You can get your free copy of “The Next Queen of Heaven” from Concord’s Web site, which is giving away a hundred copies a day. Tomorrow (Friday) is the last day. The Web site also maintains a list of independent bookstores that may carry the book. If you are lucky enough to find one, pass it on!
Maguire recently chatted with me about “The Next Queen” and how he made the decision to publish with Concord.
Concord Free Press was thought up and is managed by writers, not business people, and they have this novel notion that the intrinsic value of the reading experience of new books and the fiscal hoopla—be it hallelujah or horror—that attends any book’s publication are separate items and need not always be conflated. Sure, CFP wants to make money—for other people’s good causes—but they want to remind readers, too, that the healthy bottom line of any novel is less important than any other line of the novel … as long as the novel is good enough.
The CFP first edition of “The Next Queen of Heaven” is a teaser edition of only twenty-five hundred. It’s quite possible that HarperCollins will want to publish “The Next Queen of Heaven” in a second edition. That way lots of readers can enjoy it, and libraries can lend it, and bookstores peddle it, to the extent the market allows. But CFP prides itself in asking established authors for manuscripts that allow the authors to “break out” of their P.R. niche, as it were. I am known as a fantasist primarily; “The Next Queen of Heaven” is a sort of farce about millennial anxiety and the possible Second Coming of Christ in 1999. Next question?
Did you have to clear the arrangement beforehand with HarperCollins?
I perch, nominally, on the board of the Concord Free Press, which is a 501 (c)(3). Those numbers mean it’s a nonprofit registered with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Happily, that requires a board. We’ve never actually had a board meeting yet, but we drink a nice little bit of decent wine several times a month, and things get done. When I was approached to submit something, I did let HarperCollins know what I was doing. In good faith—because Harper has two new books from me this season, too—I promised to make only two public appearances expressly to promote “The Next Queen of Heaven.” Happily, at the first event I sold and signed “Making Mischief: A Maurice Sendak Appreciation” and “Matchless: A Christmas Story,” my two Harper titles. But the folks at Harper are keen-eyed about the industry—as are all publishers—and while they wouldn’t want me to make a habit of giving my work away for free, they conceded that this was a one-time opportunity too good to pass up.
I see that the Web site of Concord Free Press maintains a list of donations engendered by its two previous publications. Are you going to monitor the good deeds done in the wake of “The Next Queen”?
Probably not. The point is for people to give to their favorite causes. Or maybe, this once, to the cause that always falls after the dotted line on your list which means “I can’t afford to give even a dollar to anything below this line.” One can give as anonymously as one wants, of course: a donor could register as “Anonymous” and post a donation as “six dollars and twelve cents in a glass jar for a weeping barista.” But Ann and Stona Fitch, the genii behind CFP, clue me in from time to time about the total amount CFP has raised in one year. It’s closing in on a hundred thousand dollars, I think, or will soon.
Stona Fitch sounds like a character out of one of your “Wicked” books. How did you meet? Whence that fabulous name?
I was having work done in my house in Concord and the contractor had done Ann and Stona’s house, about four blocks over, and sent me wandering off to look at some of the effects. We became friends the first day we met.
Stona Fitch (the first name is Turkish, I think) is a fabulous writer himself. I read in proofs his second novel, “Senseless,” which is an eerily prescient parable about torture and the commodification of online-reality. It was published in October, 2001, which is why it didn’t get the attention it deserved, though in fact never ought reviewers to have been paying more attention. The book was and remains downright prophetic.
What accounts for your own beneficence? Were you always so generous?
I would not give away three original manuscripts in a row. I’m not deranged. I wouldn’t give away my home, my kids, or my little pincushion shaped like Natasha the Spy from “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” I do have my human limits. But I suppose I am inclined to unburden myself of the excess beyond which I think it is healthy for me or my family to enjoy.
I think charity is one of these species’ urges that we often learn to suppress, like the extremes of both hostility and courtesy. Loosening up the grip on that extra five has a very good feel to it. One of my little mantras is “Put something down, pick something else up.” When you finish reading a book, don’t cling to it like a talisman: let it go. You’re freer to move on to something else. When you have your bus money and your newspaper under your arm and there’s still five dollars in your pocket, see what good it does to the muscles of your hand to unclamp them and let that greenback loose. This isn’t the notion of karma: “Greater blessings shalt accrue to thee, good Sir, for thy kindness; and they’ll be compounded quarterly.” It’s the notion of simplicity: basic things are sound and uncomplicated, and often make you feel better to indulge in them. Like sneezing.
When the twenty-five hundred copies are gone, is that it? This book will become a collector’s item?
The CFP has promised, and my contract—or “nontract,” as it is called—allows for only one printing. There are no electronic files. But the point is that collectors have to take a deep breath and pass this one up. “The Next Queen of Heaven” is not for collecting. To that end, I don’t autograph them. It is for sharing. Let the pages turn. Let the pennies roll in. You want an autographed copy, wait a year and see if HarperCollins brings out a second edition. I think it will.
Author Michael Connelly, whose latest mystery, "9 Dragons," involves a missing person’s case in Hong Kong, has written an interesting commentary for CNN on the confluence of fact and fiction. He notes that a November, 2008 research trip to Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions area coincided with a real-life mystery: the disappearance of Canadian tourist Ani Ashekian, 31. 
