What's the Buzz?
By John Sellers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/1/2007
Bookshelf spoke with Farrin Jacobs, executive editor at HarperCollins Children’s Books, about The Luxe by Anna Godbersen (HarperTeen), which goes on sale November 20 with a 200,000-copy first printing.
Even before Godbersen’s manuscript arrived on her desk, Jacobs had been looking forward to this project. “I was talking to Josh Bank at Alloy,” she recalls. “He said he was so excited about this new book, a sort of historical Gossip Girl. I thought it was such a great idea. And it actually lived up to the promise.” Jacobs’s colleagues were equally captivated, and they put together a turn-of-the-century broadsheet—with marketing plans, “talk of the town”-style news items and a bit of gossip, of course—as part of their bid for the book’s auction, which they ultimately won back in September 2006 in a deal with Bank and Les Morgenstein at Alloy Entertainment.
Because of the book’s historical setting, Godbersen did a good deal of research during the writing and editing process for The Luxe and the subsequent three titles in the series. (The second book, Rumors, is due out next June.) “Anna spent a lot of time at the New-York Historical Society,” says Jacobs. “We tried to be as accurate as possible.”
Buzz for the title has been building since what Jacobs calls “a big push” for the book at BEA. “We hired the cover model to stand at BEA in a pink dress, and we passed out hundreds of galleys,” she says. “I walked around BEA on Friday and every third person I saw was carrying a galley. Then on my subway platform in Brooklyn I saw someone reading it, and we started to get emails asking when the next one was coming out.”
Harper has been receiving positive feedback about The Luxe from its sales force and from booksellers, as well from teens, through its First Look program (“Not only did it have scandal, betrayal, and secrets filling every page, but Godbersen managed to set all this in 1899 Manhattan. Who knew all this drama even existed back then?” enthuses one reader on HarperTeen’s page for The Luxe). Godbersen will be blogging on the HarperTeen MySpace page once the book is published, and the publisher will roll out a “How Luxe Are You?” essay contest.
Additionally, Harper believes the book may have crossover potential to the adult/romance market. “We sent galleys out to the Romance Writers of America,” Jacobs says. “We got an email from a chapter head saying we were absolutely inaccurate in one of the stable scenes. There would not have been hay on the ground—there would have been straw. But you know, no one has a roll in the straw.”
