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A brief history of Youth in Revolt
Getting a book into print is not always a smooth process-- especially for a first-time writer. Case in point: Youth in Revolt. Now (fall, 2003) in its 11th paperback printing, this comic novel reached the public only because its persistent author refused to accept rejection.
The germination of Nick
The inspiration for Youth in Revolt, says C.D. Payne, was an short humor piece he wrote in the 1980s. A boy, on the occasion of his seventh birthday, composes a letter to his parents in a florid, "adult" style in which he reflects on his life up to that point. "Originally I was going to make Nick a seven-year-old," says Payne, "but I decided the comic possibilities would be richer if he was a teenager." The novel was set in Oakland, where Payne once lived, and the name Twisp came from the small town of Twisp, Washington--home of friends who reside in a log cabin on a beautiful mountainside.
Payne began writing Youth in Revolt in 1989; each of the three parts requiring about a year to complete. He originally envisioned that each part would be published as a separate book (as they were subsequently released in Germany and the Czech Republic). After Book One was finished, he sent out query letters to dozens of literary agents. Of the three agents who expressed interest, Payne decided to sign with a New York agency which represented a famous author of thrillers. During the next 18 months, while Payne worked on Books Two and Three, he never received any communication from his agent. "It was my first experience with an agent," says Payne. "I didn't know what to expect. I called them a couple of times, and they assured me they were sending my manuscript around."
About the time Payne was finishing Book Three, he received his manuscript back from the agency with a note saying they were unable to place it with a publisher and wishing him good luck. "I then contacted the other agents who had expressed interest," says Payne, "but they must have decided I was used goods by then and both declined to take on my book."
At that point Payne decided to pay to have his novel evaluated by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. "I was leery of an agency that charges a reading fee," says Payne, "but Meredith was a successful, high-profile agent whose clients included Norman Mailer and P.G. Wodehouse. He also had written a well-received book on the Algonquin wits called George S. Kaufman and his Friends. He seemed like someone who had an appreciation and feel for comic writing." Payne sent off the manuscript of Book One and a check for $400. "I couldn't afford to have them read all three," he explains. A month later he received a five-page letter (click to read the letter) saying his novel was unsaleable and advising that it be abandoned. (Scott Meredith has since died, but his agency continues on. They now charge $450 to read manuscripts.)
With no agency interest in his novel, Payne decided to try submitting it to publishers on his own. He sent an outline and two sample chapters to over 50 publishers. None expressed a wish to read the complete work. "I'm not sure how many rejections I actually received," says Payne. "I stopped counting after 38."
Would Youth in Revolt be abandoned?
"At that point I was getting pretty discouraged," admits Payne. "I had spent three years of my life on a project that had come to a dead end. No one was interested in a three-volume, 1,100- page comic novel."
The cover of the rare 1993 first edition of Youth in Revolt. Only 3,000 copies were printed.
A do-it-yourselfer who had spent five years gutting and remodeling a rundown house in West Berkeley, Payne decided to look into self-publishing. "I read all the books on self- publishing, most of which addressed their advice to non-fiction authors--the implication being that self-publishing a fiction book was a hopeless endeavor." Research with book printers revealed that it would cost over $15,000 to publish Youth in Revolt as a hardbound book. "I figured it had to come out in hardcover to have any hope of being reviewed," explains Payne. "I also decided the book would have more impact if I published all three parts in one volume. That would make it a large, expensive book." Marketing the novel would require thousands more.
"The problem was I didn't have any spare funds," says Payne. "My day job was catalog copywriting, so I decided to do more freelance work." For the next year and a half, Payne worked at his regular job while taking on as many freelance projects as he could handle. "There was one stretch where I wrote catalog copy seven days a week for six straight months. I remember going up to Mendocino to visit friends one summer weekend, and having to retire in the afternoons with my laptop to their small guest cabin under the redwoods to write Christmas catalog copy. Like Lefty in Youth in Revolt I used to shuffle around mumbling `My life is a living hell. My life is a living hell.'
"Catalog writing is mentally intensive work, says Payne. "It's sort of like writing college term papers, only not as much fun."
During this time, to save on the cost of typesetting, Payne undertook to learn desktop publishing software. He designed the book himself, laying out the pages on his wife's Mac. "The difficulty was squeezing 225,000 words into 500 pages. I had to use a fairly small type size and then electronically condense the width of each letter. It wasn't pretty, but the result could be read with only moderate eyestrain." Payne contracted with an artist colleague to do the illustration for the dust jacket. "Then he got busy with his greeting card business, and didn't have time for my job," say Payne. "So I had to fall back on my meager cartooning skills."
Payne created the four-color cover art and wrote the promotional copy for the dust jacket. He also designed the logo and stationery for his publishing company.
1992: Youth in Revolt arrives
"I'll never forget that day," says Payne. "A big semi backed up the driveway, and the driver and I unloaded five pallets of books. It made quite an intimidating stack of boxes." Three-thousand copies of the first edition of Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp had been printed by Hadden Craftsmen in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Before the books could be delivered, the printing bill had to be paid in full. "Book printers don't extend credit to self-publishers," explains Payne.
Although the finished books were delivered in the fall of 1992, the official publication date for Youth in Revolt was April, 1993. "The delay was necessary to give me time to send out review galleys and to interest wholesalers in distributing the book, " says Payne. "Bookstores seldom order directly from publishers, so you have to hook up with a distributor." Payne sent off books to wholesalers and waited. And waited. Then the rejections began to trickle in.
April arrived and Payne had no distributor for his novel. In an effort to "prime the pump" he sent nine free copies to each of three local bay area bookstores. "I was happy to see that Cody's in Berkeley put the books out on display," says Payne. "I found out later that another independent Berkeley bookstore had tossed my books in the trash, which is somewhat ironic considering that these self-published first editions are now sought after by book collectors."
That month Youth in Revolt received its first notice by the press. The East Bay Express, a weekly newspaper in Berkeley wrote (in part): "A fat book by a local author landed on my desk a few weeks ago, and dutifully, I flipped through it to get an idea what it was like. I started to read in the middle of a chapter, but had to back up a bit to figure out some of the plot machinations. Then I had to back up a bit moreand soon realized there was nothing for it but to start from the beginning. For the next few days, I was so caught up in Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp by Berkeley's newest novelist, the diabolically intelligent C.D. Payne, that I forgot I had to write this column. . . Author Payne creates a plot so twisted and complex that a reader who's followed Nick's adventures through more than 400 pages of escalating absurdity begins to doubt that there could ever be a satisfying resolution. But Payne pulls it off."
That same week Youth in Revolt received another review that was not so kind (now on eternal view at Barnesandnoble.com). Reaching deep into his pockets, Payne took out several full-page ads in Publishers Weekly in hopes of interesting bookstores in his novel. He also placed a small (except for the cost) ad in the New York Times Book Review. "It may have generated the worst response in the history of mail order," says Payne. "I spent $4,000 for the ad and sold two $24.95 books. Not very impressive for a guy who was making his living writing advertising copy."
Some good news at last
That summer Bookpeople, a large employee-owned book distributor in Oakland, agreed to distribute Youth in Revolt, as did Seattle-based Pacific Pipeline. (Update: Pacific Pipeline is now defunct and Bookpeople recently filed for bankruptcy; the book trade is a tough business.) Orders also began to trickle in from Baker & Taylor and other wholesalers. Public libraries in Berkeley and Long Beach ordered copies. Youth in Revolt received rave reviews from Small Press magazine, L.A. Reader, and the Sonoma County Independent newspaper. "The strange thing was," says Payne, "that at that time I had only sold a few hundred copies, but I already had a file of letters from readers who loved the book. The response was very heartening."
That fall Payne had a booth at the San Francisco Book Festival, where he displayed Nick Twisp-imprinted t-shirts andsunglasses, and handed out free 50-page samples of his novel (printed in a tabloid newspaper format). At the festival he met Bob Warden, a Santa Rosa-based book marketer, who Payne contracted to serve as part-time publicist for the book. All of these expenses required ever more freelance copywriting projects to sustain.
Payne traveled to Los Angeles to promote his book at the American Booksellers Association's annual trade show. Hejoined COSMEP (since disbanded), an organization of small publishers, and paid to have his book displayed at the COSMEP booth at the Frankfurt Book Fair. To his surprise, he subsequently received an offer for the German rights from Munich-based Droemer, one of the largest publishers in Germany. Through the help of a Czech friend in Berkeley, Payne sold the Czech rights to Jota in Brno. The three Jota editions have been best-sellers in the Czech Republic, where they received much attention in the press. "I'm told that teenagers in the Czech
Republic engage in role-playing where they pretend to be characters from the book," says Payne. Foreign editions have also been published in the UK, Croatia, and Hungary.
More good news for Nick
Bob Warden introduced Payne to La Jolla-based agent Winifred Golden, now with the Castiglia Literary Agency, who agreed to take him on as a client. "I was amazed," says Payne. "She actually called meand kept me up-to-date on what was happening." Soon she had interest from several publishers, and an offer was accepted from Doubleday.
In the spring of 1995 Youth in Revolt was published in hardcover from Doubleday, and Payne was obliged to discontinue selling his stock of self-published first editions.
"Doubleday wanted to make the type bigger, so the text was cut about 10 percent," explains Payne. "Fans of Nick who want to read the full story might try locating one of my original editions. They sometimes turn up in used bookstores and at on-line auction sites such as E-Bay." (The missing parts now have been collected in the book Cut to the Twisp.) To keep the price affordable to younger readers at a time of high paper costs, the Doubleday edition dispensed with a dust jacket and featured the cover art imprinted directly on the hardcover binding. "Some friends said it looked like a high-school textbook," comments Payne. "As far as I know Doubleday never repeated that cost-cutting experiment."
Doubleday sent Payne on tour to Portland, Seattle, Bellingham, Spokane, Iowa City, and to bookstores around the San Francisco area. Doubleday sales reps, who were especially enthusiastic about the book, did their own special promotions. Although largely ignored by the establishment press, this new edition received glowing reviews from the Los Angeles Times, the Oregonian, and alternative newspapers around the country.
That same year the curtain rose in San Francisco's Cable Car Theater on "Youth in Revolt," the play. Adapted by Monica Taylor, it was produced by Bob Warden and Carl Hamilton of the Sonoma Shakespeare Theater. The play also has been produced in Denver and Rohnert Park, California.
In 1996 Doubleday published a trade paperback edition of Youth in Revolt under their Main Street Books imprint, employing some of the cover art from Payne's self-published edition. This edition is now in its 11th printing.
Hollywood beckons
Meanwhile, Payne's novel had been making the rounds in Hollywood, where it was considered at one time or another by many different studios. "Lots of producers were interested," says Payne, "but they all concluded that a film that was faithful to the story would get an R rating, which would close off the teenage audience." Ironically, Payne points out that 1998 saw the release by Hollywood of sixteen R-rated teen movies, several of which became big box-office hits.
In 1996 a TV pilot of Youth in Revolt was produced by Brillstein-Grey for the Fox TV Network. Payne and his wife were invited down to watch the taping. "As you'd expect with TV they took quite a few liberties with the story," says Payne. "But I did recognize several jokes from the book. The actors did a great job, and the audience laughed all the way through." The rumor had it that Youth in Revolt was being considered for the half-hour time slot after The Simpsons. But it was not to be. Of the 19 new-show pilots prepared for Fox that season, only two made it on the air--and neither show lasted more than a few months. "As I recall one of them starred Paulie Shore," says Payne. "It's possible Fox came to regret that decision in light of the subsequent success of such teen shows as Sabrina and Dawson's Creek."
Then Youth in Revolt was in development as a mini-series for MTV, but one of the chief writers on the project died tragically in a boating accident--reportedly on the day he completed the pilot for the show (which never made it on the air). Now (fall, 2003) it is in development as a feature film under veteran producer David Permut.
Copyright 2003, Aivia Press.
Copyright 1999 Aivia Press, P.O. Box 1922, Sebastopol, CA 95472