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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.

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.