Posted on December 6, 2007 by Steve Pollak
If Jon Papernick’s fiction is as good as his marketing skills, he must be a pretty talented fellow.
According to this essay on Jbooks.com, his writing has even been compared to the likes of Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
But the big difference between those great masters and young Papernick is that he still needs to work hard to get his book noticed. Thus, the ‘1,001 Book Project’ was born.
Papernick, who received some critical acclaim for a 2002 short story collection called “The Ascent of Eli Israel
,” wanted to have his first novel read by a wide audience. In the essay, Papernick describes the novel, “Who by Fire, Who by Blood,” as “equal parts terrorist thriller, love story, and psychological portrait set in pre-9/11 New York, a novel entirely free of comfortable Jewish kitsch, high-concept cleverness, and redemption.”
He shopped the book around to several U.S. publishers but none of them bit. He found a small Canadian press, Exile Editions, which was willing to publish the book but Papernick’s agent refused to grant U.S. rights to them. The agent apparently wanted to hold out for a larger American publisher.
That meant no distribution in the United States and, to Papernick, it was the realization that this was just the beginning if he wanted the book to enjoy wide success.
So, he devised a plan to sell 1,001 copies of “Who by Fire,” before publication. He approached a local independent bookstore with the idea and the owner thought it might work.
He had five months to make it happen.
At first, the plan appeared to be working but you know what they say about best-laid plans. After an initial flash of success, the sales figures became disappointing. And, his relationship with the bookstore owner deteriorated rapidly. There’s a lot more about this in the essay.
Even though Papernick did not reach his goal (he made it about a third of the way, he said), he did take away an important lesson about being a novelist:
I always knew that being a writer was a solitary pursuit. Now I know that the creative aspect of being a writer is only part of the job and that the other part, getting the book into readers’ hands, never ends.
I guess now you could say he’s using the whole 1,001 books experience as a marketing tool by writing about it on JBooks.com. You gotta give him credit. That’s clever. It was enough to make me go over to Amazon and plunk down $17.79 for a copy. Happy Hanukkah, Jon!
For those of you who are not as impulsive about buying books, you can find more information about Jon and an audio excerpt from “Who by Fire,” at JonPapernick.com.