To Sell First Novel, Putting That Marketing Degree to Use

by Aileen Jacobson

GREENLAWN, N.Y.

GAE POLISNER doesn’t collect troll dolls, but on one recent morning hundreds of tiny ones were clustered in plastic bags on the antique grand piano in her living room.

Ms. Polisner, 46, plans to give away the dolls — along with bookmarks sporting photos of neon-haired trolls and mounds of troll-decorated buttons — at signings to help promote her first published book, “The Pull of Gravity,” a novel aimed at teenagers. She is using the troll dolls because Jaycee Amato, a quirky female character in the book, likes to wear them on a string around her neck.

“I got an undergraduate degree in marketing, and I like to tell my parents that they’re finally getting their money’s worth,” said Ms. Polisner, who is also a family-law lawyer with a part-time practice in divorce mediation. She even persuaded the makers of Tootsie Rolls to donate red wax lips — another plot element in her book — for her to distribute to readers, she said.

“We’re in a different world,” said Frances Foster, Ms. Polisner’s book editor, about the need for authors to help market their own books. Ms. Foster has her own imprint, Frances Foster Books, at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Gae has been able to learn the rules and navigate them in an extraordinary way,” she said.

The novel will be released on May 10, but Ms. Polisner has already spoken to several high school classes — it helps that there is a John Steinbeck connection in her book — and arranged a book-signing party at the Book Revue in Huntington on May 14. She has also organized a panel discussion with five other authors from around the country, who will talk about their work at the Hunting Public Library on May 22.

Several librarians read the book before the library agreed to the program, according to Beth Barning, a librarian in the youth and parent services section. At Ms. Polisner’s suggestion, the library added cupcakes and a henna-tattoo artist to help attract listeners, Ms. Barning said.

“Gae is just remarkably energetic,” said Geoff Herbach, the author of “Stupid Fast,” a sports-themed book to be published by Sourcebooks Fire on June 1, who is one of the library-panel members. “It’s amazing to see the connections she makes through social media.”

Mr. Herbach, 41, who lives in Mankato, Minn., and Minneapolis, is the lone male among the 17 members of a group called the Class of 2K11, to which Ms. Polisner also belongs and from which she drew her panel. All are debuting middle-grade or young-adult authors who help each other promote their books. The original Class of 2K was founded in 2007, and each year a new “class” forms.

Ms. Polisner scheduled the panel for the weekend before the start of the publishing industry convention BookExpo America, because most 2K11 members will attend the event, which will be held in Manhattan from May 23 to 26. She offered to let the panel participants — whom she has never met in person — stay at her home for the weekend. “We’re going to have a slumber party,” she said.

At least some of the panel members are planning to take her up on her offer of hospitality. They include Mr. Herbach and Amy Fellner Dominy, of Phoenix, who said in a telephone interview, “I call Gae my best virtual friend ever.”

Ms. Dominy, 47, is a former advertising copywriter who also has commissioned bookmarks for her novel, “OyMG” (Walker and Co., May 10), about a Jewish girl forced to cope with anti-Semitism, and has made school visits. “I think as debut authors in this economy, we feel the need to do a lot on our own,” she said.

Though Ms. Polisner’s new book is her first, she has been writing stories or poems since she was young, she said. For a while, she had to push her literary aspirations aside: “My first law school paper came back with a big red X on it and a note, ‘This is not a creative writing class.’ ”

She grew up in Smithtown, where her parents still live, and moved back to Long Island from Manhattan with her husband, David Miller, also a lawyer, when their younger son, Holden, was born. He is now 13; their older son, Sam, is 15.

After settling in Greenlawn, Ms. Polisner said, she placed a small desk in a windowless room in her basement and wrote two women’s novels, neither yet published, in her spare time. Her publishing luck turned better when she switched to young adult fiction, a shift that she said grew out of her difficulty in finding good contemporary stories with male protagonists for her sons. She also moved her desk to the sunlit living room, steps from the grand piano.

The narrator of “The Pull of Gravity” is a thoughtful boy, Nick Gardner, almost 15, who goes on a long bus trip with the spunky Jaycee to fulfill the dying wish of their friend Scooter. They plan to find Scooter’s long-missing father and return to him a rare signed edition of John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” the themes of which (including friendship) play a substantial part in her novel.

Ms. Polisner put a bit of her own “snarky sense of humor” into Jaycee, she said, and relied on her sons’ interest in the “Star Wars” movies, which are also part of the plot, and their natural grasp of teen habits and jargon, to help her find the right voice for Nick.

However, she said, the novel, which takes place in upstate New York, is not autobiographical. Neither are the two other young adult books she has in the pipeline, she said. In contrast, her unpublished women’s novels take place on Long Island and are loosely autobiographical — including her interest in swimming in her backyard pool and off West Neck Beach in Lloyd Harbor in a wet suit.

Swimming isn’t just a diversion, she said: “I realized that when I was blocked in my writing, it would all come to me in the water, so it became a creative outlet.”

Gae Polisner will read from and sign “The Pull of Gravity” at Book Revue, 313 New York Avenue, Huntington, on May 14 at 5 p.m. Information: (631) 271-1442 or bookrevue.com. She will moderate a panel of authors at the Huntington Public Library, 338 Main Street, Huntington, on May 22 at 3 p.m. Information: thehuntingtonlibrary.org or (631) 427-5165.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/nyregion/gae-polisners-the-pull-of-gravity-to-be-published-next-week.html?recp=4&src=rec&pagewanted=print