A fortuitous meeting in Washington, D.C., helped Fulcrum Publishing land the book that will kick off the Golden, Colo.—based publisher's new fiction list.
In January, Fulcrum associate publisher Sam Scinta and publisher Bob Baron were in the capital for an event celebrating the publication of Parting Shots from My Brittle Bow by Eugene McCarthy, from the house's new Speaker's Corner imprint. "One of Bob's friends asked if we wanted to have lunch with his friend Bobby," said Scinta. Lunch turned out to be breakfast and "Bobby" turned out to be Robert Duvall. Also in attendance was screenwriter Alan Geoffrion. After spending five hours together in Duvall's Virginia home, recalled Scinta, "Alan handed me a screenplay and said, 'If you see a book in this, I'd like to work with you.' "
The screenplay was for an upcoming AMC miniseries, Daughters of Joy, starring Duvall and Thomas Haden Church, and Scinta quickly agreed to publish a tie-in edition next summer to coincide with the airing of the miniseries. Set in the late 1800s, Daughters of Joy tells the story of a rancher (Duvall) and his nephew (Church) who stumble upon a group of Chinese girls being transported from San Francisco to Montana, where they will be forced into prostitution at a mining camp.
The book fits in with what Scinta described as Fulcrum's focus in fiction: historical and contemporary stories about the western U.S. Its second novel, scheduled for spring 2007, will be Going Together by Arnold Grossman, a romantic comedy set in Los Angeles. That book landed at Fulcrum unexpectedly as well. Author Sandra Dallas—who lives in Denver—called Scinta and pleaded with him to look at Grossman's book because she didn't want "Arnie to get lost in the midlist shuffle in New York," Scinta said.
Fulcrum plans to do two to four fiction titles a year as a complement to its nonfiction program, which focuses on gardening, environmental and Native American topics.
