News

Book News: All Aboard Lionel, America's Train
Bridget Kinsella -- 11/20/00
For a centennial edition, Workman stumbled upon a publicist who took the job personally


A century of model
train history.
Can you imagine a childhood with no Lionel trains?" The year was 1994,and a concerned Jay Leno posed this question to his Tonight Show audience when he learned that the Lionel Train Company was in Chapter 11. Although the beloved company had had its share of fiscal w s since its heyday in the 1950s, it never actually stopped making trains, and to prove the point, it sent Leno a complete set to construct on the next night's show. Now, in the 21st century, Lionel is thriving again.
The Leno tale is just one among many in a complex and compelling corporate history captured in All Aboard: The Story of Joshua Lionel Cowen & His Lionel Train Company by Ron Hollander, a revised edition published by Workman this month to commemorate the company's 100th anniversary. At Workman, which had sold more than 90,000 copies to the trade alone since it published the book in the early '80s, the timing seemed perfect for bringing it back into print. For one, it's a natural holiday seller. Also, train enthusiasts of the baby-boom generation--not a bad book-buying demographic--breathed new life into the model-train market in the last decade, and are the very audience for All Aboard. And, finally, Workman found the perfect publicist for the project in Joshua Lionel Cowen's great-granddaughter, none other than industry insider Cathy Saypol.

Also in this article:



"When I heard that Cathy was going to work on the book, I was amazed," said Jim Eber, Workman's acting director of publicity. "I had known Cathy as an extraordinary New York publicist, but she d s all of these literary and political books. Why would she do this?"

Saypol, who obviously could not imagine a childhood without Lionel trains, initially wasn't so sure about taking the job. Usually Saypol works on political titles. Her most recent projects include Nine and Counting: The Women of the Senate (HarperCollins), Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography by Adam Clymer (William Morrow), The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew (Basic) and Strange Justice: the Selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer (Houghton Mifflin). Saypol said that she didn't even know a book about her great-grandfather's company was in the works until she saw it listed in PW's Fall Announcements issue. "Then a couple of weeks later, I was talking with Ellen Morgenstern [then Workman's publicity director] and I told her I had something kooky to tell her," Saypol told PW. Once Morgenstern, who is now at Disney International, learned of Saypol's family connection to Lionel, she insisted Saypol work on the project.

Ever cautious about how her ties might affect her work, Saypol consulted some media contacts to see if her familial relationship might pose a conflict of interest. "They all thought, 100%, that I should go for it," said Saypol. Now Saypol is adding a whole new set of contacts ("train people") to her database, and is hearing similar stories with each publicity call. "They all, almost without exception, launch into their own childhood stories," she explained. So far, USAToday has done a Lionel Centennial feature that mentioned the book, and Saypol has been contacting as many media people as possible. "Nobody is saying no. They say, 'Lionel? How cool.' In one respect, it is one of the hardest projects I've worked on, because it's personal, but in another way, it's very easy, because it's Lionel trains and everyone loves trains around the holidays."

Special events for All Aboard are already in the works. Train stations are a natural setting for promotion, and there will be a signing, with Lionel trains under the Christmas tree, on December 6 at Union Station in Washington, D.C. Event details are being worked out with the Transit Museum in Grand Central Terminal and with specialty retailer Hammacher Schlemmer, both in New York City.
Trains were just the
start of a Lionel world.
Saypol told PW that she feels a "squishy pride" in working on this project, largely because of the positive reaction she gets from most people. "He was such a giving man," she said. If a child came into the showroom and looked as if he couldn't afford a train, Saypol said, her grandfather allowed the salespeople to just "happen" to find one with the child's name on it. Saypol explained that her great-grandfather tried to help people without embarrassing them. She said, "Lionel was a corporation, but a corporation that made toys and made people happy. And because he invented it [the toy train], his heart was in it."
Even those who didn't grow up with Lionels, like Eber, the trains evoke a sense of familiarity. "It reminds me of the Hess truck," said Eber. "It's just a toy, but people line up around the corner for it, because it's a part of their life and they want to keep it alive."

As Hollander's company history reveals, Lionel was, in many ways, America's company. "My father had just survived the Depression and a war and it was time for a new beginning, a postwar celebration with something at once as extravagant and as frivolous as electric trains," writes Hollander. "So, it was not merely the trains but what they symbolized, what they said to us and to the rest of the world. They were both a reassurance and an advertisement: 'Lionel's in the home, all's right with the world.'"

Under Cowen, Lionel mastered the art of marketing. At a time when only the biggest retailers--Montgomery Ward and Sears--sent detailed booklets of their merchandise directly to the consumer's home, Lionel created a catalogue that children (mostly boys and their fathers) eagerly awaited. "That kind of ingenuity seems like no big thing today, when I get four or five catalogues a day in the mail," said Eber. "But that kind of savvy is original."

It is a talent and a discipline that Saypol says she inherited from her great-grandfather. "His policy was that is you couldn't do something the best, then you didn't do it," she explained. "Somehow I got that, even though I was only 13 when he died." The up side to that policy, she continued, is that "you never felt like you failed at anything, because you did your best." It is a nostalgic lesson for an instant society, and part of the Lionel myth and appeal.

But Lionel history is not without its downfalls. In All Aboard, Hollander recounts not only the glory days but also the eventual sale of the company to Cowen's distant relative Roy Cohn, and subsequent sales and various bouts with bankruptcy leading up to its current resurgence, in response to the baby boomer taste for retro toys. Despite the rocky rails the company has traveled, its product remains dear to America. As recently as 1999, the Arts & Entertainment channel ran a program that listed the top 10 toys of all time--ranked fourth, after Barbie and above Play-Doh, was the Lionel train.


Not Just 'Lip Service'

Do-it-yourself books are a dime a dozen--even before they hit the remainder tables. And perhaps even more so when it comes to titles on book publishing and promotion. "Hey, I published a book about publishing a book. You can, too!" But this January, a new do-it-yourself online publishing and promotion title will offer an unusual example of its efficacy: the book is appearing at the same time as the author's second novel.
A novelist who knows
about marketing.
The simultaneous publication was entirely coincidental. But the author, M.J. Rose--the woman PW has called "the e-book queen" (E-publishing, April 3)--is, in her typically adept way, making the most of it, trying to expand her audience, emphasize the titles' synergy and build up her presence in that most traditional of bookselling venues, the bookstore.
The two titles are In Fidelity, a novel that Pocket Books will publish and which is on Amazon.com's initial e-book list, announced last week (see News), and How to Publish and Promote Online, co-written with Angela Adair-Hoy, and published by St. Martin's Press. (Adair-Hoy is the co-owner of e-book publisher Booklocker.com and publisher of Writersweekly.com, an e-magazine that focuses on markets for freelance writers.)

Rose, of course, is best known for her debut novel, Lip Service, an erotic thriller she initially couldn't place with publishers. Drawing on her background in advertising and marketing, she turned to the Internet, where she offered an electronic -version and, later, self-published printed books. Based on Net buzz, Doubleday Direct eventually picked up the title, leading to a deal with Pocket, which published the book in hardcover. Lip Service sold 25,000 copies in hardcover and is in its second paperback printing, according to Pocket. In Fidelity has a 20,000 first printing.

Rose's e-reputation is both a help and hindrance, she told PW. "Bookstores perceive me as a marketing person who happened to write a novel," she said. "But I'm actually a novelist who happens to know something about marketing."

She also said that her e-marketing savvy has made some booksellers believe that her book and technique is "all about bypassing bookstores." Not at all, she emphasized. "It's about building a fan base and getting readers buzzing about you so you can get publishers to take you seriously or move up in publishers' eyes if you're already being published."

In fact, Rose sees a big marketing opportunity for booksellers. She explains: because so many readers like to write--by some estimates, there are 20 million Americans who consider themselves writers--every store has a huge pool of local authors and local author wannabes who will see the story of her two titles as a story of empowerment. Joint book displays and authors' workshops are naturals, she added.

For Rose, the inspiration for How to Publish and Promote Online, which has appeared in abbreviated form as an e-book with the title Secrets of Our Success, comes from the not-so-secret success of Lip Service. "I started getting mail from a lot of writers asking how I'd done it," Rose said. After spending hours a day answering people, she decided to make life easy for herself and put her advice on paper. The title includes tips from 20 contributors, who discuss everything from the importance of blurbs and how to write them to how to design effective covers and jackets. She stressed, however, that the book is "not a memoir" of her Lip Service experience.

Of course, Rose and Adair-Hoy are pulling out the plugs to promote the title about promotion. Among the publicity ideas that co-authors are using: on the book's Web site, they will answer 10 questions a month from that community of writers looking for publishers. They're also considering appearing jointly on a TV show, something that would have special resonance because the two, although they live in Connecticut and Maine, respectively, have never met.

For In Fidelity, Rose is mining some of the same marketing lode that she did with Lip Service. She has sent galleys to about 100 of her biggest online fans--the people she keeps in contact with regularly--and sent galleys to independents through the Book Sense program. She will also offer chapters of the novel on the site, rotating them weekly but removing previous chapters to discourage readers from simply copying the book. (At most, half the book will appear on the site for free.) She's offering free autographed bookplates, too. And since the book has been picked up by four book clubs, she is writing letters to members of at least two of them.

One of the most unusual aspects of the dual publication is that Rose is dealing with two publishers and two publicity departments. "They've both been great," she said, "and very cooperative." And maybe they've learned a thing or two.
--John Mutter