A Finished Book Is Just the Beginning
“Not to take anything away from St. Martin’s,” says Harpaz, whom I called in her Brooklyn apartment, “but they have a lot of books to promote. I have one book to promote. I can do it full-time. They can’t. I pretty much spend the day on the Internet and sending out packets and fulfilling whatever commitments I’ve booked. Of course I’ve spent several thousand dollars in postcards and postage, etc. But other authors who hadn’t done this and whose books went nowhere despite good reviews said, ‘I wish I’d spent part of my advance on publicity.’ And I thought, ‘I don’t want to be wishing that. I’ll do it.’”
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He suggested that she try to buy the Clinton fund-raisers’ mailing list. “That just didn’t work for me for all kinds of political reasons, journalistic reasons, financial reasons,” says Harpaz. “But it made me start thinking about how I could better reach the people who might be interested in this book.” She’s been thinking about that ever since.
Friends give you names and from those names come other names, she explains. And then there’s the Internet. “Type in ‘alternative weekly,’” she says, “and you get various things.”
As a reward for the eight-hour days she’s devoted to The Girls in the Van–while raising two children under ten–Harpaz now worries that the print run of 20,000 will sell out before the paperback edition arrives in the fall. That’s one nightmare Michael Tomasky didn’t have. He told me he really doesn’t know how many copies Hillary’s Turn wound up selling–he didn’t stay on top of such things. “I just wrote it,” he said. “All of this other stuff is somebody else’s job.”
Green Bay’s True Colors?
Mahadeva says Green Bay “should have put Miss Ranger at the center of the investigation and listened to her rather than trying to negate what she was saying. It should have been proactive instead of defensive.” In January a four-person delegation led by a police captain and a police lieutenant drove south to interview Ranger, who lives in Skokie. The only woman along was June McKenzie, a Multicultural Center board member who was a late addition to the group. The lieutenant, as I wrote last week, concluded that Ranger was someone who had got herself “in a corner” and was “saving face.” McKenzie, however, found her credible. Among other things, she recalls Ranger telling the group that her brothers are police officers and that she wished the Sun-Times “had mentioned some of the positive things at Green Bay, in particular the person at Red Lobster after the game who was very wonderful to her.”
