As she sat in a nearly empty Barnes & Noble store in Naperville on Friday morning, Anne Margaret Lewis talked about the responsibility of authors to promote their works. “You have to go out and help the booksellers sell your book,” she said, as a store employee piled some 40 copies of Lewis’ new book “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?” (40 pages, $18.95) on a table near the door.
A writer, Lewis said, has to be ready to sit down behind a bookstore table, meet potential buyers, sign books and do readings — and, even more difficult, to sit there doing nothing. Those are the tough times, she said. “I call that my humble torture.”
Friday morning in Naperville was a bit of humble torture for Lewis, but, really, it wasn’t so bad. After all, even with some minor bumps along the way, “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?” — published by the tiny Traverse City, Mich., company she heads — has been riding higher than she or anyone could ever have expected.
Since Thanksgiving, Lewis’ story of Emit the Elf and his search for Christmas has been featured on the coveted “Christmas table” and prominently displayed in all 824 Barnes & Noble and B. Dalton bookstores. The American Booksellers Association selected it as a children’s pick for this season. And Thursday, the illustrator, Wendy Popko, was on the Fox News cable morning show “Fox & Friends.”
That same day, the book ascended for a short time into the heady company of works by James Patterson, Jimmy Carter and Sue Grafton on the list of the top 100 books in the nation on the Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com Web sites.
As of Friday, the publishing house had shipped 50,000 copies of “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?” to bookstores and was expecting a new printing of 20,000 more to arrive sometime this week. “I’m worried we’re going to run out,” Lewis said, referring to the demand for books before Christmas. In its two-year existence, her company, Mackinac Island Press, with a staff of three, has published seven books. Its previous biggest title was another work by Lewis, “Tears of Mother Bear” (32 pages, $17.95) which sold 15,000 copies.
Every holiday season there are books that come out of nowhere and for one reason or another, catch the public’s fancy. Booksellers call these books “sleepers.”
But rarely does a sleeper from such a tiny publishing house rise so high so fast.
“It’s a one-in-a-million,” said Todd Gyulveszi, a salesman at the Michigan-based Partners Book Distributing Inc. and a former bookstore owner.
To be sure, luck and timing have played a role in the surprising success of “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?” It’s also a book that many — but not all — booksellers have fallen in love with and urged on their customers.
What’s more, Lewis and her husband Brian, the associate publisher of Mackinac Press, are 20-year veterans of book companies, and they brought a high degree of energy and savvy to the task of getting the Emit book noticed.
In recent weeks, Brian Lewis has been working the phones to organize bookstore appearances for his wife and to drum up news coverage as well. He hit the jackpot last Monday when the Wall Street Journal published a 1,100-word story on the book.
But it was Anne Lewis who got the ball rolling last August when she was on a tour in New Jersey to promote her book “Lighthouse Fireflies” (32 pages, $17.95).
At the Barnes & Noble store in Freehold, N.J., she showed a galley proof of “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?” to Carol Curren, the store’s community-relations manager at the time. Curren liked what she saw and liked it even more after Lewis read the book to a group of children.
“It caught my heart,” Curren explained later. “I just thought Emit was an adorable, appealing character.” So Curren contacted the other Barnes & Noble stores in New Jersey and the company’s headquarters to talk up the book.
A month later, just as the book was being published, Brian Monahan, the children’s book buyer for the chain, decided to feature it prominently in every B&N store. “It’s a nice, Christmas-story, hardcover, gift-y kind of a book,” he said.
Besides, he’d had good luck with a previous book the Lewises produced when they were at Sleeping Bear Press — “A Wish To Be a Christmas Tree” by Colleen Monroe, which Monahan put on the “Christmas table” two years after it was published. (The couple sold Sleeping Bear Press in 2002 after producing 200 books in seven years.)
Monahan said he knew the Lewises would work hard to promote “Has Anyone Seen Christmas?,” and he was right. Anne Lewis went back to New Jersey and New England in October and helped sell hundreds of books. At the Barnes & Noble in Holmdel, N.J., demand was so great during Lewis’ appearance that Dee Sockol-Frye, the lead children’s buyer, had to sell the copy of the book she had set aside for her 4-year-old granddaughter, Kayla.
She expects to get another signed copy later this week when Lewis is scheduled to return East near the end of a 10-day tour that includes stops in Naperville (where attendance was sparse Friday morning after a 10-inch snowfall), Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Meanwhile, back in the office, Brian Lewis was fielding calls, including one from the Disney organization about movie rights and others from publishers looking into the possibility of buying rights to the book from the small press. Booksellers, too, have been phoning, looking for more copies of the book to sell before Christmas.
But not everyone’s a fan.
At The Book Bin in Northbrook, owner Janis Irvine said she and her staff “aren’t crazy” about Emit the Elf and his travels through a year’s worth of holidays before reaching Christmas.
“They’re trying to cover too much for little kids,” she said. “On the cover, there’s the Statue of Liberty, the Easter Bunny, an angel, a baby — it’s too much. There are so many great children’s books this year, and this one just doesn’t bubble up to the top.”
By contrast, children’s book buyer Sockol-Frye said the book “strikes a chord in me.” Asked why, she talked about the character of Emit and the book’s illustrations, and then said, “What makes someone fall in love? I don’t know what it is.”
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Getting in the `Christmas’ spirit
In “Has Anybody Seen Christmas?” Emit the Elf travels through a series of holidays. Here are some excerpts from the story:
EASTER
With a whirr and a crash,
We flew off the rainbow slide,
Right into the Easter Factory,
My holiday friends and I.
I bumped into the Easter
Bunny,
Hopping on his pogo-stick.
“Have you seen Christmas?”
I asked.
He gave me a quick “No!”
with a clickety-click.
HALLOWEEN
We charged on our way in
this pumpkin-like sleigh,
Leaving 4th of July fast
behind.
Down we went, using
Trick-or-Treat Lane,
Following the Halloween sign.
“Have you seen Christmas?”
I yelled to the costumed boy
crossing the street.
“No, Emit, I’m afraid it’s
simply not here!”
Then he bellowed a loud,
“TRICK-OR-TREAT!”
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Christmas books always in season
Some Christmas books sell well year after year, never growing stale.
Here are some great ones, according to booksellers at Anderson’s Bookshop in Downers Grove, The Book Bin in Northbrook and Women and Children First in Chicago.
– “Christmas Day in the Morning” by Pearl S. Buck, illustrated by Mark Buehner (HarperCollins, 40 pages, $16) — The story of a son’s gift to his farmer father: doing the milking at dawn.
– “Dream Snow” by Eric Carle (Philomel, 32 pages, $21) — A farmer dreams of snow, and it snows!
– “Five Little Christmas Trees” by William Boniface, illustrated by Lynn Adams (Price Stern Sloan, 12 pages, $5.99) — A counting book for babies and preschoolers.
– “The Last Straw” by Fredrick Thury, illustrated by Vlasta Von Kampen (Charlesbridge, 32 pages, $15.59) — A grumpy camel carries gifts to the baby Jesus.
– “The Nativity” by Julie Vivas (Gulliver, 36 pages, $17) — With the King James nativity text, this pictures the story of Jesus’ birth in modern-day settings.
– “Who Is Coming to Our House?” by Joseph Slate, illustrated by Ashley Wolff (Putnam, 32 pages, $6.99) — A mouse and other residents of the stable make ready for the arrival of Mary and Joseph.
– “Winter Friends” by Carl R. Sams II and Jean Stoick (Carl R. Sams photography, 14 pages, $7.95) — Photos of birds, squirrels and deer in nature.
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preardon@tribune.com
