Parading the Next Best Sellers : Booksellers and Publishers Mingle, Target Hot Books for Fall at ABA Meet in Anaheim

ANAHEIM — When it’s all over Tuesday at this four-day literary blowout billed as the American Booksellers Assn.’s annual convention and trade exhibit, tomorrow’s best sellers will have been pretty much pre-selected for America’s reading public.

The booksellers here at the Convention Center and satellite hotels are being wooed by the big houses with the big-name writers--splashy parties with shrimp on ice, eye-popping exhibit-hall displays such as Warner Books’ garish pseudo-Egyptian temple, buttons and badges and posters heralding coming fall titles. (Doubleday’s “Goldwater in ‘88” button is a promotion for Barry Goldwater’s autobiography.)

As Edward Morrow, proprietor of the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt., and incoming ABA president, put it, the people who sell the big books want to be assured that a publisher is putting out “a lot of effort and money to make a given book sell” before giving it shelf space. “This is the grand presentation to the retail trade.”

And they don’t get much grander than the little picnic thrown by Crown for its queen of the best sellers, Judith Krantz, to launch her new novel, “Till We Meet Again,” due out in September with a first printing of 500,000 and a half-million-dollar advertising and promotion budget.

The party tent was an airplane hangar in Costa Mesa, converted into an extravagant multitheme stage set complete with a genuine British Spitfire aircraft, French vineyard, a World War II British canteen, a gilded Parisian salon, a cancan line and a Hollywood-in-the-’40s night-life tableau framed in silver palm trees.

Krantz Promotes Book

Krantz, perched high on a pink director’s chair from which trailed a pink feather boa, was explaining above the strains of music for jitterbugging, that “It’s a very complicated book, I have to tell you.” It has to do with a French girl who marries a diplomat and has two daughters, one of whom ferries aircraft for the RAF during World War II and one of whom becomes a French movie star. She is explaining, further, that she made the latter a movie star because she just had to name her Delphine and, after all, “What do you do with a girl named Delphine?”

But for many of the writers and publishing houses competing for attention here, life is not all cherries jubilee and crepes suzette. If you don’t have a budget, you better have a gimmick.

No one understood this better than William Cates of little Corkscrew Press in Silver Spring, Md., who was here to push his company’s first book, “Eating In: The Official Single Man’s Cookbook.” He and the co-author, Jose Maldonado, had brought along, encased in Lucite, “Moby stick,” a 6-foot Styrofoam fish stick, or “the typical bachelor dinner (for bachelors who do not have the book).”

“You’ve got to be a little zany,” explained Cates, who said the display had engendered lots of laughs and “We’re even writing some orders for the book.”

Pacing the floor of the exhibit halls wearing two framed posters, sandwich-board style, Robert Cottrell of Boulder, Colo., author of “Write Your Own Contracts” and “Golfer’s Performance Analyzer,” shrugged and said of his stunt, “It’s awful . . . but you get in one of these little booths and you’re absolutely lost.”

(With 1,800 booths, the halls were a veritable maze.)

Among the exhibitors were feminist presses, gay and lesbian presses, and a bevy of New Age publishers offering titles such as “The Tao of Leadership.” “It’s definitely a phenomenon,” said ABA president Morrow, “a publishing explosion.” But will New Age books go the way of the computer books that were the rage a few years back? Morrow is betting that New Age is “an ongoing and growing thing” in an era when people have the time and money for inner exploration.

Among the authors on hand was Dominick Dunne (“The Two Mrs. Grenvilles”), who came to talk about his new novel for Crown Books, “People Like Us.” At a press conference, he explained that the book began with his fascination with the influx into New York of “incredibly new rich people . . . incredibly publicized” and bent on arrogant spending and “flagrant social climbing.”

Their flamboyance has been given the “benediction” of the current Administration, Dunne observed, predicting that “they’re going to go into the closet again after the Administration changes.”

Dunne was followed into the press conference room by Baltimore Orioles manager Frank Robinson, who’d come to tout “Extra Innings,” his McGraw-Hill autobiography that promises to respond to former Los Angeles Dodgers general manager Al Campanis’ infamous statement that blacks “lacked the necessities” to be major-league managers.

Today’s celebrity lineup is to include newsman David Brinkley (“Washington Goes to War”); Wallace Stegner, who’s noting his 50th year as a novelist with the publication of “Crossing to Safety”; Lady Bird Johnson (“Wildflowers Across America”); Studs Terkel; and Shirley Temple Black, who’s coming out with an autobiography, “Child Star” (McGraw-Hill), and is also the subject of a new William Morrow biography, “Shirley Temple: American Princess” by Anne Edwards.

Random House is going all out Tuesday to honor former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky to mark publication of his book, “Fear No Evil.” Tuesday’s other headliner? Willie Nelson, who will entertain at the convention’s closing banquet. His autobiography, “I Didn’t Come Here, and I Ain’t Leaving” is on its way from Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books.

A booksellers’ convention is not all glitz. Nor is it all about blockbuster titles. For the small speciality publishing houses with no budget for sending sales representatives around the country, it is an opportunity to be seen and heard. And it is a way for proprietors of small shops to keep abreast of what’s new.

Alice Massoglia, co-proprietor of A and M Book Cellars in Canoga Park, leading her 3-year-old daughter by the hand, carrying an infant son and pushing a double stroller filled with book catalogues, said these meetings also provide an opportunity for her to tell publishers’ representatives that “such-and-such a line is getting boring.”

Still, the serious purpose of the ABA convention is cloaked in a bit of show business. At the Crossing Press booth, Rose Grant, author of “Street Food,” had set up an empanada stand beneath a multi-striped umbrella. Rutledge Hill Press was handing out free samples of “tipsy cake” to promote its Jack Daniels Cookbook.

Sphinxes and devil candles sat on the shelves at the booth occupied by Magickal Childe of New York City (formerly the Warlock Shop), presided over by owner Herman Slater, who introduced himself as “a witch high priest.” His mail-order customers, he noted, included true believers in a number of Communist Bloc countries. “They go through our embassies,” he explained.

At another booth, Gerry Studds, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, had been enlisted as a volunteer to hand out paperback copies of “You Can Do Something About AIDS,” which he described as “a cooperative venture of the publishing industry.” The book, with an introduction by Elizabeth Taylor, will be distributed through bookstores, “the first-ever free book,” Studds said.

Other booths offered “remainders” at bargain prices. Titles included “Pin Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable,” “Feasting on Raw Foods” and, sharing shelf space, “Owls: Their Natural and Unnatural History” and “Enter Talking” by Joan Rivers.

At the Warner Books temple, Peter Mauceri was fielding questions about the sequel to “Gone With the Wind,” due out in 1990 and for which Warner paid Virginia writer Alexandra Ripley a whopping $4.9-million advance. That means selling at least 250,000 hardcover books and 3 million paperback. Said Mauceri, “As our president said, ‘I’ll think about that tomorrow.’ ”

Meanwhile, Warner has high expectations for titles such as “Unforgettable Fire,” a biography of the rock group U2, which will be aided by a concert movie.

The Aussies were at Anaheim as well. Asked what’s new Down Under, spokeswoman Pat Woolley giggled and said, “Believe it or not, ‘Margarine Modeling,’ ” a how-to book on making centerpiece sculptures from the low-priced spread. “It doesn’t melt,” Woolley explained. “My representatives say to me, ‘Margarine! Yuk!’ But it will last forever and ever.” Personally, she said, “I think it’s pretty gross.”

Also coming from Australia: A “Field Guide to Australian Birds,” “Aussie English,” a souvenir book about tennis star Pat Cash, and a barbecue book for male cooks, “Barbies for Blokes.”

At the Simon & Schuster booth, trade division president Charles Hayward was talking up Dan (“Semi-Tough”) Jenkins’ 1930s period piece, “Fast Copy,” and Larry McMurtry’s “Anything for Billy,” a novel based on the life of Billy the Kid.

The spoken-word people were in abundance, with audiocassette offerings including “The Book of Job,” “The Audio Companion to the Book of Runes” and “The Audio Exploration of I-Ching.”

Weidenfeld & Nicolson is planning a heavy promotion for Shana Alexander’s book on lawyers, drugs, money and the Mafia, “The Pizza Connection.” Harlequin will be coming out in June with a new series of paperback mysteries that, said salesman Red Hutzler, “will be hitting the stands any day now, two new titles every month.”

Paul Newman has bought the movie rights to Weidenfeld & Nicholson’s book-of-the-month-club selection, Glendon Swarthout’s “The Homesman,” a novel set in the frontier in the 1870s. “Rumor has it he wants Jane Fonda to be his co-star,” said Mary Jo Imholte at the booth.

Also watch for: “The Captain and the Enemy,” a new novel by Graham Greene; rock star David Crosby’s story of his rise and fall and rise, “Long Time Gone”; “Picture This” by Joseph Heller; and “A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and Deceit,” a look inside the Mormon hierarchy by Robert Lindsey, author of “The Falcon and the Snowman.”

For those who don’t wish to “Take a Book to Bed Tonight,” as suggested on badges distributed at the convention, there was the “Soap Opera Challenge” game from U.S. Playing Card Co., promising hundreds of questions in “six sizzling categories.”

And, for adolescent readers of all ages, Eclipse Comics is offering Michael Jackson’s “Captain EO,” a 3-D comic that comes with special spectacles, and an import from Japan, “Mai the Psychic Girl,” true to the original in black and white.

“All Japanese comics are in black and white,” explained Eclipse editor-in-chief Catherine Yronwode. Eclipse had to reverse the negatives so that American fans would be reading left to right. Yronwode shrugged, “Now everybody’s left-handed.”