Raising the Bar on Handselling

By Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 6/21/2007 1:11:00 PM

Most booksellers enjoy handselling titles that combine strong literary merit and commercial appeal, like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner. For the most part these are books that publishers and reviewers also support. But what about unpublished books with no U.S. publisher.

This summer, 24-year-old Alex Green, owner of Back Pages Books in Waltham, Mass., is turning the typical handselling model upside down by challenging his customers to pre-order a first novel about an ultra-orthodox Zionist terrorist cell in Brooklyn by a relatively unknown writer, Jon Papernick, that is being published in Canada this fall. To up the ante, Green is not only trying to sell-out Exile Edition’s entire first printing of 1,000 copies of Who By Fire, Who By Blood, but hopes to get a U.S. house to buy the book.

Green announced his 1,001 Book Project on his Web site. As he noted there: "Our goal is simple, sell 1,001 copies...of this thrilling tale of terrorism and religious fanaticism before the novel is published on September 30...With your support for this book, we hope to affect change in the corporate-dominated publishing world where profit margins have virtually eliminated editors’ ability to take risks on new voices in the literary world."

As a result of posting the first two chapters of the book on his site and sending an e-mail blast to 700 store customers and 400 friends of the author, Back Pages Books has sold close to 250 signed, numbered and stamped copies of the novel since May 23. That’s more than he sold of Papernick’s collection of stories, The Ascent of Eli Israel (Arcade, 2002), the store’s bestselling book.

For Green, the 1,001 Book Project is about the need for independent booksellers to change their thinking about Internet sales. "The debate’s been running for a few years, How are we going to handsell books on the Internet? It feels like we’ve ceded all the ground to Amazon. I’m not convinced you have to have all of your inventory online." Green posts fewer than a dozen rare books and 20 new books by local authors on his store’s Web site.

When asked if he thinks that he and Green can really sell 1,001 copies of a book that was turned down by a number of U.S. houses, Papernick, quoting Theodor Herzel, replies, "'If you will it, it is no dream.' I spent four years on the novel. I just want to spend a chunk of time selling this thing." Papernick, who will be writer-in-residence at Emerson College this fall, worked as a reporter for UPI and AP in Israel after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories, which received a starred PW review, is loosely based on that experience.

Papernick admits that the book that Green has posted on his Web site is stronger than the manuscript that was submitted to publishers in 2004. "The original draft was 70 pages longer," says Papernick, "which meant 20,000 words of fat needed to be cut out." Papernick is now working on retelling the story as a graphic novel. Through Writers House, where he is represented by agent Simon Lipskar, he met independent comics artist Sandy Jimenez, who is partnering with him on the project.

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