"Imminent mayhem and timeless patience" (Is James LePore talking about Paris, dads and daughters, or his debut novel?)

The first page of James LePore’s A World I Never Made has us reading over the shoulder of American Pat Nolan as he tries to make sense of the suicide note written by his daughter, Megan. He’s understandably shaken, having just identified her body in a French morgue. We’re understandably shaken when we realize the dead girl is not Nolan’s daughter.

With the help of a savvy French detective, Nolan learns that Megan, a freelance journalist, is tangled in a dangerous affair with a Saudi businessman and that her life is just one of millions at risk. As one who loves Paris as much as I love a good mystery, I thoroughly enjoyed chasing down every twist, turn, and dark alley from the Marais to Morocco to the Czech Republic. A World I Never Made does everything the Bourne books do: the story intrigues, the characters engage, the locations are literally a trip, and the plot bombs don’t stop detonating until the very last page.

Small press The Story Plant will launch the book in hardcover next week, and according to publisher Lou Aronica, buzz is good so far. LePore, a practicing attorney and photographer, lives in South Salem, NY with his wife, artist Karen Chandler. First novel set to launch. Second novel in the pipeline. I figured we’d better get him to sit down with us for a minute before things get crazy.

Before we get down to business, James, how are you? Well and happy and enjoying the First Book ride, I hope.
I alternate between being nervous and elated, but one thing is certain: it’s a dream come true.

Tell us about the genesis of this book. Has it been in your head for a while?
I had written two other novels and although they had not gotten published, I was determined to keep on writing. One night I was told a very sad story about a young woman who had committed suicide and left a taped message to each of her parents and siblings. This woman had been seemingly happy. But what if she had had reason to be angry at one of her loved ones? What was on those cassettes? What story did they tell?

I have good relationships with my daughters, but I got to thinking about a father-daughter relationship that had gone wrong, that had given the daughter reason to be bitter, and angry at her father. And I got to thinking about redemption and the ways it might be offered to us.

This is the genesis of A World I Never Made.

I loved the high mileage of this novel, especially passages set in Paris and Tangiers, two places I love. Familiar neighborhoods rang perfectly clear. I’m curious to know about your travels and why these two particular places speak so strongly to you.
Paris is very hip, but it is its combination of hipness and ancientness--its charm and beauty unchanged for centuries--that to me makes it such a great city. In North Africa I was struck repeatedly by the crazy juxtaposition of imminent mayhem and timeless patience. These are inherently dramatic and romantic places, the perfect settings I think for a story that involves the dramatic and romantic alteration of peoples’ lives.

Tell us about “God’s Warriors” and the other stories you’ll be featuring on your web site. Are these stories you wrote to expand on the book or are they “killed darlings” cut from the original manuscript?
These are not killed darlings. The publisher asked me to write them as a way of helping create the universe of the novel for the website. I was somewhat surprised, but very happy, to find that I knew more about the characters than I thought I did. I believe that the people who read them will come away with a better understanding of what motivated Pat and Megan, for example, to be the people they were, to do the things they did, in the novel. In the novel the reader is basically told (with some showing in the way of flashbacks) that Pat was not a good father to Megan. Is this believable? If you read Till Death Do Us Part, a story that takes place while Pat and his beautiful young wife Lorrie are on their honeymoon, I believe you will see just what he lost and why he behaved as he did after her death.

It’s striking how certain elements that brand your photography also brand your writing voice: urban sensibilities, fashion savvy, the strong undercurrent of mystery. (If it’s possible for colors to be dangerous, yours are.) How does that crossover work for you? Do the images and words inform each other, or are they coming from completely separate hemispheres?
I think you’re right. The two sides of my brain must somehow see the same things but express them differently. The really good thing is that the crossover as you call it is a huge help when I’m describing a person or a scene in my writing. I call upon the things I know that make a good photograph and use them to write descriptively.

There's quite a PR campaign planned for the book. Did you bring in outside help or is it all being generated by the publisher?
The publisher, in house and by outsourcing, has done it all.

Thanks again for your time, James. We wish you great success with this book and all that lies ahead. Before we send you back to the creative salt mine, I have to ask, what are you reading?
I am reading two things at the moment. The Wanderers by Richard Price and Indian Summer by Alex Von Tunzelmann. No one captures the rawness of New York’s mean streets quite like Price. Indian Summer is a history, dramatically written, of India’s fight for independence from Great Britain and the breakup of old India into India and Pakistan. I highly recommend them both.


Above: James LePore's "Grand Central Red" (To see more of James LePore's unique imagery, visit Naked Eye Images.)

The little press that seriously could (a conversation with Lou Aronica of The Story Plant)

As tough economic times force publishing professionals to think outside the box, perhaps those best equipped to weather the storm are the ones who were already doing it. The Story Plant is a small press and relatively fresh to the universe, but its founders state their goal without flinching: "The Story Plant is dedicated to developing commercial novelists into bestselling authors." Publisher Lou Aronica came to the project after twenty years at Bantam, Berkley, and Avon, during which he edited and published a number of NYT bestsellers. Teammate Peter Miller spent thirty years managing writers, repping several NYT bestsellers, and Executive Producing more than a dozen movies. He's currently working on a HBO miniseries with Tom Hanks' Playtone company. All of which is to say: these guys clearly know what they're talking about.

I got curious about The Story Plant when I received a review copy of James LePore's forthcoming A World I Never Made. (Watch this space for an author interview and more about the book next week.) It's a well-written international thriller a la Bourne -- danger, intense personal backstory, and location location location -- but can a David-sized press really generate a bestseller in Goliathville? Lou Aronica graciously takes a moment to talk to us about it.

Lou, thanks for being here. I’m curious about the conversation at the root (no pun intended) of The Story Plant. What is it you set out to accomplish?
Peter and I started The Story Plant because we felt that, while the world certainly didn’t need another publisher, it did need someone to make commitments to novelists and work aggressively to build their careers. Throughout my earlier publishing career, I’d dedicated myself to author development. This requires launching a writer with a vision of four or five books, not one. Publishers have moved away from that for financial reasons. This move made good fiscal sense, but not good publishing sense. With few exceptions, readers don’t discover a writer en masse the first time out. Peter and I felt that a company dedicated to commercial fiction and a long-term commitment to the writers it publishes could make a mark.

And how’s all that working out so far?
Well, we certainly picked the best possible time to start a new company…. We haven’t had any breakthroughs yet, but we’ve only published two books in the midst of a miserable economy. What has worked out is that we’ve managed to put a very strong little list together. I think we’re working with a first-rate team of writers. Our plans are on course with those writers.

How has the shift in the economy changed your business plan?
It hasn’t changed the core business plan at all. We still see The Story Plant as an author development house. What has changed is our expectations for our authors’ first books because booksellers are being ultra conservative. It’s still too early to see how this will affect the growth curves we expected for each writer.

It says on The Story Plant web site: “While we understand that no one buys a book because of the logo on the spine, we hope you'll come to find our imprimatur synonymous with storytelling excellence.” Define “storytelling excellence.”
To me, “storytelling excellence” means giving readers characters they can relate to and sympathize with at some level, presenting stories that hold together well from beginning to end without becoming predictable, and writing those stories with crisp prose. We’re publishing commercial fiction and our goal is very high quality entertainment.

You’ve also said The Story Plant is dedicated to developing commercial novelists into bestselling authors. How do you go about that? And what are the essential elements that make a novelist commercial in your view?
The first step is picking a writer who writes something that speaks to a large potential audience but does so in a distinctive way. I think a writer is commercial if that writer addresses something that matters to a large segment of the readership, either via subject (love, crime, family, friendship, overcoming hardship, etc.) or treatment (memorable characters, high emotional engagement, clever turns of phrase, fast pacing, etc.). A writer breaks out if he or she presents the work in a distinctive way.

Next, one needs to connect with a core readership. It’s very difficult to promote your way onto the bestseller list. Overwhelmingly, reader enthusiasm drives commercial success. Our goal with The Story Plant is to get a core of readers interested in and talking about each of our writers. Our expectation is that this core will be relatively small with the author’s first book but, because it is enthusiastic, it will continue to grow from book to book. I’m very encouraged by what we’re seeing with our third publication, James LePore’s A World I Never Made. The blogosphere is already buzzing about it and the novel has received several enthusiastic reviews – and it doesn’t go on sale until mid-April. People care about this novel and I think that level of connection will drive word-of-mouth and build Jim over the four books we currently have planned with him.

Would you take a chance on a book you love if you felt in your gut that it wasn’t going to sell well?
I did that several times at Bantam and Avon because I thought the writer was someone we should be working with, someone with true skill as a writer. Often, the results were ugly, but sometimes this paid off in a major way because we were by the writer’s side when he or she came up with a bigger idea. We don’t have the room to do that in The Story Plant right now because we’re a small company. We know that some of our books aren’t going to sell because that’s the nature of the marketplace. But we can’t buy anything right now unless we think it has a better-than-average chance to sell at least moderately well.

In terms of both quality and quantity, how would you describe the submissions your receiving?
I’m satisfied with both so far. We’re only planning to publish seven books this year and maybe a dozen in 2010 and I have no concerns about being able to reach those marks with very good books.

Looking at the books on your list this year, what is it about each of them that really clicked for you?
What’s consistent about all of our 2009 titles is that they all engage the reader emotionally. Whether it’s a suspense novel, a mystery, a fantasy, or a romance, each touches the reader at a deep emotional level: a man searching for his troubled, estranged daughter; an emotionally scarred woman who needs to pretend to be a mother; a family trying to contend with sudden tragedy and the effects that time has had on who they wanted to be; a lover refusing to give up hope in the face of overwhelming odds; a widowed man caring for his infant son. The books on our list excited us for various reasons, but all of them connected with our hearts. I think that’s critical if the goal is to build a dedicated audience.

Lou, thanks again for stopping by. We truly appreciate your time. Final question: What are you reading?
One of the hazards of spending the entire day around words is that one doesn’t necessarily want to spend the entire night with words as well. I don’t do nearly as much reading “for fun” as I would like and I therefore have a huge backlog of books. Right now, I’ve finally gotten to Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert is a truly inspired writer and I find her perspective illuminating and her sense of humor revitalizing.