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Recently, I went to go see the movie The Help. I haven’t yet read the book but I had been intrigued about the author’s story and wrote a blog post about her path to publication.

Of course seeing this movie brought back memories of my own. My grandmother worked as a domestic most of her life. Growing up working-class, I often went with her to help clean houses as well the town’s post office and the Methodist church. One of the things I precisely remember about these times were that we were never acknowledged as anything more than the help. We were in many ways invisible.

Maybe this is the reason that now whenever I see “the help” in places — like hotels, malls, and even in my office building, I tend to look these people in the eye and smile. I try to acknowledge who they are and let them know that I do see them.

I’ve noticed this is also a recurring theme in my novels. I tend to write about the people who are looking from the outside, trying to fit in, trying to be seen.

I think as writers we tend to put certain aspects into our characters — either consciously or subconsciously. The things that have impacted our lives in both negative and positive ways. This is one of the reasons we write. To give a voice to things that matter to us.

Kathryn Stockett has become the first debut author to join the Kindle Million Club after selling over a million copies of her novel The Help (Penguin).

Janet Evanovich, Headline Review author of the Stephanie Plum novels, has entered the Kindle Million Club on the same day.

The pair join Stieg Larsson, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, Charlaine Harris, Lee Child, Suzanne Collins, Michael Connelly and John Locke as authors to sell over a million e-books for Kindle.

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Sometimes I will visit publisher sites to see if there's anything finding. Today I found my way to Algonquin Books. Author Martha Southgate's newest novel The Taste of Salt will be released at the end of September. I've had a chance to read it already. One the things I loved about it is the main characters very unexpected occupation. The writing is beautiful and many scenes broke my heart. Life is dramatic enough, the author doesn't use any tricks, simply letting it all unfold. There will be a proper review closer to the release date. Chapter One of The Taste of Salt

Though as the title states this is about Southgate on The Help. The author wrote a piece about bestselling novel turned movie by Kathryn Stockett in the most recent EW magazine.

"The current issue of Entertainment Weekly (August 12) has a wonderful cover story on The Help, the blockbuster book that was made into a movie, opening soon. As part of the photo-heavy spread, Entertainment Weekly asked Algonquin author Martha Southgate, whose new novel The Taste of Salt publishes 9/27, to write about the book. Her piece is below. Be sure to pick up a copy of the magazine–one of our favorites around here–on newsstands now."

Algonquin Books was kind enough to rerun Southgate's article, and it's worth reading. I do wonder when Southgate or any reader who said they weren't going to read The Help changed their mind. What was the tipping point?

I am still firmly in the I will not read camp. I had many customers try to convince me otherwise but I won't budge. Part of the reason for this hard line in the sand has to do with working in a bookstore in the South and having White customers tell me every day I just must read The Help.

In my head, all I could think was no I don't. I refuse to believe the authenticity of Black voices created by a White author by White readers who don't read Black authors. These were my customers so I know what they read. Not a single White customer that requested The Help asked for a novel by a Black author.

Stockett's novel was liked by many of my Black customers as well. I was a bit more curious, but knowing that a Black author would never have this amount of success with the same story, I still can't bring myself to read The Help. Now I know how some Asian readers probably felt with the success of Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha.

I loved this book so much and the movie looks like it is going to be a MUST SEE! Now if only Kathryn Stockett could give us another book…NOW!

The official trailer for an upcoming adaptation of Kathryn Stockett‘s The Help has been released. The film will hit theaters in August 12th.

We’ve embedded the video above–what do you think? According to Deadline, the film stars Easy A actress Emma Stone as Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan and Doubt actress Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark. Tate Taylor served as both director and screenwriter.

On her site, Stockett explains her research process: “Once I’d done my [library research] homework, I’d go talk to my Grandaddy Stockett, who, at ninety-eight, still has a remarkable memory. That’s where the real stories came from, like Cat-bite, who’s in the book, and the farmers who sold vegetables and cream from their carts everyday, walking through the Jackson neighborhoods.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Algonquin Books has launched the ‘Ask an Editor’ video series on their blog. Executive editor Chuck Adams stars in the video embedded above and answers the question: “How did you acquire Water for Elephants?”

Marketing director Michael Taeckens explained how it will work: “For this series, readers who have any questions about the publishing process can submit them on our blog or on our Facebook or Twitter accounts. Every two weeks a different Algonquin editor will select and answer one of the questions submitted.”

The next Algonquin Books Club will feature a conversation between Gruen and The Help author Kathryn Stockett on April 26th. Those interested can check out the website for a reader’s guide, essays by Gruen, and her recipe for oyster brie soup.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Algonquin Books has launched the ‘Ask an Editor’ video series on their blog. Executive editor Chuck Adams stars in the video embedded above and answers the question: “How did you acquire Water for Elephants?”

Marketing director Michael Taeckens explained how it will work: “For this series, readers who have any questions about the publishing process can submit them on our blog or on our Facebook or Twitter accounts. Every two weeks a different Algonquin editor will select and answer one of the questions submitted.”

The next Algonquin Books Club will feature a conversation between Gruen and The Help author Kathryn Stockett on April 26th. Those interested can check out the website for a reader’s guide, essays by Gruen, and her recipe for oyster brie soup.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A friend of mine went to see Kathryn Stocket speak at the opening of the Virginia Book Festival. They said she pulled out a stack of rejection letters for The Help, which was rejected by over 60 agents. Rather than giving up, she considered the advice from the rejections and used it to make her book stronger each time she submitted it.

The end result was a book that has sold three million copies in two years.

Have you read The Help? Do you think it’s as good as they say it is? I have to admit that sometimes I’m afraid to pick up books that are supposed to be excellent for fear of being disappointed. (And yes, I know that’s probably weird.)

USA Today released its “Top 100 Books for 2010″ list this week, a bestseller list composed of 77 percent fiction. Stieg Larsson‘s Millennium series dominated the top three spots and George W. Bush‘s Decision Points occupied fourth place.

The newspaper also noted: “Stephenie Meyer‘s popularity began to cool off. She accounted for 4% of best sellers the list tracked, down from 11% in 2009. The vampire and paranormal craze among readers isn’t dead, but it’s fading, accounting for just 9% of best sellers, down from 17% in 2009.”

The article also noted that books with movie adaptations do particularly well. It’ll be interesting to see if adaptations (like Kathryn Stockett‘s The Help) will boost sales next year.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Bethany Hegedus is the author of Between Us Baxters named a Best Book of 2009 (starred) by the Bank Street Awards Committee. Her new novel, Truth with a Capital T, releases this October.

Briefly describe the impact racism had on you as a young person.

As a twelve-year-old, I moved from a suburb of Chicago where I was encouraged to be friends with kids of a variety of races to a suburb of Augusta, Georgia where although there were the same olive, white, coco, brown, copper-skinned faces as I saw up North I had to walk a much more noticeable color boundary line. I was confused. In Illinois, there was Sundai down the street, James, the boy in my 7^th grade class who I would talk for hours on the phone with (my first real crush) and now somehow if you made friends, or heaven forbid, dated outside your race, it was a major topic of conversation.  Suddenly my parents grew concerned about what other’s thought as well. My high-school boyfriend, who was black,was met with this response by my father, “What will the neighbors think?” (He has since rescinded that position and hung on his dining room wall pictures of me with whatever man I am serious about at the time: black, white or anywhere in between.)

My best friend of twenty-three years is a dark-skinned woman, who at the time of our growing up, was a dark-skinned girl. Hollie was and the only black cheerleader in our predominately white high school. I heard Hollie called “not black” because she was in college prep courses and hung with me and the other drama geeks. It infuriated me to hear Hollie’s “blackness” talked about as if it were a sweater she could shed and not an essential part of who she was. This talk was asinine. It upset Hollie and it upset me.

As a white girl, comfortable with my white friends, my black friends, my Indian friends, my Asian friends I saw all of them go through this “white-wash” labeling. This was the late 1980’s and I am not sure much has changed. I say this, as I was a teacher in the mid 1990’s, where as an English and theatre teacher in apredominantlyAfrican-American high school, I was warned on how to cast my plays. No interracial love interests. “The Klan is still active,” the teacher before me told me. “Be careful.”

Has your personal experience of racism impacted your professional work as a writer?

It has. Tremendously.I can’t separate out who I am and what I believe in outside of my move from the North to the South at such an important age.

My first novel, Between Us Baxters(Westside Books, 2009) is a historical novel set in the Civil Rights Era, South. It sprang out of hearing that “Klan” talk, seeing a wooden sign nailed to a tree announcing it was “coon” hunting season all year round. It also sprang out of my friendship and comfort with women who did not look like me. Like the runaway bestseller The Help(Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, 2009) I wanted to investigate the bonds between white women and black women, and I do that with Polly’s mother and Timbre Ann’s aunt, Henri. I wanted to see and show racism for what it was and is and show the frailties and faults of all involved, black and white.

In my new novel, Truth with a Capital T(Delacorte, 2010) again race is a factor, but now in a contemporary setting. It was easier and less dicey for me as a white woman to write a historical novel where race was a factor than to tackle the issue today.  In any case, I did tackle rac

…but you can’t make him drink. I was just reading agent and writer, Nathan Bransford’s blog, and he makes an interesting and often widely overlooked point. No one person, publisher, or business can turn any book into a blockbuster success. No one in this industry has the power to turn any book into a bestseller. Yes, publishing houses can make business deals with bookstores and have their “BIG” books placed in prime, front-of-store, realty. They can have cut-out, life size displays and ads in every paper and magazine from here to Timbuktu. But if the book doesn’t build the ever elusive “word of mouth” or “buzz” that we so frequently hear about, it is not going to move off those carefully picked shelves. And what builds that buzz? Strong, compelling, well-written work that connects with readers. Because guess what? Readers talk! As Bransford says, “Lots of books get marketing dollars. Not all books become TWILIGHT or THE DA VINCI CODE or THE HELP or HARRY POTTER.” What Bransford doesn’t mention in his piece is that sometimes great books don’t get any help out of the gate and the author has a long, hard road of spreading the word about a book they believe in. It took years before Jenna Blum’s THOSE WHO SAVE US to get the recognition it deserved. It wasn’t until it was out in paperback, years after its initial launch, that it made it onto The New York Times Bestseller List. This is why publicity is so important in the world of publishing. It can’t make a bad book a bestseller, but it can help an overlooked book rise up and shine.

The Help

While posting last week about PUBLICIZE YOUR BOOK, I mentioned the word-of-mouth bestseller, THE HELP. All last year, friends and family recommended this book to me. One friend would ask, "Have you read it yet?" every time I ran into her. My mother gave me her copy over Christmas and joined the "have you read it?" chorus. I figured it was time to get busy.

I took my copy on our Mardi Gras road trip (we get the whole week off in Southern Louisiana) and fell in love. THE HELP is amazing, heartbreaking, amazing, lovely, amazing, funny, amazing. I don't know how else to talk about this title, so I'll give the New York Times a shot. As you read the expert below, notice the strength of this debut novel rests on fabulous writing, yes, but something more: devoted readers all part of the "have you read it?" campaign.

Taken from The New York Times:

“The Help,” a novel about the relationships between African-American maids and their white employers in 1960s Mississippi, has the classic elements of a crowd pleaser: it features several feisty women enmeshed in a page-turning plot, clear villains and a bit of a history lesson.
The book, a debut novel by Kathryn Stockett, also comes with a back story that is a publishing dream come true: at first rejected by nearly 50 agents, the manuscript was scooped up by an imprint of Penguin and pushed aggressively to booksellers, who fell in love with it. Since it came out in February, “The Help” has been embraced by book clubs and bloggers who can’t stop recommending it to their friends.

All of which helps explain why “The Help” — which some enthusiasts have compared to Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” — has maintained a tenacious hold close to the top of several best-seller lists, despite one of the strongest seasons for big-name authors in recent memory. Amid blockbusters from the likes of Dan Brown, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and Nicholas Sparks, Ms. Stockett has stayed within the Top 5 on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list since August.

“It is running and it’s going to continue to run,” said Vivienne L. Jennings, co-owner of Rainy Day Books, an independent bookstore in Fairway, Kan.

According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, “The Help” has sold 445,000 copies in hardcover. At Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest retail bookstore chain, Sessal

I just finished Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, THE HELP (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam). Before I begin to review it, let me give you the description.

Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.

Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.

Minny, Aibileen’s best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody’s business, but she can’t mind her tongue, so she’s lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women–mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends–view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

I loved this book! I loved it so much that even when I had a million things to do (errands to run, work to complete) I couldn’t let it out of my grasp. THE HELP is one of those rare books that is both wildly entertaining and extremely thought-provoking. One of the many glowing reviews of this title came from an unlikely source, The Daily Beast’s William Boot, who tackles the bestseller list titles and lets you know if you should read the books that are flying off the bookstore shelves. He, too, loved this book. He made one criticism that I wanted to expand on. Boot wrote,

“Skeeter records the stories, but Stockett never shares them with us, a whopping omission. It is an unusual thing when the book you’re holding doesn’t measure up to the one main character is writing.”

I whole-heartedly disagree with this criticism. The book that Skeeter is writing is, in fact, Stockett’s novel. The maids stories are explored fully in this book as well as Skeeter’s own life as an independent woman trapped in a confining time period, desperately trying to break free. I recommend this book to everyone! I can’t wait to find out what is next for this extraordinary author. I am also very impressed with Amy Einhorn’s ability to spot such a wonderful literary gem!

This evening I chased the moon, a fine, swollen creature.

Earlier in the day I read Kathryn Stockett's The Help, which I wanted to like so much more than I did. I am addicted to nuance and to language as a reader; that is all I will say. Later on in the day, reading the opening chapters of Mary Karr's Lit, I felt my readerly self settling in.

Then came the moon.

For one hour this afternoon, the house will be quiet, and I won't be cooking and I won't be cleaning and my gorgeous son will be off at his job.

The plan, then, is this: I'm going to sneak away and read a little deeper into Kathryn Stockett's The Help, a book, Motoko Rich reported in the New York Times, that was "at first rejected by nearly 50 agents" before it was "scooped up by an imprint of Penguin and pushed aggressively to booksellers, who fell in love with it.... Amid blockbusters from the likes of Dan Brown, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell and Nicholas Sparks, Ms. Stockett has stayed within the Top 5 on The New York Times Hardcover Fiction Best-Seller list since August."

Who doesn't like that kind of publishing story? Who doesn't want to love this book? I've only read the opening chapters. I'm using this hour to read more.

I picked up The Help by Kathryn Stockett while waiting in the bookstore for a friend to finish paying, by the time he had made his purchases, I couldn’t put the book down. This lengthy book about 1960’s Mississippi does not seem like the kind of story that is going to be completely gripping and impossible to put down. But it is! Because it deals with some pretty heavy social and historical issues (class, race, etc.), it doesn’t seem like the kind of light reading that can keep you entertained on a hot beach in mid-August. But it is! I haven’t finished it yet, so this isn’t our “official” review, but I have been so enthralled by this story that I had to update our BookFinds readers.

Trust me, I am not the first to mention this extraordinary book. USAToday recently wrote about THE HELP. The New York Times was all over it when it came out back in February. And the Today Show put it on their list of must reads for Spring!

Grab yourself a copy and check back for our review later this month!