Between Here and the Bestsellers List
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 10/6/2008 7:48:00 AM
If booksellers can make a book through handselling, why not publishers? That’s the premise behind the marketing campaign that Algonquin Books is using to try to break out Shutterbabe author Deborah Copaken Kogan’s dark first novel, Between Here and April coming out October 7, and which just went back to press for a second printing of 5,000 copies. It now has 20,000 copies in print, and Algonquin is considering a third trip back to press in the next few weeks.
Given the subject of Kogan’s book, mothers who kill, said marketing director Craig Popelars, “one of the things, we knew we couldn’t do is just blindly send out galleys. We just had to get on the phone. It took a lot of leg work.” That work though is already starting to pay off with strong reviews like a starred one in PW, which used adjectives like “breath-taking,” “heart-breaking” and “unflinching” to describe the novel. In it, Kogan explores what it is to be a wife and mother through the story of Elizabeth Burns who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a childhood friend after she learns that the friend and her older sister were both murdered by their mother, who then committed suicide.
“It seems to have some personal connection. You can tell the way people are responding that she’s writing close to the bone,” said Popelars. He points to two-page letters he’s received from booksellers like Beth Golay at Watermark Books in Wichita, Kans., who called it “an amazing novel that’s simultaneously beautiful and sorrowful. This look at tragedy, postpartum depression, and the despair a mother must feel to even entertain the thought of killing her young rather than leave them behind to fend through life without her. . . . was simply haunting.”
“I read it,” said senior editor Kathy Pories, “and felt it somehow captured a part of being a mother and a wife that people are embarrassed to talk about, which is what makes it original.” Bookseller agree and have made Between Here and April a November Indie Next Pick. It received Elle magazine’s Readers Prize for November. And Algonquin has received confirmation that reviews that will run in USA Today, Vanity Fair, Redbook and The Onion, among others. In addition, Algonquin is sending Kogan on a multi-city tour, which began at BookCourt in Brooklyn, N.Y. last week.
