Books Born of Books

The 19th-century French author Marcel Schwob was a writer’s writer in the literal sense, seeking his material in literature and history.

Photo: Bridgeman Images

If the 19th-century French writer Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) has not been well known outside of France, that may be because his ideas about literature were a little unorthodox, and so too his books. He believed everything had already been written, and that originality, in the modern age, consisted mostly of reconfiguring what had come before. He believed the texture of a life mattered more than its historical relevance, and that the past was best understood through acts of imagination. He was a writer’s writer in the literal sense, seeking his material in literature and history, but also in the conventional sense of being beloved by fellow writers: Colette, Oscar Wilde and Jorge Luis Borges, to name a few. He was not, however, a writer’s writer in the negative sense of being too rarefied for the common reader; on the contrary, his books are extraordinarily accessible, by turns delightful and haunting, which is why we are fortunate they are now being reissued in superb new translations, courtesy of Kit Schluter, Chris Clarke and the adventurous Wakefield Press of Cambridge, Mass.

Schwob grew up outside of Paris in a cultured Jewish family. His father had gone to school with Flaubert and collaborated on a play with Jules Verne, while his maternal uncle, Léon Cahun, was a famous librarian, writer and scholar. Young Marcel read Verne and Edgar Allan Poe, developing a fascination with adventure and with humanity’s dark underbelly that stayed with him all his life. As a student, he learned multiple languages, and spent years in the library reading Mark Twain, Schopenhauer, Greek plays, ancient Sanskrit and, by all accounts, just about everything else. He emerged from school a fountain of textual references, a linguist, a translator and a writer of a distinctly bookish sort.

His early story collections show the gothic influence of Poe but also of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was Schwob’s friend and role model. Set in a wide array of times and places, Schwob’s stories have the mythic quality of parables, but rendered in sensuous, often grotesque detail. Some have science fiction or fantasy elements, others are more like elaborated dreams. In the title story to his second book, “The King in the Golden Mask” (186 pages, $14.95), a king who has lived all his life behind a golden mask, in a court where everyone has worn masks without question for generations, discovers the horrible truth that he descends from a line of lepers, and that behind their masks, everyone around him is hideous. In “The Plague,” a pair of criminals disguise themselves as plague victims to escape capture, yet beneath their disguises, the plague finds them. The theme of masks runs through these stories: the personas we create versus the truth that always discovers us. Many are also based directly on historical or folkloric sources, anticipating the appropriative techniques of Schwob’s later work.
Books Born of Books
Photo: Bridgeman Images

By 1892, the year of “The King in the Golden Mask,” he had gained a reputation as a literary savant when, unexpectedly, life invaded his writing. One night on the streets of Paris he met a young working-class woman, Louise, whose childlike demeanor entranced him. Schwob had always been drawn to downtrodden figures in literature; with Louise he discovered a combination of a pitiable fate—she was tubercular—and a profound innocence. As he cared for her in her illness, he composed stories of young women surviving an indifferent world. When Louise died, these stories became the centerpieces of “The Book of Monelle” (115 pages, $12.95), Schwob’s most poetic and personal work.

In its structural looseness, lyricism and themes of creation and destruction, “The Book of Monelle” (1894) anticipates modernist writers of the following decades—William Carlos Williams, for example. It begins with a liturgical outpouring in which a young woman, Monelle, speaks in Nietzschean pronouncements on truth and reality: “Behold the word: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Destroy within yourself; destroy what surrounds you. . . . Destroy all good and all evil. Their ruins are the same.” Next come Schwob’s prose portraits of various young women, eerily titled as attributes—“The Dreamer,” “The Savage,” “The Faithful”—as if Schwob’s individual subjects have all morphed into aspects of the eternal feminine. The final section returns to the story of Monelle, a dreamlike account of death and resurrection resolving in an image of innocence: “And she came beside me in her white dress, and the two of us stole away together through the countryside.” It is a work of poetic force and intuitive form, and the book Schwob was best known for during his lifetime.

The confrontation of innocence and death remained Schwob’s focus for “The Children’s Crusade” (50 pages, $11.95), a brief work about the ill-fated 13th-century attempt by children to retake Jerusalem. Here Schwob proved himself a master of the dramatic monologue, slowly unveiling the deeply disquieting heart of this historical episode through separate accounts from clerics, a leper, a Muslim mystic, two popes and individual children who were sold into slavery or otherwise lost along the way. It is a hauntingly intimate book that somehow combines moralism, mystery and the concreteness of a lived account, and it represents a natural step toward Schwob’s masterpiece of historical fiction, “Imaginary Lives” (185 pages, $14.95).

By 1896, the year of “The Children’s Crusade” and “Imaginary Lives,” Schwob’s ideas about creativity and history had become a fully realized philosophy. “The art of the biographer consists specifically in choice,” he writes in a preface to “Imaginary Lives.” “He is not meant to worry about speaking truth; he must create human characteristics amidst the chaos.” The book presents 22 short biographical tales written with impeccable narrative concision. Some feature an unknown figure from the margins of history (an African witch, a soldier for Charles VII ), others add fictional aspects to a famous life (Lucretius, Uccello, Pocahontas) and at least one imagines a historical life for a fictional character (Suffrah, the wizard from “Aladdin”). There is no grand thesis, unless it is to emphasize “the unique existences of men, whether they were divine, mediocre, or criminal.”

Schwob cited Boswell’s 1791 “Life of Johnson” as a model for “Imaginary Lives,” but his own modern style—balancing between irony and mystery, fiction and fact—is better understood in relation to a later work it influenced, Jorge Luis Borges’s first collection of stories, “A Universal History of Infamy” (1935). Borges had several substantive encounters with Schwob’s work, including writing the foreword to a 1949 edition of “The Children’s Crusade.” As co-editor of a Buenos Aires literary supplement in 1933-34, he also published five translated stories from “Imaginary Lives,” most notably “Messrs. Burke and Hare,” about two Scottish murderers who sold corpses to science. In Schwob’s version—which reads like a perfect anticipation of a Borges story—the emphasis is on Burke’s admirable scientific approach, including the invention of a “stiff cloth mask filled with pitch” by which Burke suffocated his victims. Schwob probably came to the historical subject by way of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher,” Stevenson being an influence on both Borges and Schwob, and . . . and the pattern continues: history, influence, one text remaking another, one imagination picking up from another, in the great creative literary stew that Marcel Schwob made the special province of his art.

—Martin Riker’s first novel,  Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, will be published in October.

Appeared in the June 23, 2018, print edition.  Read more

Guest Post: Why We Still Talk About JFK

Peggy Noonan's Blog

I am on my way from Los Angeles to Dallas, where tomorrow I will appear on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” which will come live out of the Texas Schoolbook Depository. I can’t believe I’ll be inside that place, from which, 50 years ago next week, at a corner window on the sixth floor, Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed John F. Kennedy.

One of the questions we’ll discuss: Why do we still talk about JFK?

From my show notes:

1. We talk still about JFK and his death because the biggest generation in all U.S. history, that part of the population known as the baby boomers, watched it all, live, on that new thing called TV, and it entered our heads and never left. It was the first central historical fact of our lives, so we still read about it, think about it, and watch anything having to do with it.

2. Our parents experienced it as a different kind of trauma. They had lost one of their own. He had fought in World War II, like them. He was still young, like them, and now he was brutally cut down. What a lot of them felt was captured in the famous conversation of the newspaper columnist Mary McGrory and her friend Pat Moynihan. McGrory said: Oh Pat, can you believe we’re at Jack Kennedy’s funeral? “I feel like we’ll never laugh again.” He replied: “We’ll laugh again, but we’ll never be young again.”

3. We talk about JFK’s death because for the 18 years leading up to that point—between the end of the war, as we used to say, and 1963—America knew placidity. Many problems were growing and quietly brewing, but on the surface America was placid, growing more affluent, and politically calm. And then this rupture, this shock, this violence, this new sense that anything can happen, history can be ripped from its rails, that security once won cannot necessarily be maintained. That our luck won’t necessarily hold.

4. And what followed—growing political unrest, cultural spasms, riots at political conventions, more assassinations and assassination attempts—was so different from the years preceding that we couldn’t help look back at JFK’s murder as the breakpoint, the rupture. After that, things turned difficult.

5. Why, after all the historians’ revelations and the stories of the past 30 years—the women, the drug use, the Kennedy White House’s own farfetched efforts to do away with Fidel Castro, the fantastical nature of the Bay of Pigs, the failure of JFK to anticipate and answer the crude communist clichés of Kruschev at Vienna, etc., etc.—why do we continue to hold this special place for JFK? Because in the months and years after his death we fell in love with him as he was presented to us by those who knew and cared about him. Youth, beauty, charm, high intentions, wit, a certain fatalism and, deep down, a certain modesty. “Camelot.” But Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.

6. We live in now. We live in this world. Right now I can hardly believe it that I am in seat 6B of American Airlines flight 2442, LAX to Dallas-Fort Worth, a few hundred miles east of Los Angeles, mountains and desert stretching below—and I am typing on an iPad, and will press a button, and my editor in New York in just a few seconds will read this and post it on The Wall Street Journal website and you will read it. It still takes my breath away. This is “the age of miracles and wonders.” Some child born now will look back on these days as Camelot. 

Reposted from The Wall Street Journal

How I Became a Best-Selling Author

Self-publishing is upending the book industry. One woman's unlikely road to a hit novel.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

This summer, Darcie Chan's debut novel became an unexpected hit. It has sold more than 400,000 copies and landed on the best-seller lists alongside brand-name authors like Michael Connelly, James Patterson and Kathryn Stockett.

It's been a success by any measure, save one. Ms. Chan still hasn't found a publisher.

Five years ago, Ms. Chan's novel, "The Mill River Recluse," which tells the story of a wealthy Vermont widow who bestows her fortune on town residents who barely knew her, would have languished in a drawer. A dozen publishers and more than 100 literary agents rejected it.

"Nobody was willing to take a chance," says Ms. Chan, a 37-year-old lawyer who drafts environmental legislation for the U.S. Senate. "It was too much of a publishing risk."

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Allison Michael Orenstein for The Wall Street Journal

Darcie Chan works full-time as a lawyer drafting environmental legislation. She writes at night after she puts her toddler son to bed.

This past May, Ms. Chan decided to digitally publish it herself, hoping to gain a few readers and some feedback. She bought some ads on Web sites targeting e-book readers, paid for a review from Kirkus Reviews, and strategically priced her book at 99 cents to encourage readers to try it. She's now attracting bids from foreign imprints, movie studios and audio-book publishers, without selling a single copy in print.

The story of how Ms. Chan joined the ranks of best sellers is as much a tale of digital marketing savvy and strategic pricing as one of artistic triumph. Her breakout signals a monumental shift in the way books are packaged, priced and sold in the digital era. Just as music executives have been sidestepped by YouTube sensations and indie iTunes hits, book publishers are losing ground to independent authors and watching their powerful status as literary gatekeepers wither.

A Reader's Guide to Self-Published Big Sellers

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Self-publishing has long been derided as a last resort for authors who lack the talent or savvy to hack it in the publishing business. But it has gained a patina of legitimacy as a growing number of self-published authors land on best-seller lists. Last year, 133,036 self-published titles were released, up from 51,237 in 2006, according to Bowker, a company that tracks publishing trends.

A handful of self-published authors have achieved blockbuster status, selling more than a million copies of their books on the Kindle. While they represent a tiny minority of independent authors, the ranks of the successful are growing. Thirty authors have sold more than 100,000 copies of their books through Amazon's Kindle self-publishing program, and a dozen have sold more than 200,000 copies, according to Amazon. The program, which Amazon launched in 2007, allows authors to upload their books directly to Amazon's Kindle store, set their own prices and publish in multiple languages. Barnes & Noble followed suit in 2010 with a similar program for its Nook e-reader.

Self-published titles have been buoyed by an explosion in digital book sales. E-book sales totaled $878 million in 2010, compared to $287 million in 2009, according to the Association of American Publishers. Some analysts project that e-book sales will pass $2 billion in 2013.

The march of self-published authors has put publishers and literary agents on guard. Publishing houses like Penguin and Perseus have recently launched their own digital self-publishing programs in an effort to capture a slice of the mushrooming market. Some agents, including Scott Waxman, have started their own digital imprints.

Digital self-publishing still has serious drawbacks. Though e-books are the fastest-growing segment of the book market, they still make up less than 10% of overall trade book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. Book reviewers tend to ignore self-published works, and brick-and-mortar bookstores have long shunned them. And very few authors have a marketing and advertising budget equal to a publisher's.

Several successful self-published authors have gone on to cut deals with major publishers. After selling around 1.5 million digital copies of her books on her own, 27-year-old fantasy writer Amanda Hocking signed with St. Martin's Press. She won a $2 million advance for a new four-book fantasy series called "Watersong"; St. Martin's will also reprint her best-selling self-published "Trylle" trilogy about attractive teenage trolls.

Self-published thriller and Western writer John Locke, whose 13 books have sold more than 1.7 million digital copies, signed an unusual contract with Simon & Schuster in August. The publishing house will print and distribute his books—the first title comes out next month—while allowing Mr. Locke to remain as the publisher. Mr. Locke is paying for the printing, shipping and marketing costs himself, according to his agent. The print editions, which will sell as mass-market paperbacks for $4.99, won't be edited. "The opportunity to get into bookstores, Targets, Wal-Marts, Costcos, airports—I can't do that as an independent author," Mr. Locke says.

J.A. Konrath, a mystery writer who has sold 400,000 digital copies of his self-published books, earning some $500,000 a year, signed a contract with Amazon's new mystery imprint to publish his novel "Stirred," co-written with Blake Crouch, digitally and in print. It recently hit No. 1 on the Kindle top-100 list. Mr. Konrath says he was won over by Amazon's powerful marketing machinery. "They can really blow my books up," he says.

Ms. Chan lives in a spacious, two-story house on a quiet street in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y. She and her husband, Timothy Chan, met in high school, at a national science competition. They reunited in Maryland, where he attended medical school and she completed a law degree at the University of Baltimore.

For the past 15 years, she's worked for the federal government on the natural-resource team for the Senate's Office of the Legislative Counsel, where she drafts legislation concerning clean air and water, highway infrastructure and climate change. She works remotely, from her home, from 9 to 6, and takes care of her toddler son until her husband gets home. She squeezes in a couple of hours of writing each night.

She started writing fiction in 2002, when she suddenly had a lot of time on her hands. Her husband, an oncologist and cancer researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, was spending long hours at the hospital at the beginning of his residency, so she spent her nights alone writing.

She came up with the story of a wealthy, agoraphobic Vermont widow who makes anonymous gifts to the townspeople who ignore and fear her. Ms. Chan says she was inspired by the true story of a resident of Paoli, the small Indiana town where she grew up. "The Mill River Recluse" takes place in a fictional Vermont town with a quirky cast of characters—a kleptomaniac priest with a spoon fetish, a dotty woman who tries to sell her neighbors love potions, a bad cop whose off-duty hobbies include stalking and arson.

The novel took her 2½ years to write. After seeking feedback from family and friends, she sent queries to more than 100 literary agents. Most rejected it as a tough sell. "It didn't really fit any genre," Ms. Chan says. "It has elements of romance, suspense, mystery, but it falls into the catch-all category of literary fiction, and of course that's the most difficult to sell."

She finally landed an agent, Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic in New York, who represents cable-news host Rachel Maddow. Ms. Liss submitted the manuscript to a dozen publishers, all of whom turned it down. Ms. Chan stashed the manuscript in a drawer, and buried herself in her legislative work.

Five years passed. Then, this past spring, she started reading about the rise of e-book sales and authors who had successfully self published, and decided to give it a shot. She fashioned a cover image out of a photograph her sister took of a mansion in Paoli, and she and her husband used Photoshop to add some gloomy ambience. Then she nervously uploaded her manuscript to Amazon's Kindle self-publishing program. She sold a trickle of copies. A few weeks later, she started selling it on Barnes & Noble's Nook and through SmashWords, a self-publishing program that distributes to major e-book retailers including Apple's iBookstore, Sony and Kobo. Her first royalty check from Amazon was for $39.

She noticed that a lot of popular e-books were priced at 99 cents, and immediately dropped her price from $2.99 to 99 cents. The cut would slash potential royalties—Amazon pays 35% royalties for books that cost less than $2.99, compared with 70% for books that cost $2.99 to $9.99. But sales picked up immediately. "I did that to encourage people to give it a chance," she says. "I saw it as an investment in my future as a writer." The strategy worked. Several reviewers on Amazon said they bought the book because it was 99 cents, then ended up liking it.

She checked her sales several times a day, obsessively refreshing her Amazon page. In the first month, it sold 100 copies. When Ms. Chan saw the sales figure, she danced in her kitchen with her husband and toddler.

"We were saying, 'Wow, this is really cool. What if you sell 1,000? That would be awesome,' " her husband recalls.

Then, at the end of June, "The Mill River Recluse" got a mention on a site called Ereader News Today, which posts tips for Kindle readers. Over the next two days, it sold another 600 copies. Ms. Chan realized she might be able to drive sales herself. She spent about $1,000 on marketing, buying banner ads on websites and blogs devoted to Kindle readers and a promotional spot on goodreads.com, a book-recommendation site with more than six million members.

After learning that self-published authors can pay to have their books reviewed by some sites, she paid $35 for a review from IndieReader.com (IndieReader no longer offers paid reviews). She paid $575 for an expedited review from Kirkus Reviews, a respected book-review journal and website. The review service, which Kirkus launched in 2005, gives self-published authors the option to keep the review private if it's negative. Ms. Chan decided to have hers posted on their website. Kirkus called the novel "a comforting book about the random acts of kindness that hold communities together." She used blurbs from the reviews on her Amazon and Barnes & Noble pages. "I hoped it would lend some credibility," she says. "Most other reviewers won't touch it."

Sales kept climbing. In July, it sold more than 14,000 copies. That month, it was featured on two of the biggest sites for e-book readers, generating a surge of new sales. In August, it sold more than 77,000 copies and hit the New York Times and USA Today e-book best-seller lists; it later landed on the Wall Street Journal list. In September, it sold more than 159,000 copies. To date, she has sold around 413,000 copies.

Ms. Chan and her agent decided to resubmit the novel to all the major imprints, citing robust sales figures and rave online reviews. Some publishers have responded warily. A representative of one publishing house feared the book had "run its course," Ms. Liss recalls. Others worried about the novel's bargain basement price, arguing that an e-book that sells for 99 cents likely won't command a typical hardcover price of around $26.

A few major publishers made offers, but none matched the digital royalty rates of 35% to 40% that Ms. Chan makes on her own through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Typically, most publishers offer print royalties of 10% to 15% and digital royalties of 25%. Simon & Schuster offered to act as a distributor, but Ms. Chan wants the book to be professionally edited and marketed.

Ms. Liss says that the offers from U.S. publishers so far don't improve much on what Ms. Chan is making on her own. She's made around $130,000 before taxes—substantially more than a standard advance for the average debut novelist—and she's getting a steady stream of royalties every month. "I told Darcie, at this point you're printing money. They're not. Go with God, we'll sell the second book," Ms. Liss says.

In the meantime, there's interest from other corners of the industry. Multiple audio-book publishers have made offers. Six film studios have inquired about movie rights. Two foreign publishers bid on the book. Ms. Chan is holding off on such deals, for fear they might sabotage a potential contract with a domestic publisher.

Ms. Chan still wants to see her book in print. Several librarians have contacted her seeking print copies after patrons requested her book. "I have people writing me begging me for a hard copy, book clubs and libraries calling me, and I don't have a hard copy to provide for them," she says.

Ms. Liss advised her to work on a sequel set in the same town, with some of the same characters. Ms. Chan has written two chapters. While she would love to write full time, for now, she still sees writing as more of a hobby. When people ask her what she does for a living, she says she's a lawyer. But she's still holding out hope that a publisher will buy "The Mill River Recluse," edit it and sell it in brick-and-mortar stores.

"The hardest part for me is uncertainty," she says. "I deal better with rejection than uncertainty."

Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com

Secret of Self-Publishing: Success

Authors With a Following Make Money Going It Alone, but It's a Slog for Others

By JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Self-publishing these days is increasingly a tale of two cities.

There are established authors, like Nyree Belleville, who says she's earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher..

Then there are new authors, like Eve Yohalem. More than a month after self-publishing, she has grossed about $100 in sales— after incurring costs of $3,400. She said she's in no rush, though.

Rob Shepperson

Vanity presses have been available for decades. But thanks to digital technology and particularly the emergence of e-books, the number of self-published titles exploded 160% to 133,036 in 2010 from 51,237 in 2006, estimates R. R. Bowker, which tracks the publishing business.

Amazon.com Inc. fueled the growth by offering self-published writers as much as 70% of revenue on digital books, depending on the retail price. By comparison, traditional publishers typically pay their authors 25% of net digital sales and even less on print books.

For some established authors, these terms can make self-publishing a financial home run. Ms. Belleville, for instance, a veteran romance author who wrote for seven years under the pseudonym Bella Andre and a year as Lucy Kevin, self-published her first e-book in April 2010. She has since cumulatively sold 265,000 units of 10 self-published titles, most priced between $2.99 and $5.99. Her total take from those 10 titles since last April: in excess of $500,000 after expenses, she says. Previously, the most she ever made from a book was $33,000.

Self-published women's fiction writer Darcie Chan has seen her new work, "The Mill River Recluse," hit No. 5 on The Wall Street Journal's list of digital fiction bestsellers for the week ended Oct. 23. Ms. Chan priced her novel about a secretive widow living in Vermont at 99 cents, and says she has sold "hundreds of thousands" of copies since it went on sale on Amazon in May. The book, also carried by Barnes & Noble Inc. and other e-retailers, was previously rejected by major publishing houses.

"My original intention was to gradually get my name out there as a writer, because when it was rejected one of the things I heard was that nobody knew me," says Ms. Chan. "I never expected this."

Ms. Chan says the book was featured on several Kindle-related sites that recommend e-books to readers. In August it broke into the top 10 on the Kindle store, where it ranked No. 6 Friday. She paid a site to review her book, which she thinks may have given her book a boost. And she also did some "inexpensive Web-based advertising" which also got the word moving among readers. Ms. Chan, a lawyer by training, said the novel is now being resubmitted to major publishers.

Then there are writers like Erik Kjerland. He has self-published four novels and one book about self-publishing in the past year under the pseudonym Derek J. Canyon. His profit of about $5,000 on sales of roughly $10,000 is better than he'd hoped but not enough for him to quit his day job as a technical writer.

The question that most intrigues would-be self-published authors isn't whether they'll be viewed as literary outcasts, but how to do it and what it costs. Simply getting attention is an enormous challenge, although e-books have a longer shelf life.

"One of the big differences between e-books and print is the sales cycle," says Ms. Yohalem. "It's almost inverted. A chain store buyer makes a decision as much as six months before the book is published, and then it has no more than six months on the shelf. At that point your sales cycle is over. But with e-books, it's completely the opposite. It's often six to nine months before your book takes off, and you never take it down."

She says she began to think seriously about self-publishing after her second book—a collection of short stories aimed at readers 6-10—was rejected and she realized there wouldn't be enough of a market to lure a big publisher. She also wanted to experiment with self-publishing. Her first middle-grade novel, "Escape Under the Forever Sky," had been issued by Chronicle Books in 2009 to good reviews but only modest sales. Chronicle told her that story collections targeted to that audience don't sell. A separate young-adult novel didn't find a buyer either.

To learn about self-publishing, Ms. Yohalem visited blogs such as Joe Konrath's "A Newbie's Guide to Publishing." She also spent time on KindleBoards.com, an independent community focused on topics related to Amazon's Kindle e-reader, including self-publishing. Within a few months she decided to self-publish the short-story collection. She priced "Grandpa Hates the Bird: Six Short Stories of Exciting, Hilarious and Possibly Deadly Adventure" at $2.99 and priced individual stories at 99 cents each.

It helped that her sister and two friends, all experienced editors, lent their services free of charge. This saved her $1,000 to $2,000, she says. She commissioned a cover illustration for $400.

She then hired Telemachus Press LLC in Longboat Key, Fla., to act as her digital publisher, including formatting the manuscript, for about $3,000.

One of the things that Ms. Yohalem did for promotion was tap Facebook. A friend searched for bird/parrot related pages, posting a message on nine sites praising the "Grandpa Hates the Bird" titles. Ms. Yohalem then "liked" the pages and the postings on each site. Ms. Yohalem did her own searches on Facebook and when she found sites she considered appropriate, she posted a note about her books.

Ms. Yohalem says that her titles went live on Barnes&Noble.com the week of Sept. 26, and on Apple Inc.'s iBookstore the week of Oct. 3. So far, she says she's made 44 sales on Amazon, including 34 sales at $2.99, and four sales of the entire collection at Smashwords Inc., an e-book distributor. "I'm just getting started. It's way too soon to begin counting dollars." She hopes to soon sell a new middle-grade novel to a traditional house.

Write to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com