Mosher on the Move
A three-month trek and a northeast-to-west bookseller outreach help double author's 'Fall' sales
How far would you drive for a book? One mile? Ten miles? In the case of novelist Howard Frank Mosher, the answer is 11,000 miles.
Last July, Mosher set out from his home in Vermont on a cross-country odyssey to promote The Fall of the Year, which was published by Houghton Mifflin on October 1. This autobiographical novel, set in a fictionalized version of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, takes place over the course of one summer in the late 1950s. Its quirky characters include a baseball-playing, trout-fishing smuggler-turned-priest, a bottle picker/metaphysical savant and an itinerant mind reader.
Mosher's long-distance book tour, which had its genesis in a fact-finding trip for his next work, a novel about the Lewis & Clark trail, was part of a bookseller-to-bookseller outreach campaign developed by HM associate marketing manager Carla Gray.
"The campaign," she explained, "came about because if you're a bookseller, once you've met Howard, you want to sell his books. He's done extensive drop-in tours in New England, and his books have really taken off."
In June, Gray sent galleys to Mosher enthusiasts, including NEBA president Donna Urey, owner of White Birch Books (North Conway, N.H.), and Michael DeSanto, co-owner of the Book Rack and Children's Pages (Winooski, Vt.). She asked them to write a letter that she could send to their counterparts out West. Gray mailed their letters, along with a set of galleys, to booksellers along the route of Mosher's trip. HM's telephone sales department followed up, lining up 100 drive-bys for August and September, from Elliott Bay (Seattle) to the Bookstall at Chestnut Court (Chicago) and Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza (Albany, N.Y.).
Senior editor Harry Foster, who edited The Fall of the Year as well as Mosher's only work of nonfiction, North Country (also published by Houghton Mifflin), was a strong supporter of the tour. "We thought this was a good book with broad appeal," he said. "We knew Howard had a big following in New England, but he's not a regional writer any more than Larry McMurtry is a Texas author." Then, too, Foster noted, "there are a lot of similarities between the Northwest and New England. Both like down-to-earth fiction, as opposed to perhaps urban fiction, and both have a lot of independent booksellers."
Mosher has already been discovered beyond his region by the movie world. Vermont independent filmmaker Jay Craven filmed A Stranger in the Kingdom with Martin Sheen and Ernie Hudson; that movie is now a renter's favorite even beyond Vermont borders. Craven has also made a movie based on Where the Rivers Flow North with Rip Torn, Michael J. Fox and Tanto Candinal, which is available on video.
And finally, Mosher has just completed a screenplay for Northern Borders and is "cautiously optimistic" that it will be a go with the producers of A River Runs Through It and Dances with Wolves.
For Mosher, the trip for Fall was "a lot of fun," even though he visited eight to 10 stores a day.
"Houghton Mifflin laid the groundwork very well, and I found a lot of people out there who still love to read." To keep himself entertained, he brought along books that related to the parts of the country that he passed through-Ivan Doig's Mountain Time, Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Tom McNeal's Goodnight, Nebraska and William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse.
Mosher's most notable moment of the tour, however, more closely resembles Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings. As a frustrated Mosher tried to negotiate rush-hour traffic in downtown Minneapolis to get to the Hungry Mind Bookstore, he recalled, "I was inching my way across the river and road rage was starting to prevail. All the sudden, everybody just stopped. I craned my head out the window and walking up the road were 25 Canada geese." He took it as a sign that "the people of Minneapolis must all be readers, at least of nature books."
As a result of Mosher's travels, The Fall of the Year went back to press before publication and now has 25,000 copies in print.
"This shows at least a 50% increase over the net sales of his last hardcover," Gray commented.
The reviews are just starting to come in, including one from the Washington Post Book World, which quotes Flannery O'Connor on the best American fiction being regional. In addition, the book was voted #3 on the November/December Book Sense 76 list.
Nor has Mosher, who prefers not to do formal talks or signings, stopped driving. He is in the midst of a local New England drop-by tour of nearly 50 bookstores.
UPDATE
More Morris
When prolific author and former Harper's editor Willie Morris died this past summer, most obits mentioned his 1967 childhood memoir, North Toward Home. One London newspaper even called it the best book on American boyhood since Mark Twain.
A great plug for any book, indeed. But it hasn't been readily available to today's readers.
Until now.
The University Press of Mississippi is issuing an "instant" hardcover edition of the book on November 29, which would have been Morris's 65th birthday. And Morris's trade publisher, Random House, which releases Morris's My Cat Spit McGee next month, will bring out a Vintage paperback edition of North Toward Home in August 2000.
As Book News reported earlier (Aug. 16), UPM is doing quite a bit more to honor one of its state's most famous sons. In April, it will publish Remembering Willie, a collection that includes eulogies given at Morris's funeral by William Styron, David Halberstam and others, plus tributes from other luminaries, including President Clinton.
Also on the press's spring list is Conversations with Willie Morris, the next installment of UPM's extensive author interview series. Compiler Jack Bales, a librarian at the Mary Washington College Library in Fredericksburg, Va., is working on a Morris biography that he hopes to sell to a trade house. And in fall 2000, the press will issue Mississippi, a large-format illustrated book by New Orleans photographer David Rae Morris, which includes text by his father, delivered shortly before his death.
