Everybody has an obsession. For Steve Almond—a creative writing teacher and commentator on Boston NPR affiliate WBUR-FM—it's candy. His new book, Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (May), is a deceptively simple confection that could be Algonquin's next big bestseller, after Lee Smith's novel The Last Girls (2002) and Robert Morgan's Gap Creek, an Oprah pick in 2000.
The book offers a tantalizing mix of confession (Almond has eaten a piece of candy "every single day of his entire life"), nostalgia ("this entire book arose from the loss of a single candy bar. I am speaking of the Caravelle") and business writing ("candy is the Dow Jones of the kid economy"). The parallel between the sweets biz—where the Big Three, Hershey's, Mars and Nestlé, dominate a dwindling number of independents—and the book business has not been lost on independent booksellers, who made Candyfreak the number one Book Sense pick for May. But the book's appeal hasn't stopped there. It was also selected for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program, Borders' Original Voices program, and as an Amazon Spring Breakout Book—thereby receiving a rare quadruple honor that no book published last year was able to match.
Algonquin Sweetens the Pot
Almond also sees similarities between the underdog candy manufacturers he profiles in the book—like the Idaho Candy Company in Boise, maker of the Spud—and his current publisher, the North Carolina—based Algonquin. "Anybody at a small business feels that same sense of being engaged in something noble, and that's what they do at Algonquin," Almond told PW over the phone, shortly after consuming a Kit Kat Dark and a Brazilian candy bar with ground-up cashews and honey.
Algonquin, a division of Workman Publishing, has mounted an intense grassroots campaign with 1,200 galleys, about an equal number of Goo Goo Clusters (the best-known candy bar in the South) and a potent dollop of passion. Marketing director Craig Popelars sent early copies of the book to reps who don't even sell Algonquin, including PGW New England rep Peg O'Donnell, who sold Almond's previous short story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, when Grove published it in 2002, and Jason Gobble, who sells Penguin Group titles from Tennessee to Michigan. "I thought it was absolutely fantastic," said Gobble, who had no problem talking up another company's book. "One of the things that works to my advantage as a sales representative is that I recommend books from other houses, so I'm not known as a corporate whore." Since then, HighBridge Audio, which is distributed by Penguin Putnam, has acquired audio rights to Candyfreak.
Popelars and Almond also visited some stores in February that weren't able to be part of Almond's 20-city tour. At Books & Co. in Dayton, Ohio, for example, Almond and the staff shared pizza and stories about candies of their youth. "Almond's such an extraordinary devotee of chocolate," commented director of public relations Sharon Kelly Roth. "I've never met anybody so drenched in chocolate."
The biggest problem Steven Salardino, manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, foresees is shelving Candyfreak. "I will probably have it in more than one place—cooking and food, and in nonfiction," he said. Based in part on sales of My Life in Heavy Metal, which was the store's second bestselling book of fiction last year, after The Da Vinci Code, Salardino predicted that Candyfreak is "going to be pretty big. It's just so funny; it reminded me of my bubblegum youth." At University Bookstore in Seattle, the book will go into the contemporary culture section, which includes Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, said events assistant Matthew Simmons, who gained eight pounds reading Almond's book. "I'd read it at lunch and run downstairs and get a candybar."
National vendors like Hudson News, with 300 stores that carry books, are also looking forward to unwrapping Candyfreak and exposing customers to its sweet core. "Candyfreak was just so funny. We've guaranteed Algonquin priority placement in at least 60 newsstands," Sara Hinckley, v-p of book purchasing and promotions, told PW.
Algonquin plans to start with a 50,000-copy first printing, and has already lined up author appearances on the Food Network's Roker on the Road and NPR's Talk of the Nation, as well as a feature in Time Out New York. Considering that Almond set out to write Candyfreak after his agent for My Life in Heavy Metal stopped representing him and he had to give up on a novel that he worked on for a year and a half, this book could be sweet revenge. "Bottom line, the only important thing is that the publisher has to really believe in what you do," said Almond.
Algonquin is definitely a believer. Not only have staffers spent hours following up on each set of galleys, and taste-tested many pounds of sweets before shipping them to bookstores—but the publisher has also purchased a collection of Almond's stories.
