SOURCE: “Bestseller Dreams,” in Washington Post, February 4, 2001, p. W11.

[In the following essay, Span surveys Hoffman's career as a writer who has been critically acclaimed but has yet to achieve the status of bestselling author, focusing upon the promotion of his novel Blood and Guile.]

Bill Hoffman walks into the Volume II Bookstore in Blacksburg, Va., on a Wednesday evening and immediately wishes he could walk right out again.

It's the chairs. Past the poster promising “10٪ Off William Hoffman Books During Event,” past the stacks of his novels Tidewater Blood and the just-published Blood and Guile, in the center of this enormous store that sells Virginia Tech textbooks and sweat shirts and baseball caps, he's spotted nearly 70 metal folding chairs. In a burst of reckless optimism, the store's staff has set up rows and rows for a reading and signing that's supposed to start in a few minutes—and all of them are empty.

“Doesn't look too promising, does it?” Hoffman says glumly to his wife.

He and Sue have driven 150 miles to this first stop on his promotional rounds, and all the way up into the Blue Ridge, Bill wondered whether the long trip could possibly prove worthwhile. Amiable but a little shy, Hoffman doesn't really like publicity appearances anyway. If he were the kind of name-brand author whose novels sold themselves, the superstore shelves emptying as quickly as clerks could stock them while he stayed at home writing in rural Charlotte County, why, that would be fine with him. “I could be a recluse,” he'd said earlier in the day, sounding wistful as he was locking up their old farmhouse. “That'd be ideal.”

But because he is not that kind of author, he knows he has to try to hustle books—especially since a major New York publishing house, HarperCollins, has picked up this novel after long years when only small houses and university presses would publish his work. The HarperCollins people want to make Blood and Guile his “breakout” book, the one that finally delivers a national readership. Hoffman hopes they succeed; he's 75 and has been writing for more than 40 years without reaching that elusive target, and he understands that he may not get many more shots. The contemporary publishing industry has limited patience with so-called midlist authors.

So even though the audience eventually fills only 10 chairs—including Sue and two of her cousins who drove over from Pearisburg—he goes to the lectern and adjusts his reading glasses and begins.

First, he gently corrects the staffer who introduced him as an award-winning writer who's published 10 novels and three collections of short stories. “Twelve novels and four short-story collections,” Hoffman says. His voice is quiet, softened by his decades in Southside Virginia though he grew up in the twangy coal country of West Virginia. He has a long face with eyes that slope a bit sadly, a frosting of white hair. Years of horseback riding, bird-hunting and, more recently, long daily walks have kept him lean in his book-tour uniform: dark green sports jacket, pressed shirt and slacks, Topsiders.

He talks about Charlotte Court House, where he and Sue have lived on a 50-acre horse farm since 1964, a town with fewer than 600 residents, no stoplights, and a weekly newspaper in which “every cow that has a calf makes the headlines.” He tells about the gents who sit and gab under the sycamore tree in what passes for downtown, how they once told some out-of-towners who were seeking “the author William Hoffman” that there wasn't any Arthur Hoffman in these parts.

Then he reads chapters 1 and 2 of Blood and Guile: A snowy West Virginia mountainside where four friends are hunting grouse. Through the hemlocks comes the sound of three shots—an agreed-on SOS. A swift, terrible accident. Or maybe not.

Afterward, Hoffman inscribes his best wishes in seven hardcovers (Sue's cousin buys two) and a paperback; next morning, feeling a touch disheartened, he and Sue head home. There will be more events through the month of November—a hometown signing this weekend, a church fair in Richmond, a book-group discussion in South Carolina—with radio interviews sprinkled in among the road trips. Meanwhile, up in New York, the publicity and marketing people are doing—well, Hoffman doesn't quite know, but he figures they're doing whatever such people do to generate attention and sales. He also knows that breaking out is hard to do.

It's a tense time. “You wonder whether anything is ever going to happen,” he says. “Isn't anyone out there going to read my book? Isn't anyone going to review it? You'd think I'd get used to it, but I never have.”

'Midlist author' is a phrase that Hoffman has never used. But if he'd been spending time in New York (still the Imperial Rome of the publishing world), going to meetings and parties and lunches at Michael's, he would be uncomfortably familiar with the term. He'd know that worry over midlist books and their future has people in the industry variously squawking, lamenting, debating and defending—and disagreeing over whether electronic publishing will help or make things worse. It's not a label that writers welcome, and publishers like it even less. But midlist is what most authors are.

Almost any substantial work of fiction or nonfiction that doesn't become a bestseller qualifies as a midlist book, one that doesn't make the “front” of a publisher's seasonal list of upcoming titles. It probably sells somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 hardcover copies (writers whose sales sink below that may have trouble finding commercial publishers) and a high of 20,000 to 25,000. Beyond the numbers, however, the word “midlist” has acquired a stigma, an unnerving whiff of low sales expectations. “It suggests that it's a B-team book,” says John Sterling, president and publisher of Henry Holt. “A book that doesn't get any real attention from anybody in the publishing house … What are the chances a book of that sort is going to work? Incredibly small. Enter the lottery; you'll have a better chance of succeeding.”

Midlist books get published anyway, by the thousands each year; some are wonderful and some less so. The danger they all face is being ignored in a business increasingly dominated by the Big Book, the Tom Clancy thrillers and Danielle Steel romances that readers line up for. “The ugliest word out of a publisher's mouth,” says literary agent Molly Friedrich, “is small.”

Last spring an uneasy Authors Guild, which had spent more than a year looking into these trends, released its report on midlist publishing. It laboriously toted up the figures for the top fiction and nonfiction titles on the Publishers Weekly annual bestseller list, then showed how those 30 megabooks suck up a growing proportion of sales. In 1986, the bestsellers accounted for about 7 percent of all adult hardcover trade book sales; a decade later they accounted for 13 percent. In 1999, applying the same methodology, the proportion reached nearly 15 percent.

The report blamed this shrinking market share for midlist books largely on the rise of the superstore chains and the accompanying demise of independent bookstores over the past decade. Readers now make about 15 percent of their adult book purchases in independent bookstores, a percentage that has been sliding each year, while they buy about a quarter through large chains, and the rest by mail order, at Wal-Marts and Price Clubs, and on the Internet.

Independent booksellers, though sometimes more glorious in memory than in fact, have traditionally specialized in discovering smaller, more idiosyncratic books and recommending them to customers. Chains, with their discounts, do particularly well at moving large quantities; hence the towers of the latest Anne Rice or Michael Crichton that greet shoppers at the door. Though superstores stock tens of thousands of titles, which assures more books of national distribution, many midlist books get consigned to the stores' depths, two or three lonely volumes unnoticed by clerks or customers. After a couple of months, they're likely to get boxed up—this is the rare business in which retailers can return unsold merchandise—and sent back.

To ward off this fate usually requires money—marketing dollars, another arena in which midlist books are at a disadvantage. Simply to ensure that a new book spends two weeks on a chain's front tables, and gets included in some advertising, a publisher has to pay about ＄10,000 through subsidies known as “coop advertising,” according to the Authors Guild report. Many of the chain-store devices that bring books to customers' attention—window displays, cardboard sales racks—carry price tags. So, of course, do key elements of the publicity apparatus: Sending an author on tour costs at least ＄1,500 per city.

But the marketing budget for a midlist book is usually meager; the industry rule of thumb has long been “a buck a book.” A publisher that prints 10,000 copies of a biography, after deducting the cost of sending galleys and review copies to editors and critics, may not have enough left to buy prominent store placement, let alone send the author on the road.

Meanwhile, the Big Book gets steadily bigger. The novel that topped the Publishers Weekly 1979 fiction bestseller list, a Robert Ludlum thriller called The Matarese Circle, sold 250,000 copies in hardcover. Twenty years later, a novel that sells a quarter of a million copies won't even make PW's annual top 30 in fiction.

For a midlist author, what results is “devastating disappointment: Your book is out, you hold it in your hands, and you realize that nothing else is going to happen,” says author Nicholas Lemann, who chaired the guild's study committee on midlist books. “It'll go to stores across the country, get returned in 90 days, and it's as if it were never published.”

If worthy books get overlooked and writing them becomes increasingly unrewarding, authors ask, where will the next generation of writers come from? What happens to readers when marketing efforts increasingly steer them toward a small number of big-name authors frequently duplicating the elements of their last bestsellers? What potential classics may never find their audiences? The culture itself is diminished when new voices and explorations of important subjects are unable to make an impact. A long list of hallowed authors, from William Faulkner to Anne Tyler, had early publishing histories that were, for extended periods, financially unimpressive.

Publishing executives get weary of taking this particular rap. No publisher can subsist solely on bestsellers, they point out: Knowing exactly which title will connect is too uncertain, and the multimillion-dollar advances given to best-selling authors eat up too much of the profits. So every house takes chances on unknown writers, tries to nurture their careers over several years, and works to get them attention without generating red ink. Any house would love to discover the next original literary voice. A publisher that launches 200 to 300 new titles a year has to make choices, of course; books deemed more likely to pay off will get more money, more effort, more of everything. But modest sales remain acceptable, they insist, as long as the numbers keep rising.

They are right about all those things, and right to point out that making a living as a writer has always been very difficult. But many also acknowledge that in the book game, midlist authors get fewer at-bats than they used to. A small first book is acceptable, probably a second, possibly a third. But sooner rather than later, a writer whose stats aren't improving markedly will get yanked from the lineup.

“We'll publish everything you write,” Bill Hoffman's first editor at Doubleday told him in the 1960s. No editor would, or honestly could, say that now.

The first time Hoffman sold a novel, he was nearly broke and perilously close to enrolling in graduate school. But ever since a Washington and Lee professor had told him he had the makings of a writer, that was all he ever wanted to be. “I made a deal with the Lord,” he says. “Kind of a prayer, I guess … ‘If you'll just get me a book published, I won't ask any more.’”

He confesses to not having kept his end of the deal. Nevertheless, on New Year's Day 1954, he came home exhilarated from a great day's bird hunting. “Cold, crisp. I'd shot well. The dogs had done well. Sunset was just right. I came in and saw a telegram under the door.” A Doubleday editor wanted to publish The Trumpet Unblown, the unflinching World War II novel Hoffman had written about a young Virginia private quickly disabused of his notions of military gallantry; Hoffman himself had waded onto Normandy's Utah Beach with the Army Medical Corps. With news of his book's acceptance, “I felt I'd been let out of prison,” he remembers. He grabbed a bottle and went off to celebrate with friends.

An inveterate storyteller in person as on the page, Hoffman has an abundance of such tales about his early life. How his first paid writing gigs were love letters crafted on behalf of his military school classmates. How that Washington and Lee professor's seminar included another aspiring young author, known as T. K. Wolfe, who wore natty tattersall vests and was “beginning to write some good stuff.” How they remained friends when they both went to New York, Hoffman taking a night job at a bank so he could write during the day, until a revered professor at his alma mater, Hampden-Sydney College, called and commanded, “Boah, come on down heah and teach these freshmen some English!” He obeyed and has been a Virginian ever since, while Tom Wolfe stayed up north and had a different sort of career.

“We've loved it here,” says Hoffman. Here is a parcel of countryside called Wynyard, with stables and outbuildings and a brick farmhouse built in the 1830s; he's rocking on the broad front porch, looking out at the front pasture—tawny on a warm October afternoon—whose split-rail fence he built himself. Today happens to be the day that HarperCollins starts shipping Blood and Guile from a warehouse in Scranton, Pa., to bookstores across the country.

Once, he and Sue kept as many as 16 horses here, raised vegetables and chickens and two daughters, had a small menagerie of pets and hunting dogs. Now, the population has dwindled to a cat, one temperamental thoroughbred named Fling, and the senior Hoffmans, who no longer ride for fear of injury. Sue nurtures her flower gardens but has given up on vegetables; Bill does chores but lets someone else manage the haying. What hasn't changed, after all this time, is that he writes.

He's up at 6 a.m. and by 6:15 is at the computer in his office, his old wooden desk turned away from the window so that he won't be distracted by the view. The routine hasn't varied: He writes a first draft quickly, because a blank screen is too frightening to bear, then reworks it several times, finally tapping at each sentence like a diamond cutter until all the excess falls away and what remains is perfectly clean.

Yet as Hoffman has plugged away, decade after decade, the publishing business has changed around him, sometimes without his quite realizing it. An unfailingly good-natured man, he rarely sounds angry about that, but he frequently seems bewildered.

The Doubleday relationship, for example, lasted through seven novels, from The Trumpet Unblown (“A powerful anti-war book,” said the New York Times Book Review) through A Death of Dreams in 1973. None sold more than 5,000 or 6,000 copies, despite good reviews, but nobody seemed to mind; by paying Hoffman modest ＄10,000 advances and selling the paperback rights, Doubleday was turning a small profit on his books, and a small profit was enough.

“He was a very good writer,” says Tim Seldes, his first editor. “I thought he'd have the same kind of success as Mailer and James Jones had.” If Hoffman was taking some years to get there, well, “that was what you expected back then … We all, when we took on a first novelist, assumed we were in for the long haul.”

Hoffman's next editor felt the same way. But by the '70s Doubleday was going through management upheavals and becoming, like the rest of the business, less tolerant: Hoffman still hadn't broken out and his seventh book had no paperback sale, which led to his eighth being rejected. His agent, Emilie Jacobson, blames the corporate mergers that had begun to consolidate many publishers into a few large ones “controlled more by the MBA/bottom line types” than by editors who recognized Hoffman's literary gifts.

“They're a business; they're not charitable institutions,” Hoffman recognized. But in this changed landscape, “I was sitting around sort of baffled about what to do next.”

Through the '80s and '90s, as New York turned a cold shoulder, he published mainly with university presses that printed only a few thousand copies and drew limited attention; he felt himself begin to disappear. And because academic publishers paid token or no advances, he also tightened an already snug belt. Bill and Sue got by because they'd paid off the farm, raised much of their own food, drove secondhand cars—and because Bill taught at Hampden-Sydney and also managed to make money in the stock market. But as his daughters grew, “they saw other men going to offices with briefcases, getting ahead in the world,” he fretted. “Their compatriots had a lot of advantages my girls didn't. That hurt.”

Even more troubling was Hoffman's fear that those editors rejecting his work might be onto something. “Maybe I just don't have it anymore,” he thought. “Like an athlete who's outlived his usefulness on the football field.” At one point he was on the verge of becoming a stockbroker; a Richmond financial firm was ready to take him on. But he was unable to stay away from the typewriter.

Worse than a midlist writer, Hoffman was also becoming—another phrase nobody likes—a regional writer. In the South, where fellow writers revere his work, he's been plied with tributes: awards, honorary degrees, a symposium devoted to his work. He's published two dozen stories in the prestigious Sewanee Review, more than any other writer, including Peter Taylor and Flannery O'Connor. The University of Missouri Press even brought out a book about him, a collection of critical essays called The Fictional World of William Hoffman, edited by a professor friend, William Frank. Outside the South, though, he remained little known, dogged by the phrase “a writer's writer”—a euphemism, Hoffman joked, for a writer whose books don't sell.

Why this was so, given the high literary quality of his work, continues to puzzle his fans and peers. It's true that Hoffman takes on meaty themes: identity, religion, and that Southern favorite, the weight of the past. But he is rarely heavy-handed, his ideas tucked into compelling stories about war, family, murder. Besides, “when you begin reading, you discover the wonderful way he has with language,” Frank says. “Just the way he describes a dead bird, that wonderful cadence—it's almost poetry.”

A spare passage from Blood and Guile:

… The grouse flapped up from under sumac, its wings beating the bush, its neck stretched long, and its gleaming eyes took me in as it curved left away. When Drake fired, the load hit the bird so squarely it went limp, spun into a drooping fall, and bounced against the ground, where it left a sprinkle of blood across snow.

“Poleaxed him,” Drake said, and stroked the bird before handing it to me. I drew fingers over the beautiful and marvelously complex design of brown and bronze. The black stripe across its tail feathers appeared a masterful touch of creation. I felt the warmth of the bird's breast and the last lingering tremor of departing life.

No one expects William Hoffman to be John Grisham, but why doesn't he have the belated recognition and income of, say, the late Wallace Stegner?

Perhaps it's because he was out of sight in Charlotte Court House; he can't even remember the last time he was in New York. Or perhaps the places Hoffman describes so evocatively—he sets his books in Tidewater Virginia, the West Virginia mountains, the farms and tobacco towns of the Southside—no longer have much mystique. But by the late '90s, when his mainstay Louisiana State University Press stopped acquiring original fiction, Hoffman faced the prospect of having to stop publishing altogether.

Then came Tidewater Blood, Hoffman's 1998 novel in which a nearly feral hero named Charley LeBlanc, living in a swamp shack and subsisting on fish and muskrats, is suspected of planting a fatal explosion in a plantation house. Charley, it emerges, is the black sheep of the aristocratic family within, having made a couple of left turns through Vietnam and Leavenworth since leaving home. He encounters a gallery of vivid characters—truckers, a cave-dwelling hermit, and Blackie, the lady barkeep in a pink eye patch and cowboy boots—while simultaneously fleeing the law and attempting to clear his name. Hoffman crafted the tale with his usual serious purpose, uncertain of its fate. Happily, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a small publisher known for quality fiction, took it on, deciding that what he'd considered simply his next book was a taut but literary suspense novel.

As sometimes happens at smaller houses, Algonquin—which publishes only two dozen titles a year—lavished considerable attention on Tidewater Blood. It solicited jacket blurbs from other novelists, put together a regional tour with 21 events over eight weeks, badgered local papers and radio stations to schedule interviews as the author and his wife drove to each stop. It wangled reviews throughout the South and beyond—Houston, Cleveland, Chicago, even People magazine. And the book won the Hammett Prize, given by the International Association of Crime Writers. All this added up to still-modest sales—an initial 10,000 print run, followed by a 5,000 second printing—but the “sell through” was clean (translation: few returns). HarperCollins vice president and executive editor Carolyn Marino heard about the novel, read it and promptly bought the paperback rights. “The writing is very beautiful, yet the story is an accessible and commercial one,” she decided. “It's rare to find that combination.”

Like an amusement park ride with a few too many thrills, Hoffman's career track—having lurched from promising newcomer status to barely surviving veteran to rediscovered treasure—then took one more swerve. He completed his next novel, tapping a minor character from Tidewater Blood, Charley LeBlanc's meek attorney, Walter B. Frampton II, as its protagonist—and Algonquin promptly rejected it. “Turned into the damnedest mess you've ever seen,” Hoffman says. He rewrote it several times, but his editor says that “we had different visions,” that the book was “more of a mainstream novel than Tidewater Blood”—a problem for the resolutely literary Algonquin.

So perhaps it's fitting that Carolyn Marino stepped in and bought the rejected manuscript, which became Blood and Guile, for HarperCollins, where—as at most big publishing houses—mainstream is the point. She loved Hoffman's characters, particularly Frampton, the unprepossessing hero who would rather listen to Mozart than hunt grouse, but develops a quiet courage.

Hoffman, a bit dazed by all this, found himself with a two-book deal: a ＄50,000 advance for each novel, more money than he's ever made on a book. “I hope it has a nice, big readership,” Marino said on the eve of Blood and Guile's publication. Hoffman's fans and supporters had their fingers crossed, too: this deal could catapult him beyond regional-writer standing and off the midlist.

Hoffman himself was nervous, however. He responded to the pre-publication stress the way he always did: by working each morning on his next novel. He'd decided to bring Charley LeBlanc back to center stage. The first few chapters and a detailed outline were due in January; he thought the work was coming along nicely.

That much, at least, lay within his control. Steeling himself for the November 1 publication date of Blood and Guile, he told people he felt like a combat pilot who'd been shot down one too many times. Public appearances can be delightful or humiliating, reviews can be wounding, but being overlooked hurts worst of all. “The competition's pretty tough out there,” he said. “Books come pouring off the presses. You can just get lost in this torrent of books.” If this book doesn't thrive, he fears that HarperCollins could find a reason to reject the next one, or to publish it without commitment and leave it to die.

The insufficient size of advances has long been a favorite gripe whenever authors, a notoriously malcontented lot, get together. But complaints about inadequate promotion probably run a close second.

More and more, feeling ignored by their publishers, writers try to mount their own marketing campaigns. They hire independent publicists, even though that costs thousands. Or they set up their own signings. They dream up issue-oriented panels, with themselves among the talking heads, and pitch the idea to producers whose names they find in TV talk-show directories.

“Unless you're getting a mid-six-figure contract, you can't count on your publisher to do much at all,” warns Robin Davis Miller, an Authors Guild attorney who leads its seminars on do-it-yourself publicity. “I would expect nothing.”

What a publisher does or doesn't do isn't the only factor that attracts readers (word of mouth is powerful, Oprah is omnipotent), but it can certainly make a difference. What any non-brand-name author dreams about is a campaign like the one Little, Brown and Co. has designed for Silver Spring writer George Pelecanos, whose well-reviewed crime novels have won him a solid reputation but have yet to climb past midlist sales levels. His ninth novel, Right as Rain, being published this month, marks the launch of a new series—an opportune time, the house has decided, for a major push.

So, well before publication, Little, Brown sent Pelecanos to regional trade shows. He autographed galleys at booksellers' gatherings in Boston and Washington and attended a major mystery convention in Denver, where Little, Brown hosted a reception and gave away more galleys. (Galleys are printers' proofs, photocopied and distributed before publication to give booksellers and the media an advance look; Little, Brown ordered a hefty 2,000 with pricey color covers.)

The original plan was to send Pelecanos on a six-city book tour. But then master crime writer Elmore Leonard, who rarely blurbs books, supplied a jacket quote that began, “A terrific book full of characters I wish I had thought of,” and bookstores started to request appearances. By late fall the tour had expanded to 12 cities—half in tandem with best-selling novelist Michael Connelly—and the publisher was planning newspaper ads. Pelecanos contributed a conveniently timed essay for the March GQ, and Talk magazine commissioned a feature story … and none of this guarantees that Right as Rain will sell 50,000 copies when it hits stores, which is enough to propel a book onto the New York Times bestseller list most seasons of the year. But it means that Pelecanos will probably not be sitting at an upcoming Authors Guild seminar griping about his publicist.

For most midlist writers, though, publication represents a series of battles, with acceptance of a manuscript only the start of the struggle. Within the publishing house, the editor has to fight to rev up the publicity and marketing departments enough to secure the book a decent marketing budget. The marketing chief has to fight to get the sales reps excited, and the sales reps have to fight to get booksellers to place orders and then the publicists have to fight for reviews and features.

All these skirmishes are harder when an author has compiled a history of mediocre sales, especially now that sales figures are computerized and any chain-store factotum can see the sad story on the screen. “Familiarity does breed contempt,” says David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster's trade division. “It's very hard to go back to the bookstores and say, 'We know you've sold 10,000 copies of this author's books before, but this one is the one that's going to sell 30,000.' They laugh at you”—and then order no more than they sold last time. Better to be a first-timer with no track record.

Now and then, a much-published author comes to this conclusion and actually adopts a pseudonym in order to shed a troublesome sales history. Rosenthal tried it last year: A West Coast suspense novelist generally sold 18,000 to 25,000 hardcover copies, not a dreadful number but one that, instead of rising, was starting to slip. Rosenthal suggested a change of authorial identity, and last spring, Simon & Schuster published this renamed writer's novel, with a skimpy bio and no jacket photo. After all that stealth, how did the book do? “Lousy,” Rosenthal admits. “Actually worse.”

Sales history is a problem Bill Hoffman also faces. In addition, the idea that authors need to tackle their own marketing has yet to trickle down to Charlotte Court House. After all, Hoffman has a team in New York that's supposed to worry about steering his career. There's Emilie Jacobson, his literary agent for more than 30 years, a tiny woman in enormous glasses who has a computer in her office but prefers to use an old Royal manual typewriter and to record her authors' sales and earnings in big green ledger books. There's Carolyn Marino, who as editor is Hoffman's advocate within HarperCollins, and David Brown, the 24-year-old publicist assigned to Blood and Guile. Hoffman's never met any of these people face to face, or spoken with Marino in the months since they completed work on the manuscript; he's never heard the name Carrie Kania, though as his HarperCollins marketing director she arguably has more to do with his book's success than anyone besides him. But he assumes that selling books is their job, not his.

Yet even the uncomplaining Hoffman, as his publication date looms but his tour itinerary has just three stops on it, starts to wonder what's going on up there. And Sue Hoffman, a scrappy sort with curls the color of steel and a will to match, wonders too.

They are puttering around their kitchen one afternoon, talking about a couple of personal trips planned for the next few weeks. They have a meeting coming up in Charleston, W.Va., Bill's home town; shouldn't he have a bookstore signing while they're there, maybe some local media attention? And they're driving to Greenville, S.C., for their granddaughter's birthday; shouldn't some event be scheduled? The stores where Bill drew satisfying crowds while promoting Tidewater Blood—do the proprietors even know he has a new novel coming out? “I feel funny trying to manipulate things,” Sue says. “I hate to impose and ask favors.” But what about that lovely bookstore in Lynchburg, just an hour away, where dozens of people turned out last time?

“Lynchburg, I could sell some books,” Bill says.

“No question.” Sue thinks maybe she'll drop that nice bookstore owner a note. And she'll call the store in nearby Farmville. And what about the Library of Virginia in Richmond, where Bill has twice been invited for lunch-hour talks? Their friend Henry is on the library board. …

“I'll manage something,” she murmurs, jotting notes on a legal pad, already mapping out the Blood & Guile Tour. She knows that Bill dislikes self-promotion, that he still half-believes that a good book will somehow find readers. “Well, that's hogwash,” she's decided. “Too many other books out there and people screaming about 'em. So I'll scream for him.”

Bill has been telling himself, and Sue, that a big publisher can't be as attentive as a small one like Algonquin. He's trying not to get spooked or annoyed by HarperCollins's apparently less aggressive approach. “But bottom line,” Sue frets, “don't they want to sell books?”

The Blood & Guile Tour, after its painful 70-chair kickoff in Blacksburg, picks up with a weekend signing at the Yarn Corner, Hoffman's hometown bookstore, one of the cluster of gracious old brick buildings that constitute downtown Charlotte Court House. The event has been front-page news in the weekly Charlotte Gazette and the Brookneal Union Star, and almost as soon as proprietor Janet Early opens for business, Hoffman's most loyal readers start filing in.

Here's Clarence, his former tennis partner. And Jim, who's buying six copies of Blood and Guile for the county library. Tammy, who went to school with the Hoffmans' daughter Margaret. And many members of the Village Presbyterian Church, where the Hoffmans are elders. Over the course of Friday and Saturday afternoons, Bill shakes hands and exchanges courtly greetings (“Hello, Pearl!” “Where've you been keeping yourself, Ann?”) with half the town, it seems: Bruce the math teacher and Wayland the physician and Earl, who owns the local garage. The place hums with a neighborly babble, and lots of people buy an extra copy or two to send to a son on a minesweeper in the Persian Gulf or a daughter-in-law in Atlanta.

“Now if you see Larry, don't you dare say, ‘Larry, how did you enjoy that book?’ Because he's not getting it until Christmas,” instructs Hoffman's friend Pinky Bates, a school administrator. And Hoffman promises he won't say a word.

“That was great,” Early declares after the last fan has left. She's moved more than 70 copies of Blood and Guile, plus a dozen paperbacks of Tidewater Blood.

“Pretty good for country folk,” says the author, pleased.

But a few days later, the Hoffmans drive to Richmond for a church bazaar where Bill and a friendly young fellow who writes maritime history sit at a long table for three pointless hours. People sidle down the table and look at the books; they seem willing to discuss the books; they evince little interest in buying the books. So Hoffman and his fellow author, in a gesture of literary solidarity, purchase each other's.

The reviews are starting to come in, too, and decades of reading them has not immunized Hoffman against the sting of criticism. The trade magazines have been laudatory: Blood and Guile got starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and the crankier Kirkus Reviews (“tense, filled with sharp characterizations, and beautifully worked out”), a rare double plaudit. The Roanoke Times & World News raves (“a masterful tale of courage and fear”) as usual. But Hoffman's first-ever review in the Los Angeles Times, e-mailed to him by his publicist, is unenthusiastic. And his first Washington Post review in 30 years praises the book's charm and “invitational coziness” while chiding that “it's obvious from about Page 20 who's done this dastardly deed.”

“Everybody says bad reviews are better than no reviews,” Hoffman stews. “I'm not sure about that.”

A week later, he's feeling better. A swing through South Carolina nets another dispiriting bookstore appearance, but also an enjoyable talk at a Greenville high school, and then a sweet evening with a reading group in Columbia. The lakeside home was gracious, the questions were intelligent, and all 20-plus members were clutching copies of Blood and Guile. Plus, the reviews in the St. Petersburg, Norfolk and Charleston, W.Va., papers are all excellent. But where's the review in the Richmond Times-Dispatch? Hoffman always gets one, and it's always a gush, but this time it's delayed and his signings in Richmond and Farmville suffer from lower-than-last-time attendance. By late November he's rattled and perplexed. “We need some publicity,” he says, “and we're not getting it.”

HarperCollins has not disregarded Blood and Guile during this six- to eight-week interval when most books either catch on or falter.

Here's what it's done:

It prints about 10,000 copies initially, preferring to err on the low side because publishers would rather risk running short than getting stuck with returns. Then it quickly goes back to press for 2,500 more copies, which will take several weeks to print and ship. The attractive book jacket, of snowy trees and a mountain cabin, is a concession to Hoffman, who spent days looking at an earlier attempt and decided he deeply disliked it.

Marino talks up the book to contacts in the mystery and suspense field, and submits it for the major mystery awards.

HarperCollins gets review copies out. David Brown sent 50 to 75 galleys in July to monthly publications that plan their issues far in advance. The marketing staff sends 200 books to independent and mystery bookstores, with an accompanying letter from Marino praising its “gripping story” and “beautiful prose.”

Brown mails 210 more books, with a press release and the trade reviews tucked inside, to every major newspaper and newsmagazine with a book page. In late October he starts calling those publications, from the Abilene Reporter-News through the Winston-Salem Journal. “Just want to make sure you received a copy of Blood and Guile by William Hoffman, his follow-up to the award-winning Tidewater Blood,” Brown says into the phone. There's rarely anyone on the other end, just voice mail systems, but the reminder may help.

The one thing HarperCollins does beyond the basics is to hire a firm specializing in radio, to book interviews with Hoffman at stations around the country. Radio is cheap (less than ＄3,000 for this company, compared with ＄4,000 or ＄5,000 at the more expensive firm the house sometimes uses for big-name authors) and helps spread the word.

This is what HarperCollins doesn't do:

It doesn't send Hoffman to booksellers' gatherings. The spring shows fell too early; the fall shows came too late.

It doesn't order ARCs, advance reader's copies—fancier galleys that are printed instead of photocopied, with glossy color covers. ARCs are a potent industry signal that a publisher intends to put money behind a title.

It doesn't send Hoffman on the road. Travel is expensive and “it's really hard to tour an author these days if they don't have a name-brand identity,” says marketing director Carrie Kania. Hoffman's small “regional” tour, which means he and Sue put 1,772 miles on their Buick LeSabre (the first new car they've ever owned), is largely the result of their contacting friends and bookstore owners themselves.

It doesn't try to arrange additional publicity, probably because publicist David Brown must juggle 15 to 30 books a year.

It doesn't advertise. No publisher does, really, except for already-known authors. “It's almost horrifying how much it costs,” Kania says.

And there isn't nearly enough coop money to persuade most chain bookstores to display it prominently.

So while there are logical-sounding reasons for everything HarperCollins doesn't do, the bottom line is that by the end of November it has shipped and sold fewer copies of Hoffman's novel than Algonquin sold of his last one, something no publisher likes to see. Barnes & Noble ordered the book in moderate quantities in the Beltway region and at selected stores that do well with suspense, but some stores didn't carry even a single copy. Every Borders store did stock it, but only about a quarter ordered a “display quantity” (five copies or more), enough to put on upfront tables.

Blood and Guile got about a dozen reviews beyond the early trades, most of them positive; more will trickle in over the coming months. It could still have a small additional printing if sales pick up. The radio effort seemed to fizzle, however: Hoffman received a list of stations to call at prearranged times, but some were booked for dates when he was on the road and unavailable and they weren't rescheduled; at other stations, no one answered the phone when he called. A supposed “tour” of 20 or more markets shrinks to four actual interviews by year's end, with a couple more scheduled for January and February.

This is all pretty standard, and HarperCollins says it's not unhappy with Blood and Guile's resulting so-so performance. “We're building his career,” Kania, the marketing director, says of Hoffman. “This was not the big breakout book, but it brings him up one more notch to where we eventually want him to be.” For the trade paperback edition, and the next hardcover, the house will try for more reviews, more media, more attention from mystery booksellers. Perhaps forgetting for a moment that Hoffman is 75, and not realizing that though he and Sue are healthy and vigorous he has made inquiries about cemetery plots, Kania says: “This was our first hardcover with him. The next one will do better, and hopefully the next and the next.”

Meanwhile, there's this bit of lucky timing: A book that arrives in stores in November will likely still be there in January. The staff will be far too busy restocking shelves and working the registers during the frantic Christmas season to send it back.

Questions about the viability of midlist publishing come at a time when the book business is already twitchy. It's grown accustomed to change, to the continuing rounds of mergers and takeovers, the clout of the chains, the advent of Internet bookselling. But the pace of change has picked up and some shifts feel more seismic.

Consider the latest development: Electronic publishing already allows readers to download some books onto home computers or portable reading devices, or to have books printed on demand, and may one day allow most consumers to bypass retailers and publishers altogether. Stephen King offered a double-barreled preview last year, first directing Simon & Schuster to publish his novella Riding the Bullet only electronically, then self-publishing a serial novel as long as readers kept paying for online installments. Publishers were relieved when the latter experiment lapsed after six chapters (not enough fans were paying up), and it was never clear how such efforts might fare with an author named Stephen Queen. But King made money and the implications remain unnerving. “People are scared about e-books,” says Simon & Schuster's Rosenthal. “They're scared they'll make publishing houses as we know them obsolete, which may indeed be true.”

Digital publishing might prove a boon to midlist authors. Jason Epstein, former Random House editorial director, has declared in lectures and articles and in the just-published Book Business that mainstream publishing is already a terminal case, that technology can eliminate such middlemen, and that what looms is a revolution on the order of Gutenberg's. “Like the difference between sending a boat across the Atlantic with a sack of mail versus making a phone call,” Epstein says. He envisions a consumer ordering a book on the Web; it will be nicely printed and bound at an ATM-like kiosk near his home; he will pay less than he does now and the author will get paid more. The independent Web publisher that arranges the transaction can still make a profit because it involves no warehouses, sales force or returns. Even Amazon.com, which authors tend to like because it has infinite shelf space and doesn't have to return books, can't match that low-cost model.

Convinced that they dare not ignore the digital future, the major houses and their digital partners are already investing hundreds of millions in e-publishing. Its trajectory and timetable remain very uncertain, however, and other people in the business mutter caustically about the last supposed revolution, books on CD-ROMs. “Haven't heard much about that lately,” one executive says.

In this nervous period, one can detect undercurrents of anxiety about how much publishing still matters. Perhaps books are simply becoming less culturally central; most attract fewer consumers than a 1,000-watt radio station in Springfield, Mass., not to mention a failing TV sitcom. Perhaps publishing, where generations of bright college grads felt privileged to work, where service to literature was understood to compensate for lousy salaries, has lost its already-dimming glamour. How long will talented young people continue to enlist when they can't afford a one-bedroom New York apartment? When the Bill Hoffmans of the world are outsold by “novelist” Ivana Trump?

Perhaps the industry simply cranks out more books than readers want to buy or even glance at. Several major publishers, agreeing that it would be wiser to produce fewer titles and give each more support, have trimmed their lists. Yet the number of new hardcover titles still tops 50,000 each year.

Why do they do it? frustrated writers sometimes wail. Why do publishers bother with midlist books if they are unable or unwilling to let the buying public know they exist? Aside from the inexorability found in any industry (editors need to acquire, catalogues need to be filled), the likeliest answer is that occasionally the stars align and a midlist title becomes a Big Book. A memoir by an unknown high school teacher, acquired for a ＄125,000 advance and given a respectable but not terribly optimistic first printing of 27,000, benefits from a forceful marketing effort (and from its own appeal, and from just plain luck) and turns into Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which spent 117 lucrative weeks on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list.

Perhaps the more mystifying question is why authors persist. Here, the entire enterprise lifts into the realm of the irrational. After the first book or two, most midlist writers grasp the odds against the next one being widely read or making much money—they may be irrational, but they're not delusional—yet they rarely quit the field. They get bounced by big publishers and head for smaller ones. They see publishing catalogues where novels and biographies are almost outnumbered by offerings from wrestlers, sex gurus, fashion designers and extreme skateboarders—and refuse to take the hint. The book (not the computer screen) remains a sacred object, one with the occasional power to confer immortality. As Hoffman put it as his book tour was winding down, “You can't help it, you've got to be a writer. I'm 75 and here I still am writing books. It's as inevitable as the color of your hair or your eyes.”

The final stop on the Blood & Guile Tour is one of the best: a noon reading at the Library of Virginia. The library executive who introduces the author is eloquent in his praise. Perhaps 75 people—old friends, strangers, library staffers—listen to Hoffman tell stories and read from his novel while they eat lunch from styrofoam containers and paper bags. Afterward, they line up in the library's soaring glass-and-stone lobby so that Hoffman can sign their books.

“I see you switched publishing houses,” says one fan, a clerk who's slipped away from a Richmond law firm, who harbors writing aspirations himself.

“They kinda switched on me,” Hoffman says.

“Really!” The clerk looks surprised; how can such a longtime novelist with so many awards be expendable?

“Publishing,” Hoffman tells him, “is almost as crazy as lawyering.”

At home, as the weeks pass and the first snow falls, Hoffman increasingly turns his attention to his new book. It keeps him from feeling discouraged as an ominous silence seems to descend around Blood and Guile. He doesn't hear anything much from Carolyn Marino; David Brown has few additional reviews to forward; he has no idea whether the book is moving. “You kind of expect the world to stop,” he muses. “Heck, it's just a book coming out.”

And yet, though finishing a book feels “so damn futile,” here he is, at it again, every morning.

The fantasy he allows himself, now and then, doesn't involve seeing his name on a bestseller list or cashing a hefty royalty check; it's simpler than that. In all the years he's been writing, he's never seen anyone reading a book by William Hoffman. “I wonder,” he says, “if it'll happen in my lifetime.”

He envisions himself strolling along a beach—possibly Holden Beach in North Carolina, where his family vacations each August—and noticing someone absorbed in a book. Say the reader's a young woman (“in her thirties, that's what I call young these days”), stretched out on a beach chair under an umbrella. She's wearing sunglasses and perhaps a straw hat, and Hoffman, drawing closer, suddenly realizes that he recognizes the jacket. It's his novel, in hardcover of course, and “she looks entranced by it.”

In this daydream, Hoffman wanders over to discuss the book, but he doesn't identify himself as the author. He just chats for a spell, asking what she thinks, perhaps offering that he enjoyed that novel, too. A little pleasant conversation, and then he walks on. The point, after all, isn't adulation. It's just knowing that someone's paying attention.