THE CROSSOVER: Amazing 'Grace'

Judy Quinn -- Publishers Weekly, 8/2/1999

Among the Bridget Jones clones and elephant-in-the-room Hannibal this summer is a quieter success in a hard-to-crack category: contemporary women's fiction.

Patricia Gaffney's The Saving Graces has been hovering just under both PW's and the NYT's bestseller lists since it was released some six weeks ago.

The book, a story about a group of four Washington, D.C.€“ based women friends, self-dubbed "The Graces," now has about 100,000 copies in print, almost double its initial sell-in.

HarperCollins now plans to release Gaffney's next book, another contemporary women's novel, next summer alongside The Saving Graces in a mass market paperback "super-release." The intention is to build Gaffney as a major summer brand author.

The launch of Gaffney is the brainchild of HarperCollins senior v-p of adult trade, Marjorie Braman. Three years ago, while Braman was still at Dell, she picked up one of the author's previous near half-dozen historical romance mass market books for some in-flight reading on her return from a Romance Writers of America conference. She became particularly attracted to Gaffney's writing style and characterization, which she believed transcended the conventions of historical romance. Braman approached Gaffney to do a book for her, and when she moved to HarperCollins, the author moved with her.

HarperCollins did a standard postcard and galley mailing to build word of mouth on the book. Braman also intentionally avoided the idea of issuing Gaffney's crossover book under a pseudonym; she believed Gaffney's romance fans would be drawn to the book, despite it being not only a different format but different category. A separate mailing for the book was targeted to them.

Braman describes The Saving Graces as being "along the continuum of The Group and Loose Change and our own Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." A usual editor pitch, perhaps, but reviewers also have seen the connection, with Booklist noting "this ode to the friendships between women could easily become the Northern version" of that current Harper hit.