Like many aspiring authors, Nan McCarthy had visions of selling her first book to a major publisher and watching it rocket to literary success.
And like many aspiring authors, she soon learned the discouraging realities of the business as publishers returned her manuscript along with rejection letters.
Undeterred, McCarthy, 35, a mother of two from Grayslake, decided to publish the book herself. She spent $10,000 of her own money, used the Internet as a marketing tool and launched a one-woman publicity blitz.
She hasn’t made the best-seller lists yet, but McCarthy has sold thousands of books and earned critical acclaim for her debut computer romance novel called “Chat.”
Since releasing “Chat” in 1995, McCarthy has sold co-rights to a national publisher and received favorable write-ups in such publications as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, People and Glamour. She also signed on with a major New York literary agent.
“It’s been an up-and-down ride, a real roller coaster,” McCarthy said in an interview at her home-based office in Grayslake. “I was euphoric when I first published the book. I felt a real sense of accomplishment. I was surprised that people liked it as much as they did.”
The romance in “Chat” unfolds between a man and woman who meet in an Internet chat forum. The story is told through an exchange of e-mail messages between Beverly, a married book editor, and Max, an advertising copywriter who is single.
The book is the first in a trilogy that McCarthy hopes to package as a boxed set. Her second book, “Connect,” was self-published last year, and the third, “Crash,” is due out later this year. The first two books end with cliffhangers, enticing the reader to continue the series.
“Chat” has won legions of fans, many of whom correspond with McCarthy through e-mail, wanting to learn more about the author and her characters.
Amy Mueller, a computer litigation specialist from Milwaukee, said she was drawn by the unique format of “Chat.” “The whole idea of actually producing these (e-mail) letters between two people was brilliant,” Mueller said. “I am surprised that many others haven’t gone ahead and done this. What kept me going through this book, and wanting more when it abruptly ended, was the twist it took.”
McCarthy, who has made her living as a computer journalist, technical writer and desktop publishing expert, waited a long time before becoming confident enough to write a novel.
A Chicago native, McCarthy attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an advertising major. It was there that she began dating her future husband, Patrick, who was planning a career in the Marine Corps. McCarthy knew that his work would mean travel. She had no idea how far those travels might be.
His first assignment was Okinawa, Japan. They moved there in 1983.
McCarthy made the best of it and wound up in the magazine business. She took a job at This Week on Okinawa, a social magazine for Americans living on the military base. She spent three years in Okinawa, honing her writing skills, teaching piano and learning to speak Japanese. “I had a great time there,” she said. “But I knew all along I wanted to write books.”
In 1986, McCarthy’s husband was transferred back to the States, where he was stationed at Quantico, Va. Shortly after moving there, McCarthy started writing feverishly. She typed out 650 pages of a novel based on her experience in Okinawa. “I tried to get it published, but I couldn’t,” she said. “I didn’t have an agent. It’s sitting in a box in our basement now.”
McCarthy took a series of odd jobs, working in a Hallmark card store and at a day-care center in Virginia. “I did what I had to do to make money, to keep busy and keep challenged, but I knew all the time I really wanted to be a book writer,” she said.
She and Patrick eventually moved back to the Chicago area, where they both had family ties. “We had both missed Chicago and wanted to have children and settle down,” she said. They settled in suburban Wheaton.
To help make ends meet, McCarthy got a job as a clerk at Hog Farm Management, a trade magazine owned by ABC/Cap Cities. The company later bought a fledgling desktop publishing magazine called Personal Publishing, which McCarthy joined as an editorial assistant and eventually worked her way up to managing editor. She started out with no computer experience and became an expert.
In 1991 she was recruited by Quark Inc., the computer software company, to run its creative services department in Denver, where she worked for about 18 months before being let go. McCarthy, who was working 70 hours a week at the time, was relieved.
McCarthy then started her own editorial-services company in Denver called Rainwater Press to write and edit computer publications and articles. She also wrote advertising and marketing materials for high-tech clients and put together a book called “Quark Design.”
Work was fine, but McCarthy again was getting the urge to write a novel.
“I decided to just sit down and start writing,” she said. “I had no misconceptions. I didn’t think I would immediately get an offer and become famous. It really gave me an appreciation for the work involved.”
She was inspired to write about an on-line romance after learning more about the phenomenon from friends. “I started mentioning it to a lot of people, and they suggested I read the Griffin and Sabine series,” McCarthy said. That series involves a romance written through letters and postcards.
“I sat down and read all three books and thought, `Wow, this is cool. I could do this through e-mail,’ ” McCarthy said. “At that time, the whole thing crystallized in my mind, a trilogy called `Chat,’ `Connect’ and `Crash’–two strangers getting to know each other through their correspondence. Characters just started developing in my mind. Once your mind latches on to something, you know it’s a good idea.”
She wanted the book to be romantic without being too tawdry like other books about on-line romance. “I wanted to write a book that showed two fairly normal people falling in love,” McCarthy said. “I interviewed a lot of my friends who had on-line romances, I asked them very detailed questions about how their conversations started, about how quickly they became intimate (in their messages), the things they talked about. And I started hanging out in those AOL chat rooms.”
With a bit of research behind her, McCarthy was ready. “Once I sat down and started writing, it took about three weeks. It was like this flood. It just came out of me. It was really a wonderful experience,” McCarthy said.
Her husband read the manuscript and offered his thoughts, though he had little experience with personal communications on-line. “I never really conversed with anybody that way,” he said. “I wasn’t familiar with the more personal and romantic side of the Internet.”
McCarthy tried to pitch the book without an agent, a risky strategy in the competitive world of publishing. “I was just so anxious. I had a real vision of the book. I figured I would just go ahead and self-publish, and I could always sell the rights to a big publisher down the road,” she said. “I had no knowledge of the business aspects of self-publishing, like distribution, publicity, sales, and I was really interested in learning all that.”
McCarthy enlisted the services of a friend to design the cover, which is black, with the title in glossy black lettering. It was published in Denver with a run of 2,500 copies in November 1995.
She promoted the book through a Web page for Rainwater Press and called upon all of her contacts in the computer and desktop publishing world to spread the word. She began selling it by mail order. Getting the novel into bookstores was another problem because of the black cover, which booksellers told her made it invisible.
Her fortune got better when Peachpit Press of Berkeley, Calif., which had bought the rights to McCarthy’s Quark computer book, bought co-publishing rights to “Chat.” Peachpit, a division of Addison-Wesley Longman, published 20,000 copies in June ’96. Peachpit sales reps initially had a hard time selling it to big bookstores, because the company publishes computer books and had trouble placing it, McCarthy said.
But because “Chat” was now under the imprint of a large publisher, the book was getting reviewed in the major press. McCarthy got mentions in Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Times. “I got validation,” she said.
As the reviews were coming out, however, the book was not yet in stores because of a distribution problem. “I learned a hard lesson. Just because you get your book published by a large, well respected publisher doesn’t mean you’re going to sell books,” McCarthy said. “So I was very discouraged.”
Trish Booth, publicity manager for Peachpit, said the company was willing to take a chance on “Chat.”
“Every now and then, we like to try something a little different,” Booth said. “We had never published a work of fiction before, but we thought it was a good little story and we would try to help her get it out there.”
Booth said that because Peachpit specializes in how-to books on computers and desktop publishing, marketing “Chat” in that genre was difficult. “It has been a challenge, but the book has done moderately well,” Booth said. “I think it would do better with a general publisher.”
Eager to get back to the Chicago area again, McCarthy and her husband moved to Grayslake in the summer of 1996. Luckily, her husband had an opportunity to land a full-time job with the Marine Corps Reserve unit based at Ft. Sheridan.
Patrick helped keep her spirits up as McCarthy pushed to get her book noticed. “Pat was my No. 1 advocate,” she said. “I don’t know how I could have done it without his encouragement.”
She started another publicity blitz. “I started sending copies of my book to famous people, I sent it to the White House, Oprah, Tom Cruise. One of my friends suggested Tom Cruise because she thought he would be perfect to play the part of Max,” McCarthy said.
She also wrote a letter to humorist Dave Barry, whose own book “Dave Barry in Cyberspace” was being prominently displayed in bookstores while hers was not. “I was going into bookstores and seeing these pyramids of his book. I though that it was really a racket to get your book to stand out in a crowd,” McCarthy said.
Barry responded with a friendly postcard. On the Internet, McCarthy had passed along the letter she wrote to Barry, and it soon was posted on Internet bulletin boards. The publicity boosted sales immediately. So far, McCarthy said, about 15,000 copies have been sold.
With the success of “Chat,” writing the second book was much harder. “I felt I had to live up to my readers’ expectations,” she said. “I wanted to make it strong. Now I feel comfortable that it’s a good book.”
“Connect” is available through Rainwater Press and can be ordered directly from the Web page, McCarthy said. Most of the sales have been to loyal readers of “Chat.”
As for “Crash,” the final installment, McCarthy is hoping her agent, Jane Dystel, will land a deal before year’s end. If not, she plans to have a limited press run to make sure the book gets to the faithful readers who have bought the other two books.
McCarthy said she is prepared to put in the hard work she knows it will take to promote the books again. “I’m going to have to work as hard as I did the first time,” she said. “I know it’s always going to be that way. But as long as I can keep writing what I like to, I’ll be happy.”
Nan McCarthy can be reached at 800-269-9715 or via the Internet at www.rainwater.com. Each book costs $11.53, including tax and shipping.
A SAMPLE OF THE E-MAIL STYLE
Following is an excerpt from “Connect,” the second in Nan McCarthy’s trilogy of e-mail fiction. This section is an exchange between the characters Beverly J. and Maximilian M.
Private Mail
Date: Thursday, February 15, 1996 8:45 a.m.
From: BevJ@frederic-gerard.com
Subject: You Idiot
Maximilian,
Never, EVER, call me on the telephone again.
What were you thinking? And how did you find me? No, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I want you to promise me that you will never call my office again. I can only thank my lucky stars that my home phone number is unlisted. If you ever call me at the office again, I’ll quit my job. Then you’ll never be able to find me. And just to make double-sure, I’ll change my name, join the Federal Witness Protection Program, *and* have a sex-change operation.
Beverly
Private Mail
Date: Thursday, February 15, 1996 2:26 p.m.
From: Maximilian@miller&morris.com
Subj: You Idiot
To: BevJ@frederic-gerard.com
Bev,
Omigod. I feel terrible. I can’t believe I did such a stupid thing. I think it was a buildup of my frustration over not hearing from you all these months. Everything just bubbled over, Bev.
After I came home from my date with Steffee last night and wrote you that message, I started knocking back more martinis. I was getting really polluted when it suddenly occurred to me out of nowhere that I might be able to figure out your work phone number from the domain name in your e-mail address. On a whim, I hyped http://www.frederic-gerard.com into my Web browser and there it was! Welcome to the Frederic Gerard Publishing Company World Wide Web Site!!! . . .
I just want to tell you that I’m sorry, that I promise to never call you at the office again, and that I still think you’re a real piece of work.
Max
