Show Daily: Interview with Carl Lennertz

From Marketer to Writer

by Lucinda Dyer -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2004

To booksellers, Carl Lennertz, v-p of independent retailing at HarperCollins, is certainly one of the most familiar faces at this year’s BEA. Many worked with him during his tenure at ABA, where he was senior marketing consultant, created Book Sense 76 and began the Book Sense bestseller lists. Others know him from his time as associate publisher at Little, Brown or from the years he “fell upwards” at Random House, rising from a St. Louis–based sales rep to v-p and marketing director for the Knopf Group.

While Lennertz has attended ABA/BEAs since 1978, this year marks his first appearance as an author. “I’m not a real writer,” he protests. “I don’t have a novel in me or a nonfiction book that requires research.” But Harmony Books brushed aside his doubts, and so his Cursed by a Happy Childhood: Tales of Growing Up Then and Now [click here to read the review] is due out this month. He autographs today at table 6, 12–12:30 p.m.

Lennertz began writing the night after George Harrison’s death in 2001, inspired to record memories from his growing-up years for his then-11-year-old daughter, Savannah. He wrote of friendships and cliques, music and books, first jobs and first loves: gentle lessons he wanted to pass along to his daughter, lessons about being a child and dealing with the milestones she would soon be approaching as a teenager. Writing, he found, was the easy part. “It’s the rewriting that’s hard. I had no idea how many edits and rewrites are required, how you have to let go and cut things you love in order to make it a better book.”

While his daughter will have memories of a city childhood, Lennertz was raised on eastern Long Island. “I grew up not talking about being from a small town with 98 kids in my graduating class. I always said I grew up near the city. But now I’m proud of being from a small town. Ironically, because the potato fields have been turned into vineyards, it’s now become a chic place to go.”

Recently, Lennertz took his daughter to visit the library in his hometown. They discovered a shelf proudly displaying the works of local writers. Perhaps sensing some small regret on her father’s part, she had just the right encouraging words: “Maybe they can put a shelf below it for authors who once lived here.”

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