A Committee Hopes to Book Artful Profits

“Only two classes of books are of universal appeal,” Ford Madox Ford wrote many years ago. “The very best and the very worst.”

The question now is whether Rod Kline can achieve either of these commercial ideals.

Kline is a former Silicon Valley marketing executive whose new publishing venture is as audacious in style as it is modest in scale. Fed up with what he regards as bad books produced by a publishing establishment supposedly as slack and indifferent to quality as Detroit before the Japanese, Kline is bringing out a book of his own in August. It’s not your usual novel.

For one thing, it was written by committee. All his books will be. And it’s being test-marketed. When readers spot something they don’t like, Kline’s budding book factory rewrites it. If the ending turns readers off, Kline and his minions will change it.

“Our goal is to produce a higher-quality book,” he says. And what does that mean? To Kline, a better book is one readers like better and therefore are likelier to buy.

The key is finding out what readers want. Kline and his team don’t have a lot of money for market research, so they buttonhole customers at Bay Area book stores and rely on published sources. There is no lack of communication between production and marketing.

“Everyone in the company does market research,” Kline says. Of “Lady Killers,” the first offering of his R. Taylor Kline Corp., he adds: “We can tell you exactly how and what people are going to think about this book.”

Kline, 33, also has some sense of how traditional writers and publishers may respond to his unusual efforts to build a better book.

“Sounds like a lot of trash to me,” growls Roger Straus Jr., chief executive of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, a doggedly independent literary publisher whose writers include Tom Wolfe, Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott.

John L’Heureux, a highly regarded novelist who used to head the writing program at Stanford University, is practically apoplectic.

“No work of art has ever been created by committee,” he says emphatically, adding: “If there’s a just God, the earthquake will claim this guy first.”

Definitions of art differ, of course. Some movies are certainly art, and they’re routinely made by groups, although an individual vision is often said to predominate.

But Hollywood studios have for years practiced what Kline preaches. Scripts are written and rewritten by many different writers, and finished films are often tested before audiences. “Fatal Attraction,” for example, had its ending changed as a result of audience response in preliminary screenings. The movie later became a blockbuster hit.

And although an author’s individual vision is considered sacrosanct, more young writers attend writing schools, where their work is subjected to workshops--a kind of focus group--made up of other aspiring writers.

Indeed, despite Kline’s ostensible literary sacrilege, his efforts embody an interesting critique of mainstream publishing, and they come at a time the industry’s perennial art versus commerce debate has flared anew.

Authors complain that publishers don’t edit--in other words, don’t try to make their books better--and a recent cover story in the New Republic generated controversy when it leveled this argument against some leading editors in New York. Authors also attack publishers as disorganized and technologically backward.

These views, oddly enough, go hand in hand with the idea that publishers now care only about the bottom line. Today few publishers are independent of giant corporations, and small, quality houses struggle. Near Berkeley, for example, North Point Press, a leading literary publisher, has stopped producing new books.

So Kline will use computers. He will pay readers by the error to comb his manuscripts for mistakes. And as Harlequin has done for romance novels, he will try to inspire brand loyalty.

“The same thing that happened to the auto industry is about to happen to the publishing industry,” he predicts. “I don’t know why they’re not doing what I’m doing. I can’t believe it.”

But Kline Corp. is no Honda. Its market research is haphazard, and although Kline won’t give specifics, its capital is slender. The firm runs out of Kline’s Alameda residence, and he drives a battered 1975 Oldsmobile Cutlass the color of an avocado. He also faces an uphill struggle to get its products into bookstores.

Nor will Kline’s books make anyone forget Dostoevsky. He and his team of book creators (and fellow shareholders) will focus on mystery, science fiction and self-help, categories chosen because, Kline says, they sell.

His team consists of two writers (including one who claims he invented the propeller beanie), a marketing director and a production manager, as well as Kline himself, a lifelong scribbler with an unpublished novel to his credit.

To create a book, the group develops a one-page outline that specifies genre and gives the barest description of plot and character. At 300-450 pages, length is a given; that’s the length people want, Kline says.

Character profiles are developed next, and then the work is divided into chapters, which are assigned to various group members for writing. The group meets Mondays and Fridays to coordinate. “We inspire each other,” Kline says.

How do the disparate chapters come to have a single voice? Kline says that’s his big trade secret.

“Our book will appear as one voice, but it will be much richer, deeper and more captivating than any one author could do it,” he says.

The literary world isn’t unanimously aghast. Oakley Hall, retired director of a UC Irvine writing program that produced such talents as Michael Chabon, is only “slightly horrified,” and then only in the case of a novel. “I don’t see why it wouldn’t work,” he says.

Adds Brian Moore, the Irish novelist now living in Malibu: “I don’t see that it’s any different from any other commercial enterprise.”

What Kline is doing isn’t altogether new. As a lark, a group of Newsday reporters some years ago wrote an intentionally trashy novel called “Naked Came the Stranger,” and even serious writers respond at times to market forces. John Barth, for example, changed the ending of one of his earliest novels to get it published. Later, after achieving some success, Barth restored the original in subsequent printings.

Kline’s biggest challenge may come when he tackles self-help, because there’s no psychologist on his staff, but he’s undaunted. “Most psychologists don’t know anything,” he says. “We just have to find one who agrees with what we say.”