PW: K.C. McKinnon Uncovered

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K.C. McKinnon Uncovered
Judy Quinn -- 10/13/97
Cathie Pelletier breaks out of 'midlist crisis'
On October 4, attendees of Nashville's Southern Festival of Books went to a panel expecting to see Cathie Pelletier, a local Crown author known for literary novels that sell in the 20,000 hardcover-copy range (Beaming Sonny Home, 1996) and K.C. McKinnon, a pseudonymous novelist whose much more commercial book, Dancing at the Harvest Moon, just got a 250,000 first printing push from Doubleday and is hovering around PW's top 25 list this week.

But what is already an open secret in the publishing community was finally and formally acknowledged in Nashville: Pelletier is McKinnon.

"There's not going to be much fanfare; it's not like I'm going to wear a lampshade on my head," joked McKinnon, contacted by PW a few days before the public revelation. She said that a lot of people had guessed her identity, many tipped off by the name "McKinnon," a Pelletier family name and also the moniker for the fictional Maine family central to her first three novels, The Funeral Makers, Once Upon a Time on the Banks and The Weight of Winter.

Why the switch to what even Pelletier admits is a more sentimental, less humorous style? Try cold, hard cash. "God, money is freedom," she exclaimed, noting that she had only approached low six figures before this. Dancing, first acquired by Doubleday editor-in-chief Pat Mulcahy under the pseudonym, originally garnered only a $75,000 advance, but that snowballed to a whopping $1 million advance from Doubleday for another McKinnon novel, Candles on Bay Street, after Dancing got heat: a Tri-Star/CBS TV movie sale; a Good Housekeeping first serial; a $250,000 paperback floor; and foreign rights sales in 14 countries to date.

"I guess people think 'midlist' authors should hold up signs on the highway saying `Will work for food,' " she said. "That's pretty ridiculous."McKinnon's objective is also to gain a wider audience. "D sn't the term 'midlist' sound close to 'midlife?,'" she asked. "And that was what I was having. I was turning 40 [she's now 44] and people kept telling me 'Look at Anne Tyler, they broke her out with the fifth or sixth book. Well, I had written six novels and was still waiting." The epiphany came in a Canadian bookstore, when she complained to her husband that her books were lost among the blockbusters. "He told me: don't complain -- write one yourself," she said.

Pelletier is also working on her next Pelletier novel, tentatively titled Running the Bulls. It will focus on a man's spark to life after learning of his wife's infidelity. Crown exec v-p Betty Prashker, who holds the option on this book, told PW she completely understands Pelletier's reinvention of herself as first-time-novelist McKinnon. "In today's computerized environment, orders are based on previous sales, and it's often the first novels that will get the bigger orders," she said, adding, "Pelletier deserves an audience."

And there's hope that McKinnon audiences may perhaps discover Pelletier. "We've been handselling her for years, and we're hoping a lot of people will read her literary fiction, which is very accessible," said Audrey Seitz, v-p of sales and marketing for Nashville's Davis-Kidd Booksellers. Seitz had suspected that McKinnon was Pelletier early on, and Davis-Kidd stores will showcase Pelletier backlist alongside Dancing. "It's going to be an interesting way to get [Pelletier] readers through the back door," she said.
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