooked Kind of Perfect
was also conceived as a picture book, but Jeannette Larson, her editor
at Harcourt, "encouraged me to try it as a novel. It took a year or so
of thinking about it--during which time, I moved cross country [to
Vermont] and had another baby--before I gave it a shot. Once I started
writing, the book came pretty quickly."
Urban believes her
experience as a bookseller has been an asset. "Vroman's was my MFA. I
read more while I worked there than I ever did in real graduate school
and I had to process more of what I read, too, so that I could talk
about it intelligently with customers and colleagues. I heard thousands
of authors read from their work and talk about their process. For nine
years, I hosted a summer writer's workshop series on Saturday mornings.
Writers, agents, illustrators, and editors all came to give hour-long
workshops to aspiring authors. Secretly, I took notes."
She
also suggests that authors should know more about the marketing
process. "I'm anti-ignorance. Ignorance is expensive. When I was at
Vroman's, I opened tons of mail from authors who were trying to promote
their books. Many of them mass-mailed generic notes with boring press
releases attached, or they spent lots of money to have toothbrushes or
napkin rings imprinted with the title of their book, or four years
after publication they were requesting a signing at 'Vermin's
Bookstore.' I knew not to do those things."
Urban places great faith in her bookselling roots. "Booksellers are
some of the kindest, most friendly, most encouraging folks on the
planet. They are my people, you know? It is weird to be on the other
side of the desk, though. I'm always wanting to straighten the stacks
and answer customer inquiries. I can't seem to help myself. I go into a
bookstore and invariably handsell somebody else's novel."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)