Awards hope to change literati into glitterati

By GERALDINE BAUM

Feb. 7, 2005 12 AM PT

Imagine the awards night -- the lights and limousines, the swanky gift baskets and red carpet. But instead of Nicole Kidman looking frozenly pretty in pale pink as a nominee for best actress or a hunky George Clooney laughing in the front row of the audience, the spotlight zooms in on Philip Roth in an off-the-rack windbreaker. Joan Rivers eyes it with envy!

And look who’s walking up to the podium! It’s the prolific Joyce Carol Oates. She’s actually taken off time from writing her zillionth novel to be here tonight. But, oy, what was she thinking when she put on that nondescript frock?

Such is the fantasy of a book industry desperate to get consumers to pay more attention to the 40,000 new titles cranked out every year. Publishers and booksellers would like to bring dignified sex appeal to a literary world that too often plays second fiddle to movies and television with their hefty profit margins, unceasing publicity and glamorous cast of characters -- many first found in books that few outside of film development offices have read.

Located primarily in the People’s Republic of Manhattan, with its luminaries often lunching at Michael’s in Midtown, the book industry is taking a page, so to speak, from Hollywood, and backing the Quills, a new national award event that would be a conflation of the Oscars and the People’s Choice Awards. But instead of movies, TV or pop music, it would be a “consumer-driven celebration of the written word.”

This new awards show is set to be broadcast this fall from Manhattan on NBC’s 14 owned and operated stations in major markets such as Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. The event is being billed by the network as a “celebrity-energized presentation in the fashion of the Golden Globes.”

In fact, everything about this enterprise is modeled after ubiquitous TV award shows that are relatively inexpensive to produce and often get high ratings. Even the more literate Brits televise their prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, which, according to its foundation, “has the power to transform the fortunes of authors, and even publishers.”

So it’s no coincidence that the slate of finalists for the new Quills will be selected by roughly the same number of people -- 6,000 -- who vote on the Oscars. But instead of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Quills finalists will be chosen by 6,000 booksellers and librarians drawn from the subscription list of Publishers Weekly, a trade magazine.

(PW, with its parent company Reed Business Information and NBC Universal Television Stations, is backing the glitzy book award event to be held at an iconic New York location yet to be named; clearly the corporate backers expect to get many new branding opportunities out of it.)

In May, after the booksellers and librarians come up with five finalists in 15 categories from best romance to best religion/spirituality book, winners will be chosen by regular folks who will vote over the summer online or at Borders and select bookstores.

The man who cooked this up is Gerry Byrne, a self-described movie guy. Frankly, before he got involved in this venture he knew little about the book business.

He’s the former publisher of Variety and Daily Variety and now does development projects for those magazines, Parade and a film festival. He spent the last year educating himself about book selling, and calling on people in the business to drum up support for the new awards.

For his executive council he recruited corporate publishing types such as HarperCollins’ Jane Friedman, Time Warner’s Larry Kirshbaum and Random House’s Peter Olson. Already, the publishing world is giddy: “We consider Quills a home run for all,” said Patricia Schroeder, head of the Assn. of American Publishers, anticipating all the good attention the Quills will bring to a wide variety of books.

Still not present and accounted for on that executive council are prominent editors, writers or critics, the type of people who control the more earnest and established book prizes -- the National Book Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/ Faulkner Awards for Fiction or the Pulitzers -- that are presented at rather long luncheons in hotel ballrooms around Manhattan with no network coverage. (One does show up on CSPAN).

These awards are much coveted but even a prestigious National Book Award is not guaranteed to boost sales. Sometimes a shiny seal on a book jacket does lead to new marketing opportunities and a book ends up on the front tables at Barnes & Noble or selling out at Costco. More often, though, the award brings personal glory to authors and publishers but little to their bottom line.

In a culture in which attention is critical, even Human Rights Watch loads up its dinners with stars, the publishers are optimistic that if the Quills can attract a Nicole and George if not an Oprah and some literary bigs, the televised awards might help books reach a broader audience the way the Oscars, and even the People’s Choice Awards, help with ticket sales or ratings.

Why the publishing industry hasn’t already taken its National Book Award and simply dolled it up for prime time is curious. “Personally, I didn’t know enough to even think about that,” says Byrne. “It was an empty blackboard for me.”

An industry ‘glow’

Rather, his aim was to put together an entertaining award event that would “create a glow for the entire industry” without embarrassing the bookish types. “We don’t want best kiss, best hug, the fun stuff of, say, the MTV awards. That’s all advertising driven. We want to promote reading and literacy and, yes, sell books.”

This award comes at an opportune moment when the book industry is not only a little frantic to reinvent itself but also is a little fed up with its traditional kudos fests that sometimes feel awfully insider. In November, the National Book Awards embarrassed the lunch crowd at Michael’s (while pleasing the purists) when five relatively obscure female writers from New York City were finalists for the exalted fiction prize.

In a year in which some of the most important American writers -- Oates, Roth, John Updike, Cynthia Ozick and Russell Banks -- produced great works, it was startling that not one made it to runner-up.

And as one editor griped, “For the rest of the country, it’s called the National Book Awards, not the New York Book Awards.”

Still, the more literary-minded fear that instead of promoting great works, the Quills will celebrate personality. Indeed, Byrne envisions a Quills show with 60-second bio pics about unrecognizable but famous authors such as Nora Roberts and Tom Clancy.

“What you do is treat these individual authors as if they were Olympic athletes, like the five finalists in the 200 meters,” Byrne says. “Nobody knows who they are so you treat them up close and personal and further their brand.”

Byrne also admits that while it may be a nightmare to some, the possibility of a John Grisham bestseller or Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” sweeping the Quills is a good thing because “again you’re celebrating accomplishment in the industry.”

But that also fails to accomplish what Oprah does so brilliantly with her book club: lifting the sorry state of reading in this country while giving new commercial life to such classics as “Anna Karenina” and “The Good Earth.”

Dan Halpern, a published poet and editorial director of Ecco Press, says the Quills sound like the Zagat book awards in which everybody in a self-selecting group gets a vote, weeding out “the really horrible stuff but also getting rid of the idiosyncratic but great stuff.”

“You definitely miss a Jean Genet,” says Halpern, referring to the late and generally obscure French absurdist playwright. “So what you get is right in the middle, the popular stuff.”

He prefers prizes that are judged by accomplished panels of peers. “You can argue they’ll vote for their friends and diss their enemies, but if I have to take one book with me on vacation, I’d rather take one picked by a group that is vested in quality than by general readers.”

Then there is the point of view of writers, by inclination a shy, often disheveled group, less concerned about doing 400 sit- ups every morning to look good on television than about rewriting a sentence 400 times in the quest for eloquence.

A friend of mine, a wonderful unknown Manhattan writer, had this to say in an e-mail about awards:

“All I know, as an author of an about-to-be-published novel, is that if I were making up book awards I would include categories like ‘Best Single Sentence,’ ‘Metaphor of the Year,’ ‘Best Subplot,’ ‘Best Fourth Novel’ and so on because in reality the only ‘best’ that people are ever truly aware of is ‘Best-Selling,’ and as we all know and as fiction writers have to tell ourselves way too often, bestselling does not necessarily mean best written.

“Although, of course, if there was another book award, the hope of authors (wiping the sour grapes from our lips) would be that we could slap it on to our book jackets and become ... Best-Selling.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Let the feathers fly

When the Quills are given in October, the awards will cover a lot more than just best fiction and nonfiction. Here are the categories.

Book of the Year

Rookie of the Year

Book Club Award

(committee selected)

Children’s Book of the Year

Best Book to Film

(committee selected)

Graphic Novel of the Year

Design (Judge a Book by Its Cover Award -- committee selected)