I love it when a plan comes together

Sometimes half-baked Friday-afternoon ideas work out. The Fat Girl did.

In addition to acquiring books through the normal author/agent-manuscript channels, I'm always looking for reprint opportunities, particularly with books that have gone out of print but deserve an opportunity to be rediscovered by a new audience (this is a particular advantage of rapid audience turnover).

Last November, Horn Book editor Roger Sutton blogged about Chris Lynch's wonderful novel, Inexcusable, a book which affected me for days after I read it. In his blog about Lynch's novel, Sutton mentioned another, older book with a "fabulously unreliable narrator," The Fat Girl by Marilyn Sachs. I coveted more of these unreliable narrators for Flux (still do; there's a whole other blog entry someday about why I like unreliable YA) and was reading all I could, so naturally I tried to find Sachs' novel. I couldn't; it was out of print. My excitement increased. I found a used copy (twice the cover price for a massacred old paperback), read it, loved it, and decided we needed to publish it (and fortunately my superiors agreed).

To make a long story short, Ms. Sachs was easy to reach and eventually agreeable (in the course of negotiation, we had a wonderful conversation about Jane Austen, and she very graciously sent me a signed copy of her then-new book, First Impressions). And now, today, an early copy of the actual Flux edition of The Fat Girl landed on my desk. I'm obviously very excited, but perhaps not nearly as much as Flux publicist Brian, who may actually do a Green Brothers Happy Dance when he gets his copies.