Maybe everyone has a book in them, but not everyone should write a book.
That's one of the lessons I learned attending the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver 6 years ago.

The program was designed to give people fresh out of college or those looking to change careers, as I was at the time, an in-depth look at the publishing industry. I did that while spending time in the beautiful and humidity-free Mile High City, where I could see the Rocky Mountains every day, and had the opportunity to hang out for most of the summer with my sister and her girls, who live there.

But anyway, at DPI, while not enjoying the weather, mountains, and my beautiful and hilarious nieces, we studied marketing, promotion, book cover design, literary agency, magazine and journal publishing, and sales, the big focus of the 6-week summer program was on editing and book publishing.

Book editors, in the course of their work, read a lot of duds. The volume of manuscripts that come across their desks is staggering. And much of it is crap.

To unearth a true gem of a book - a bestseller, even - in the slush pile (unsolicited manuscripts) is a very rare occurence indeed. Which is why authors must work with a literary agent to determine whether publication is feasible and, if so, to help them find someone to publish their manuscript.

Which is what makes it so remarkable for an author to have a first novel published. To have it quickly become a bestseller is rather astonishing.

First-time author Kathryn Stockett, 39, did just that with her novel "The Help." But it wasn't as if Stocket just strolled up to the publisher and was handed a contract. She got 45 rejection letters from literary agents first. Forty-five. And perservered. And got a bestseller under her belt.

I haven't read "The Help," but after reading Chris Talbott's review of the novel for the Associated press (below), it's on my list...


First-time author scores unexpected best seller
By CHRIS TALBOTT
Associated Press Writer
JACKSON, Miss. — Good thing Octavia Spencer is an actress. She needed all her stagecraft to hide a horrified look when her friend, Kathryn Stockett, asked her to read her new novel, "The Help."
Stockett told Spencer she based a character on her.
"My face just got hot," Spencer says, "and I thought, 'What are you talking about?'"
It got worse. The character was a short, loud black maid who spoke in a Southern dialect and never seemed able to keep a job because of her big mouth, which didn't go over well in the white neighborhoods of Jackson in the early 1960s.
"And I thought to myself, 'If this is Mammy from 'Gone With the Wind,' I am just going to call her and tell her,'" she recalls. "I think by Page 3, I realized what she was doing and I realized how intelligent these women were.
"Oh, honey, to me it's an amazing journey."
Reactions such as Spencer's are becoming common as "The Help," Stockett's debut novel, creeps up the best-seller lists after an early February debut. The premise of the book usually causes an immediate visceral reaction, especially if readers know Stockett is white. After a few pages, though, most readers are hooked.
Entertainment Weekly reviewer Karen Valby called the book's backstory potentially "cringeworthy" before giving it high praise and an A-minus. Industry standard Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called "The Help" a "button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel." Positive vibes are viral on the Web.
"It's exciting to see someone get this kind of attention for a first novel," Stockett's agent, Susan Ramer, says. "This is very rare."
Not bad for a manuscript that was shunned as Stockett shopped it to agents. She stopped counting at 45 rejection letters, but kept at it until Ramer snapped it up after reading a few pages. What others didn't see — or care to read — was immediately evident to Ramer.
"Reading it, you say, 'I've got to have this,'" Ramer says.
She was able to sell the book in a matter of days. Publisher Amy Einhorn chose it to launch her own imprint at G.P. Putnam's Sons.
"We editors like to say that the books we publish are wonderful," Einhorn says. "If we're being truthful, the fact is books of this level don't come along often. Everything I keep hearing from people is, 'I can't believe that's the first book you launched your imprint with because it's so amazing.' It was kind of a no-brainer."
"The Help" tells the story of three women during the formative years of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, where it was dangerous to push the boundaries of segregation for both blacks and whites — though for very different reasons.
So when black maids Aibileen and Minny begin to work with a white woman named Skeeter on a book about their experiences as domestic help, they fear retribution ranging from firings to beatings. For Skeeter, an awkward, hairdo-challenged University of Mississippi grad who has never had a boyfriend until midway through the novel, the penalty is ostracization from normal white Jackson society; she is branded as one of those "integrationists."
In a sense, it's a story of the movement behind the civil rights movement. But it is much more. At turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, the story feels like a pitch-perfect rendering of a time when black people weren't even second-class citizens in a state where anti-integration forces fought back with both restrictive laws and violence.
The 39-year-old Stockett was born in 1969, a few years after the novel's events. Her family had a maid named Demetrie, who helped raise Stockett before Demetrie died in the mid-1980s. It wasn't until much later that the author got a better understanding of the climate in which she grew up.
"I was young and dumb," she said in a recent interview from Los Angeles where she was on book tour.
"I'm so embarrassed to admit this ... it took me 20 years to really realize the irony of the situation that we would tell anybody, 'Oh, she's just like a part of our family,' and that we loved the domestics that worked for our family so dearly, and yet they had to use the bathroom on the outside of the house.
"And you know what's amazing? My grandfather's still alive, the house is still there. Demetrie died when I was 16, and I don't know that anyone else has been in that bathroom since then."
It is the issue of separate bathrooms that spurs Aibileen to help Skeeter with her book. She wants to keep her job and her reputation as a skilled surrogate mother but she can no longer live with the idea that the woman whose children she raises thinks she carries diseases that white people don't.
The stories that Aibileen and her friends tell Skeeter are funny, sad, poignant and terrifying, and are filled with consternation at the contradictory ways — and prejudices — of white people.
Mary Coleman, a political science professor at Jackson State University who grew up in the rural Mississippi town of Forest, found the author's portrayal of the relationships between white families and their black help authentic.
"I grew up in a community where tons of mothers provided domestic help to white families and the twists and turns of life in a largely segregated town could be learned sooner rather than later if there was a relative who worked in a white home," Coleman says. "We grew up understanding that the world looks very segregated physically speaking, but the lines or walls weren't as high as people imagined because of these whispered conversations in white homes that were, in fact, later heard in black homes."
The book also rang true to Vickie Greenlee, a 66-year-old travel agency owner, who has been a member of the Junior League for decades. Stockett skewers the Junior League of Jackson in "The Help." Its president, Miss Hilly, serves as the book's antagonist and its members, though genteel, steadfastly reinforce segregation — she starts a project that all good white Jackson families have separate bathrooms for blacks, for example.
Greenlee says the Junior League is very different today, but that Stockett captured the times well — well enough to raise a few eyebrows when Greenlee suggested they choose "The Help" for their book club.
"In describing the book to them, a couple of them said, 'Oooh, I don't know,'" Greenlee says. "But when they read it, they thought she did an excellent job. A lot of that was very relevant. And the relationships with our maids, we felt like they were part of our families. Then again they didn't take issue with us or didn't question what we did."
Stockett had no idea anyone would ever read the book when she started. She began writing it while taking a break from her job as a magazine consultant in New York City shortly after the terror attacks destroyed her hard drive and her previous attempts at fiction, which began when she majored in creative writing and English at the University of Alabama.
"We couldn't e-mail, we couldn't even make a telephone call, a land line or cell phone, for about two days, so I just got really homesick and really it had been a lot of years since I had spoken to Demetrie," Stockett recalls. "I remember wishing that I could just talk to Demetrie and hear her voice again. So I started working on this story ... trying to escape the media and all the mess on TV. It started as a short story and just continued on and on from there."
Stockett is continually surprised at the reaction to the book. It's one of those rare books that gets pushed by both small booksellers and the big chains. It's No. 1 on the Southern Independent Booksellers Association list and edged onto The New York Times and Publishers Weekly lists two weeks ago.
"I think it's because of this word-of-mouth phenomenon because people begin engaging one another in discussions about how they grew up, what their feelings were about race differences in the '60s and whether or not they relate to this kind of story," she says. "I've gotten so many e-mails from readers who are sharing their stories."

Some distant dream of a job offered tuition reimbursement for coursework that was somehow related to your job. I figured pretty much any course of study relates on some level to writing and editing, so I checked out a master's program at Rosemont College, which was closeby. Alas, because my work schedule overlapped with the class schedule by half an hour two nights a week, my employer nixed that idea. It occurred to me that maybe they would've found some way to get out of it anyway. But it was a nice idea on paper.

If you do have that kind of perk at your job, for the sake of all of us who don't (no real perks other than the occasional free newspaper), I urge you to take advantage of it. Go get that master's or doctorate you've been tossing around in your list of "shouldas."

Below is an excerpt from this Friday's Watercooler column by The Associated Press on the topic of tuition reimbursement:


Pay my tuition ... please?
excerpted from the Watercooler column
By Erin Conroy
AP Business Writer
Your employer may offer tuition reimbursement, but in these trying economic times, how do you work up the nerve to cash in on the opportunity?
Katy Piotrowski, author of the new book “The Career Coward’s Guide to Career Advancement,” says at least half of American workers are offered educational benefits from their jobs. Still, many don’t know how to pursue these opportunities or justify them to employers during an economic downturn.
“It’s easy to get into a scarcity mentality of, ‘Oh gosh, there’s just so little money around,’” Piotrowski said. “But companies are always looking to succeed and get to the next level. If you’re interested in learning new things that could position the company in a better way, it can be a win-win situation.”
Piotrowski offers these tips to approach employers about financial support for continued education opportunities:
•Lead with your employer’s interests and ask which areas they would like to see the team develop expertise. Then, as you evaluate training programs, aim to incorporate your employer’s needs into courses that will also help you achieve your personal career training goals.
•Provide hard data about how your improved education will result in increased productivity, profitability and opportunities.
•Guarantee a good grade. Many businesses won’t cover employee education costs unless they receive a “B’’ grade or higher. Offer a similar guarantee to your employer to prove that you are serious about success in the classroom.
•Promise to stick around for a set period afterward. One primary objection employers have to paying for education is that team members leave shortly after earning their degrees.
•Offer to split the cost. Times are tight, especially now. If you meet objections about a weak bottom line, suggest that you split the cost. Some educational subsidy is better than none at all.

The 1986 film "At Close Range" was based on the real life Chester County crime family led by Bruce Johnston Sr. in the 1960s and 1970s. Starring Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, Mary Stuart Masterson, the film happened right here in Mercury territory. It that doesn't ring a bell, Madonna's "Live to Tell," which got a lot of airplay, was written for the film (I think she was still married to Sean Penn at the time).

I haven't seen the film in at least 20 years. Curiosity makes me want to go unearth it from the drama stash at Blockbuster some night. But what the bibliophile in me should do is check out local author/journalist Bruce Mowday's new book, "Jailing The Johnston Gang: Bringing Serial Murderers to Justice" (Barricade, $22.95, 272 pages). Barricade recently announced the book is already in its second printing.

Or I could just read Mercury Editor Nancy March's blog about it, True-crime novel brings back memories. She covered the Johnston murder trials when she was a reporter for The Mercury.

And if you'd like to meet the author, he has several area appearances coming up:

“I’ve been receiving calls to schedule additional talks throughout Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland," said Uwchlan Township resident Mowday in a recent Barricade press release. "There is tremendous interest in this story of criminals who terrorized this area for decades. The book has also been selling extremely well on Amazon.com.”

Signed books can be obtained from the author, Mowday, by calling him at 610-873-0727, E-mailing mowday@mowday.com or visiting www.mowday.com. The 272-page book, with 17 photographs, costs $22.95.

Mowday’s local speaking and signing schedule includes:

*April 18 Signing at Exton Barnes & Noble 9 a.m. until noon.
*April 23 Talk and signing at Longwood Rotary at 6:45 a.m.
*April 25 Parkesburg Community Day signing from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.
*April 29 Talk and signing at Easttown Library at 7 p.m.
*April 30 Talk and signing at Coatesville Rotary at noon.
*May 3 Book signing at Mystery Book, Mechanicsburg. 1 to 4 p.m.
*May 4 Talk and signing at Chester County Corvette Club at 7 p.m.
*May 15 Talk and signing at Caesar Rodney Rotary Club, Wilmington, 7:30 a.m.
*May 16 Signing at Downingtown’s 150th anniversary celebration.
*May 18 Talk and signing at Okahocking Society at 8 p.m.
*May 21 Talk and signing at Boyertown Lions at 6:30 p.m.
*June 6 Signing at Bayard Taylor Memorial Library Home and Garden Tour
*September 12-13 Chadds Ford Days signing.

A convenient guest post from the AP that covers not just one, but TWO, finance books:

Young adults urged to smarten their money habits
By EILEEN AJ CONNELLY
AP Personal Finance Writer

NEW YORK — Saddled with student loans and credit card debt and addicted to $4 lattes, do young adults stand a financial chance?

Two new books aim to give the Millennial generation the information they need to set themselves on the right path, using strikingly different approaches.

In "I Will Teach You to Be Rich," author Ramit Sethi writes with a laid back, irreverent style that has made his five-year-old blog of the same name popular. While Beth Kobliner, in an update of her 1996 best-seller "Get a Financial Life," uses a more sober tone. But both authors are serious about trying to nudge, push or cajole young people into paying attention to money matters to provide themselves with long-term financial security.

"The point of this book is behavioral change," Sethi said in a recent interview. He hopes that by using language and situations young people are comfortable with, his message will get through. Personal finance advice is typically aimed at older people, he said, and can often seem like "old white guys talking (about) confusing subjects."

"It's not broken out in a way that we care about," the 26-year-old said.

Sethi aims at helping young people achieve both short-term goals — buying a new iPhone or taking a dream vacation — and long-term goals like paying off debt and saving for retirement.

The book offers a six week program that takes readers step by step through setting up banking and investment accounts, paying down debt and improving credit scores. And it advocates what Sethi calls "conscious spending," meaning an awareness of where money is going and why.

Sethi does not advocate a step that Kobliner suggests: keeping a log of daily spending to track where money goes. "You obviously need to be aware of what you're spending, but should you be aware of it on a day to day basis?"

Kobliner doesn't think such an exercise is necessary for the long term. But she maintains that for a week or two, writing down every dollar (or keeping track of spending in the Blackberry notes function) can be an eye-opener. "It sounds so obvious, but I think the revelation that people have when they do that is pretty amazing," she said in an interview.

Kobliner's book offers both an overview to give readers a quick start toward understanding their finances, and substantial detail on topics such as banking and investing, along with intensive run-downs on mortgages, insurance and taxes. Young military families may also be interested in her chapter on military benefits.

As for those lattes, Sethi breaks with the personal finance pack when he says it's perfectly OK to keep high-priced coffee habit or even to spend hundreds on Jimmy Choo shoes — as long as the bills are paid, the 401(k) contributions are flowing in and the savings accounts are set up. "Personal finance I think traditionally has been so much about people telling you not to do things," he said. "Not to buy lattes, not to buy $150 jeans or enjoy going out to eat. Personal finance is not about more and more willpower."

Kobliner also supports the concept of "mindful spending," but offers a somewhat more traditional approach. She suggests that readers identify short-term and long-term goals, and find ways to cut spending so they can reach them. "I hate the clichéd advice," she said. "But it's true, you have to have a one-time sit down and ask, 'Where do I want to be? What are my goals?'"

"Thinking that through is very helpful for people because then it gives you something concrete to work toward," she said.

When it comes to the crushing debt load that young people carry, both writers offer similar approaches for how to get out from under it, including suggestions on how to talk to credit card companies and consolidating student debt.

And they both focus on built-in saving and investing. "I think it's human nature to want to spend what you have," said Kobliner. "It's so important to build savings into your budget."

Looking ahead, they also agree that the current financial crisis may have an upside. "If there's any silver lining in this (economic) frenzy that we're in now, I think it's going to force some awareness with this generation," said Kobliner. When her book was first issued, she recalled, many said young people didn't care about the topic. "Now I think it's clear, not only do young people care about it, but they have to care about it."

Kurt Vonnegut is one imaginative dude. I remember picking up "Breakfast of Champions" sometime during high school and being dazzled. Literally. (get it?)

Fans don't need to look much further to enjoy some new work from the author. Even after death, Vonnegut continues to create:


Publisher to release new batch of Vonnegut stories

NEW YORK (AP) — A posthumous collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut will be released this November.

The collection, called "Look at the Birdie," contains 14 stories by the author of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and other works, Delacorte Press announced Friday.

The publisher says it plans to reissue 15 Vonnegut titles including "Mother Night," ''The Sirens of Titan," ''Galapagos" and "Slaughterhouse-Five." Also due: another collection of his unpublished writings and a book of letters sent to and from the author during his life.

More never-before-seen stories by Vonnegut appeared in the 2008 collection "Armageddon in Retrospect."

Vonnegut died in April 2007 at the age 84. His works contained elements of social commentary, sci-fi and autobiography.

"What occurs in the world of the faerie will become manifest in the world of men"

Reviewed: "Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story," by Carolyn Turgeon, Three Rivers Press, 2009, $13.95, 279 pp.

I’m a fan of novels that push envelope of the concept of "willing suspension of disbelief" by mixing reality with fantasy. Carolyn Turgeon’s latest novel, her second, "Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story," does just that.

The enjoyable and quite readable fictitious tale follows Lil, an old woman who works her days away in a New York City bookshop while dreaming of returning to her youth as a fairy — yes, a fairy in the fashion of Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell, complete with wings and mystical powers. And Lil wasn’t just any fairy, she was the fairy chosen to be Cinderella’s fairy godmother.

But this is a Cinderella story that strays far from the innocuous, bubbly Disney version. At first glance at the book’s gorgeous cover, I thought maybe I could pass the book along to my 9-year-old niece, but as I read more changed my mind. I realized this is no light fairy tale, though it truly is the tale of a fairy. This fairy tale is more of the Grimm Brothers sort.

Lil is a tragic, heartbroken figure. She’s a person broken in spirit who hasn’t given up hope for redemption for past wrongs. She leads a double life: On one hand, she’s a knowledgeable bookshop assistant who ekes out a meager existence in a rent-controlled apartment; On the other, she’s a lonely, outcast creature who once did something so heinous as to lose the keys to the kingdom, so to speak.

Desperately, Lil wants to redeem herself — something she feels could possibly take her back to the fairy world, to the sister she lost at a young age and dearly misses.

The opportunity presents itself in the form of a good deed of sorts for Lil’s boss, a dashing Prince Charming of a bookshop owner who’s unlucky in love. Lil encounters and has an instant connection with Veronica, an artsy type who may the perfect young woman for him, at the shop and arranges for them to have a magical date to an actual society ball.

But the story is not as light and sweet as it may sound. There’s an underlying despair in Lil’s character, in her story. As much as we want her to be redeemed from her discgrace, we begin to doubt her credibility. But we are already, as they say, enchanted by this story.

Apparent are Turgeon’s sheer imagination, exquisite and colorful language and descriptions and ability to generate momentum within the story.

She reminds us that life, after all, is no fairy tale.
And though the world may be cruel, there is hope.

*Full disclosure: Carolyn Turgeon went to my high school (dear old State College Area Senior High School in State College, Pa.), graduating the year before I did. We were acquainted then, but didn’t stay in touch over the past two decades. I recently reconnected with Carolyn through a popular social networking site and was pleasantly surprised to learn she is a full-time author of marvelous and magical books (Her first novel, "Rain Village," went to print in 2006. Learn more at her website). Turgeon is quite the blogger as well: Check out The Astonishing Blog.

Reviewed: Skylight Confessions, by Alice Hoffman, Little, Brown and Company, 2007, 262 pages.

I've read a lot of Alice Hoffman (prolific author of 18 novels). She has a way of pulling you into stories that touch on the supernatural but are grounded in reality. Skylight Confessions is no exception. It's the story of a couple of generations of New Englanders, none of them quite happy or fulfilled.
The book starts with young Arlie, not even 17, who finds her destiny following her ferry-boat captain father's death. She seduces a young stranger and seals her fate. Soon, Arlie is a mom and wife trapped behind the transparent boundaries of a famous house called 'The Glass Slipper,' an imposing architectural wonder made entirely of glass and with glass ceilings.
That's where the title comes in, and the end of the book reveals some of the secrets/truths of Arlie and her family. Her distant husband John who seems to resent her for seducing him late one foggy night when he got lost on the way to a party and ended up in her bed.
Their son, Sam, becomes a slave to heroin early on. Her daughter, Blanca, never knows a mother's love and eventually physically escapes across the pond but her own happiness remains elusive. Their nanny of sorts, Meridith, brings a fresh twist to the story and another union that seems to come straight from the fates.
Death before one's time, addiction, emotional distance play along with themes of true love, passion, yearning in this engrossing tale.
"People are haunted because they want to be," says Merrie's husband at one point. And it seems to be true. John Moody is haunted no matter where he goes by the spectre of his beautiful young wife, someone he never seemed to fully appreciate. She lingers about in a diaphanous white dress, her signature long red hair loose, her lips silent. She doesn't reprimand and isn't there as a fright. She's just there. Because he can't let her go. Meanwhile, dishes in the house break and crack at random and ash pours off the roof. Birds get trapped inexplicably inside the house. Her presence is felt by everyone there.
It won't take you long to read and may keep you up past your bedtime (but in a good way).
Thanks, Brandie, for loaning this to me even before you read it yourself!

If you've ever judged a book by its cover -- or title -- this little gem forwarded to me The Mercury's Thin Green Line blogger and one of our two in-house staff reporters might be of interest (or at least a chuckle on this April Fool's Day):

Cheese beats Baboon Metaphysics in odd book prize
LONDON (Reuters) — The prize for oddest book title of 2008 was awarded to "The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais," thanks to a late surge in popularity, The Bookseller magazine said Friday.
Philip M. Parker's "Fromage Frais," which literally means "fresh cheese" in French, beat out titles such as "Baboon Metaphysiscs," "Curbside Consultation of the Colon," and "Strip and Knit with Style" in the annual competition run by the British magazine.
According to online bookstore Amazon.com, Parker's book costs a stunning $795. The website gives no indication as to what it is about, but it takes up to two months to deliver.
"I'm thrilled that the public steered clear of smut... and turned the supermarket chiller into the Petri dish of literary innovation," said Horace Bent, custodian of the prize.
Parker's book claimed first place with 32 percent of the 5,034 votes cast on theBookseller.com, beating out early favorite "Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring."
"Baboon Metaphysics" placed second with 22 percent of the vote, while "Colon" trailed close behind with 18 percent.
The prize was dreamed up at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1978 as a way of avoiding boredom. Past winners have included titles such as "Bombproof Your Horse" (2004), "Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service" (2001), and "Reusing Old Graves" (1995).
(Reporting by Catherine Bosley; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)