The Accidental Bestseller Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2009 by Wendy Wax.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback / June 2009

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wax, Wendy.

  The accidental bestseller / Wendy Wax.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-06004-9

  1. Women authors—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.A893A65 2009

  813’.6—dc22

  2008054352

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to every writer—aspiring and otherwise—who has a story to tell, a love of the written word, and a burning desire to see the fruit of their labor on a bookstore shelf. In a prime position. Cover out. With full publisher support behind it.

  Acknowledgments

  Although writing is generally an individual sport, few novels emerge from a vacuum. A number of people helped me bring The Accidental Bestseller into being, and I’d like to thank them here.

  Thank you to Sandra Chastain, Berta Platas, and Karen White—who is my Faye, Mallory, and Tanya all rolled into one—for using their considerable brainpower to help me turn the kernel of an idea into an actual story. And to Missy Tip-pens for her insights into the role of a minister’s wife as well as the realities of writing inspirational romance; she is not Faye, but was generous enough to lay out the parameters in which Faye might exist.

  Thanks, too, to the Chicago contingent, Rachel Jacobsohn, Sue Ofner, and Karen Lothan, who helped me figure out where Faye might live as well as the logistical details of her life. And to Susan Jacobsohn, trainer extraordinaire, who knows absolutely everyone and has the phone numbers to prove it.

  Thanks to my brother, Barry Wax, who took me to the inspiration for the Downhome Diner in our hometown of St. Pete, and who has become a voracious reader in his own right.

  Finally a great big thank-you to my agent, Stephanie Ros tan, for all that she did to see this story into print. And for sharing her editorial experiences and inside knowledge of the publishing industry—even though I now know all kinds of things that I kinda wish I didn’t.

  1

  The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

  —JOHN STEINBECK

  Kendall Aims’s writing career was about to go down for the count on that Friday night in July as she hurried down Sixth Avenue toward the New York Hilton.

  It had taken many blows over the last year and a half—the first when her editor left Scarsdale Publishing to have a baby, leaving Kendall orphaned and unloved; another when her new editor, a plain, humorless woman named Jane Jensen, informed her that her sales numbers were slipping. And still another when they showed her the cover for the book she’d just turned in, a cover so bland and uninteresting that even Kendall didn’t want to open it. And on which her name had shrunk to a size that required a magnifying glass to read it.

  She landed on the ropes when the print run for this new book was announced. Kendall’s first thought was that someone had forgotten to type in the rest of the zeros. Because even she, who had given up on math long ago, could see at a glance that even if they sold every one of these books, which now seemed unlikely, she’d never earn out the advance she’d been paid.

  Looking back, it seemed as if one day she was perched prettily on the publishing ladder, poised to make all the bestseller lists, and the next the rungs had given way beneath her feet, leaving her dangling above a bubbling pit of insecurity and self-doubt. Not to mention obscurity.

  Tonight her publisher, like all the other publishers participating in this year’s national conference of the Wordsmiths Incorporated, or WINC as it was affectionately abbreviated, had hosted an obligatorily expensive dinner for its stable of authors. There Kendall had smiled and eaten and pretended that she was happy to write for them while they pretended that even after eight years spent proving otherwise, they still intended to make her a household name.

  Now one filet mignon, two glasses of wine, and a crème brûlée later, Kendall hurried through the hotel lobby barely noticing the knots of chattering women scattered through it. The waistband of her panty hose pinched painfully, and her toes, more used to Nikes than Blahniks, throbbed unmercifully. She felt, and she suspected looked, like what she was—a suburban Atlanta housewife whose children had left the nest and whose husband barely noticed her
. At forty-five not even expensive highlights and a boatload of Lycra could disguise the fact that her body had given up its struggle against gravity.

  She reached the lounge and was already scanning the crowd for familiar faces when two women stepped up beside her. One was tall and blocky, the other short and round. A cloud of nervousness surrounded them.

  “Let’s just walk through and pretend we’re looking for someone.” The tall one was clearly in charge, her broad shoulders set in determination.

  “Do we have to? We don’t know anyone and we aren’t anyone, either,” the other one whispered. “What if we do see an agent or an editor? What are we supposed to do then?”

  Kendall flushed with memory. She might have been either one of these women ten years ago. Shy, insecure, and dreaming of publication, she’d been stuck on the fringes of her first national conference desperate to sell the book she’d somehow managed to write, but unable to imagine how it could possibly happen.

  “We’re just going to make a quick pass,” the taller one promised. “At least we’ll be seen. And be sure to keep an eye out for any opportunities. Half the point of being here is to network.”

  “But . . .”

  “Come on. Just follow me. The worst thing that’s going to happen is nothing.”

  Kendall smiled, drawn out of her own misery for the first time since she’d arrived in New York early that afternoon. She and Mallory and Tanya and Faye had met at their first Wordsmiths Incorporated conference in Orlando; all four of them wannabes who’d stood, knees knocking, waiting for their turns to pitch ideas during editor and agent appointments. Fifteen minutes to try to sell yourself and your talent to a twentysomething girl who held all the power and couldn’t understand why you, who might be as old as her mother, or possibly her grandmother, were unable to keep your voice from cracking as you delivered your carefully memorized pitch.

  They’d bonded then and there, four women of disparate ages and even more disparate backgrounds, drawn together by their fear and longing.

  How many times during that first conference had Mallory dragged her through the cocktail lounge insisting they had to work the room and get their names out there? How often had the four of them sought each other out in that sea of two thousand strangers, carving out their own ground, pooling their strengths and resources, vowing that all four of them would beat the odds and see their books in print?

  Miraculously, they’d done it, continued to do it. Against all those frightening odds.

  Kendall’s own chin went up a notch. Her career might be faltering, but she did, in fact, have one. She was multipub lished by a major New York publisher and so were her friends. They’d all done respectably, though Mallory was the only one of them who’d hit the all-important New York Times list regularly.

  Somewhere inside this bar the three of them waited for her, back from their own publisher dinners and parties, a warm cozy oasis in the middle of the Sahara of publishing.

  Her children might not need her anymore; her husband, well, she wasn’t ready to think about what, if anything, he wanted from her anymore. But she had her friends and she was somebody in this world. A smallish somebody perhaps. Not as big as Mallory. Or as prolific as Tanya. Or in as hot a space as Faye. But she had value here; her name was known. She wasn’t finished yet.

  She couldn’t be finished.

  Because if she wasn’t an author, she was nothing. And nothing was the one thing Kendall Aims was not prepared to be.

  “There you are!” Mallory St. James moved quickly and surely toward Kendall, a tall, elegant figure in sleeveless black silk. Velvety brown hair brushed slim shoulders and diamonds glittered at her ears and throat. The two women next to Kendall gasped in recognition, but Mallory’s smile stayed firmly in place.

  “We thought maybe you’d pounded Plain Jane to a pulp over dessert and been carted off to jail.” Mallory pronounced their nickname for Kendall’s new editor with relish and managed to avoid making eye contact with the obviously eavesdropping women. “Tanya and Faye are holding down our table. The wine is on its way.” She slipped her arm through Kendall’s then acknowledged their gaping audience. “Ladies,” she said with both warmth and enough distance in her tone to prevent a request for autographs. “My friend here has to be rushed to our table. She’s clearly in desperate need of a drink.”

  Kendall marveled at Mallory’s social dexterity; she’d become a master at making the readers who bought her books and kept her on the lists feel good without encouraging them to become too familiar.

  The taller one’s hand flew to her chest and a delighted smile washed over her angular face. “You see,” she said to her companion as Mallory led Kendall into the bar. “I told you we needed to come in here. Mallory St. James actually spoke to us!” Her voice vibrated with excitement. “I bet that was her friend Kendall Aims.”

  The bar was knee-deep in men and women of all shapes and sizes. Rings of chairs surrounded too-tiny tables. It looked and sounded as if all two thousand conference attendees had tried to cram themselves into the lounge at the same time.

  “Good grief, you’ve just made their entire conference,” Kendall said, as they worked their way through the crowd. “They can’t wait to get out of here to tell somebody they talked to you. They didn’t even notice me until you arrived. I used to have a career of my own. Now I’m Mallory St. James’s friend.”

  Mallory shrugged her bare shoulders, unperturbed. Kendall hated the whine that had crept into her voice. Normally the four of them laughed over the idea of anyone being in awe of any of them. They’d started together and held each other’s hands through the giddy heights and rock-bottom lows that were an inevitable part of publishing. Envy and resentment had never been factors in their relationship, and Kendall was horrified to be feeling both now.

  “I know that was not a note of self-pity I just heard in your voice.” Mallory nodded to a knot of women who’d fallen silent to observe their progress.

  “A note.” Kendall snorted. “That was a fugue. A full-fledged symphony. My entire career is in the toilet. I just keep praying that nobody flushes.”

  “Interesting metaphor.” Mallory continued to nod and smile, but never checked their pace enough to invite interruption. “But there’s not going to be any flushing. All you have to do is walk off with the Zelda Award tomorrow night and Scarsdale will be looking at you in a whole new light.”

  A woman at the bar pointed them out to her friends. Two more tables stopped talking as they passed.

  “Do you think we should have just had a bottle of wine in the suite?” Kendall could feel the weight of the eyes on them, assessing, wondering, trying in a glance to glean Mallory’s secret for making all those bestseller lists. Curious how close she was to Kendall, whose career was nowhere near as big.

  “No, no hiding.” Mallory’s lips barely moved behind her smile. “Besides the WINC board wants us published folk to be visible. You and I are bona fide evidence that a writer’s dreams can come true.”

  “Maybe we should warn them that sometimes those dreams turn into nightmares,” Kendall said. “I don’t remember them covering that in any of the conference workshops.” She smiled evilly. “Let’s propose a workshop for next year—‘Caught in the netherworld. Stranded in the mind-sucking midlist.’ ” She referred to the dreaded spot in the middle of the publisher’s list of offerings in a given month. The top slots, the books the publisher was most excited about, got the biggest orders and the most publisher support, perpetuating those authors’ positions at the top of the publisher’s and ultimately the bestseller lists. The rest of their authors were thrown out there, much like shit flung at a wall, while the publisher waited to see who “stuck,” or so it seemed to Kendall.

  Kendall had originally clung to the wall and even begun to inch up it; now she seemed to be sliding back down at an alarming pace.

  “Great idea,” Mallory said. “Except no one wants to hear the truth. Just like no pregnant woman actually wants to listen to t
hose delivery horror stories. Everyone wants to believe that once they sell their book the struggle is over, when it’s really just beginning.”

  Kendall looked at Mallory, whose rise had been nothing short of meteoric, and an ugly pocket of envy filled her heart. How had she sailed through so unscathed when Kendall felt so badly bruised and beaten?

  Kendall pushed the bitterness away as Mallory slowed. She looked up as Tanya and Faye, still dressed from their publisher parties, waved their hellos.

  “Hey, over here!” The youngest of their foursome, Tanya Mason was thirty-five with blond hair that could only be described as “big” and an oval face dominated by a pointy chin and cornflower blue eyes. Her accent was pure country and so was her attitude. She wrote stories about single mothers like herself for Masque Publishing, with the occasional NASCAR hero thrown in.

  “You are way behind, Miss Kendall,” Tanya crowed as Kendall and Mallory reached the table and dropped into their seats. “I had to slap Faye’s hands away to save you a glass of this fine red zinfandel. Of course, I could barely move my arms to get at her after the white-water rafting trip through the Hudson River Gorge that Darby dragged us on today.”

  Kendall felt the room and the curious eyes recede as she accepted a glass of the red zin. “I think Masque should be paying you a bigger advance to compensate for the inevitable hospital bills,” Kendall replied. Tanya’s editor, Darby Hanover, was both highly competitive and a notorious jock with a passion for hair-raising adventure. Her favorite authors often found themselves a part of those adventures, even those like Tanya whose spirits were willing, but whose muscle tone was weak.

  “Hazardous duty pay,” Tanya said, “that’s it for sure. And to think I came in a whole day early to lose the use of both of my arms.”

  Faye rolled bespectacled eyes at Tanya, though the eyeglasses couldn’t hide the twinkle that resided there. She was sixty, referred to herself as “full figured,” had cropped salt-and-pepper hair, and was the wife of the charismatic televangelist, Pastor Steve, though you’d never hear it from her.