Judith Krantz Goes to War : How Does a Mega-Seller Stay No. 1? It’s Not a Pretty Job, and Don’t Even Mention Tom Clancy

Judith Krantz is angry.

No, she’s madder than angry. Judith Krantz is livid, raging, fuming, and any other adjective you can find to describe her fury.

“They keep telling me they feel as bad as I do. Like hell they do,” she says peevishly. “Nobody feels as bad as I do.”

Why is the diminutive, dainty and usually demure Bel-Air author seeming like her evil twin this morning? (Surely, that was a Krantz plot sometime.) Because of a warehouse error that prematurely sent to stores 5,000 copies of her lastest literary confection, “Till We Meet Again.”

Now Crown Publishers is nervously shipping all 500,000 books, though the official publication date isn’t until Sept. 15. And Krantz frets about what will happen to the yearlong planning--as precise as the Pentagon’s--that has gone into the $500,000 promotional campaign for her fifth novel.

“This,” she explodes, “is like landing on the beaches at D-day without any ammunition.”

While surely the fate of Western civilization doesn’t hang in the balance, the war analogy is not entirely inappropriate.

That’s because the shipping glitch has pitted Krantz page-to-page against a formidable opponent--Tom Clancy and his fourth techno-thriller, “The Cardinal of the Kremlin,” which hit bookstores last month.

The battle is not so much a matter of vanity as it is of money; as Krantz herself has witnessed in a decade of writing fiction, the once-genteel book industry has turned into a “cutthroat business.”

Driven by big profits from works by a small pool of popular authors, publishers as well as writers have become celebrity-savvy. While once hot books and hot authors were marketed primarily by word of mouth, New York publishers now use a concept borrowed from Hollywood: the media blitzkrieg.

Publishing “is a more conservative world than the movies (and) is inching toward more hype all the time,” says Sybil Steinberg, fiction editor of Publishers Weekly.

Krantz cares more than most about how her work is sold. Just last week, she visited a B. Dalton’s store in Century City just to check out the display arrangements. A clerk immediately recognized her. “Well, you’re up against Clancy,” he sympathized.

“So I see,” Krantz replied gloomily.

“I guess it doesn’t make you feel any better to see this,” he added, whipping out a copy of Newsweek with Clancy’s bulldog countenance on the cover.

She took the magazine home “and it was an hour before I could read it,” she sighs.

A Twinge of Jealousy

She counted the pages, felt a twinge of jealousy, then decided she and Clancy were “as different as human beings could be. . . . If it had been a woman, I think I would have been green with envy.”

Instead, Krantz, author of four No. 1 best sellers (in hard-cover and paperback)--”Scruples,” “Princess Daisy,” “Mistral’s Daughter” and “I’ll Take Manhattan”--talks about the possibility this new book could be an also-ran.

“I think I’d have to give myself a present in case that should happen,” she pouts. “I think I would have to go to Tiffany and pick out a necklace.”

To avoid springing for that expensive bauble, Krantz again is personally supervising all promotion of her $19.95 book. And, in keeping with the richly flavored tone of her novels, this summer’s campaign looks to be creme de la Krantz.

She is romping through Rodeo Drive searching for the perfect--and, of course, priciest--outfits to transform herself from a “country mouse” clad in sweat pants and sneakers into a fashion plate fit for the cameras.

Last week, she appeared on “Good Morning America.” This week, she’s on “Entertainment Tonight.” And soon she will be the star of a 43-city satellite TV tour--the kind pioneered by the studios to promote the likes of Sylvester Stallone. Thanks to the miracle of technology, local TV anchors coast to coast can have Krantz Live at Five while she stays put in a comfy studio back in Los Angeles.

Can’t make the satellite date? Don’t worry. Some media will catch up with her during an additional publicity tour to Chicago, Los Angeles and London.

Cosmo Portrait Updated

The old portrait of Krantz by Cosmo coverman Francesco Scavullo also has been updated with a casual shot by Hollywood photographer Harry Langdon.

And, just in case there’s not enough material among the reams of press releases and biographical blurbs she has written, Krantz even provides an interview she did with herself. For instance, commenting on whether success has changed her, she observes: “I haven’t changed my old hobby--staying blond--but I take a yellow pad to the hairdresser and write until it’s time for my manicure.”

“If she weren’t a novelist,” says Nancy Kahan, associate publisher at Crown, “she’d be a marketing director.”

About the only thing Krantz didn’t have a hand in was her May 25 promotional party. “For once, they didn’t want me second-guessing them,” she says.

But long-held habits are hard to break. When she arrived a half-hour early to find the searchlights weren’t on, she nagged: “How are the booksellers going to find this place?”

Crown Publishers is not known as “Hype House” in the trade for nothing. They already had redefined the concept of the promotional party--Krantzitizing it, so to speak--with the “Scruples” bash at Giorgio, complete with Rolls-Royce gridlock, and the “I’ll Take Manhattan” fete at Trump Tower, featuring that master of self-promotion, Donald T.

Blowout in an Airplane Hangar

For “Till We Meet Again,” whose plot centers on aviation, the publisher decided on a $75,000 blowout in an airplane hangar at John Wayne Airport in Orange County. Timed to coincide with the American Booksellers Assn.’s annual convention, the party boasted a rare British Spitfire aircraft.

The main attraction, though, was Krantz, who perched on a pink director’s chair at the center of the hoopla, playing with a pink feather boa provided for her amusement. “I loved every minute of it,” she confesses. “I was the last person to leave.”

But also one of the first writers to nurture the relationship between her own celebrity and sales of her books.

Much Smaller Scale

One reason: money. Not long ago, a bona fide best seller was anything that sold 50,000 hard-cover copies; it now can mean 300,000 or more because of the proliferation of bookstores in malls and shopping centers.

“When we started with ‘Scruples,’ everything was done on a much smaller scale,” Crown publisher Bruce Harris notes. “Now we’re printing five times as many books for ‘Till We Meet Again.’ It’s very important that the booksellers feel some connection with the author when you’re talking about these kinds of numbers.”

But do readers respond to writers who become personalities? “I don’t know,” Steinberg wonders aloud. “I think people who are going to buy Krantz are going to buy Krantz no matter what else goes on. I really think all the hoopla is for Judith Krantz herself.”

If the promotional push is just a way for publishers to massage their megastars’ egos, it seems to succeed. “It’s almost quid pro quo,” Steinberg says. “It’s as if they’re saying, ‘You write us a best seller, and we’ll give you the snazziest party you’ve ever seen.’ ”

Like the proverbial 500-pound gorilla, blockbuster authors like Krantz can do as much or as little publicity as they want. The amount of time they devote ranges from virtually none (Stephen King and Danielle Steel) to almost constant (Jackie Collins, who was the first to insist on a billboard on Sunset Boulevard).

Krantz just didn’t wake up one morning knowing how to hawk herself. She had a head start, what with a brother who’s a successful publisher, a mother who’s a lawyer and a father who’s an advertising honcho. Her film-producer husband, Steve (who turns her books into those successful TV mini-series), set a publishing record of his own when his first novel, “Laurel Canyon,” earned the highest advance ever paid for a paperback original.

Though the Wellesley-educated Krantz was West Coast editor of Cosmopolitan (where she wrote articles like “The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm”), she says today with absolute seriousness that as far as the world of fiction was concerned, “when ‘Scruples’ was bought, I was a total virgin.”

That was 1977, when her agent was an unknown attorney, now superstar Mort Janklow; her publisher was a little known outfit called Crown, which produced only nonfiction staples like “The Joy of Sex” and “How to Avoid Probate.”

Though Crown ordered a first printing of 106,000--a first-novel record--”they told me I didn’t want to go on a book tour,” Krantz recalls. “They told me book tours are notoriously hard on body and soul.”

Then, three weeks later when they sold the paperback rights to Warner Books for $500,000, they called her and announced, “You’re going on an 18-city book tour.”

“But you said it wasn’t a good idea,” she reminded them.

“No, it’s a wonderful idea!” they responded.

“You see,” Krantz explains, “they’d gotten their money back on the deal.”

When her second novel was finished in 1979, Krantz found herself the subject of front-page news stories when Bantam Books set a world record for paperback rights by shelling out $3.2 million for “Princess Daisy.” It was, Time magazine scolded, “enough to give a dollar bill to every man, woman and child in New Zealand.”

Seven Major Tours

With four books behind her, Krantz has made seven major tours of the United States and Canada, three of England and Scotland and one each of Austria, Holland and West Germany. She also has done countless interviews, arranged by her 22 foreign publishers, at her home--since 1986, a 6,000-square-foot estate she is landscaping to resemble Provence.

While many authors are terrified of television, Krantz has taken to it as easily as her characters take to shopping at Saks. “I really love being the center of attention, I have to admit it. I think it’s because I’m a frustrated actress.”

Also a non-stop talker. Perhaps it’s because when writing, she sees and speaks to almost no one (save her gardener, her cook and her personal trainer). But the very sight of a microphone or a tape recorder causes her to bubble over like uncorked champagne.

Sometimes, it seems, she will do almost anything for attention. During the promotion of “Princess Daisy,” People magazine asked the 60-year-old mother of two to pose in a sauna in just a towel--apparently, to show she was a “hot” author. “She did it,” Kahan recalls, “but I think she regretted it.”

When Krantz’s latest manuscript--a pull-out-all-the-stops fairy tale of the lives of the De Lancel women through the world wars--was delivered in April, Crown wanted to get it in the hands of industry insiders as fast as possible. After all, the novel more than fills its quota of reckless romances, sinful riches and wretched excess.

In May, editors took the unprecedented step of sending bound manuscripts to 4,500 opinion-makers before the bookseller’s annual convention.

Then there was a second mailing of advance galleys, all slickly packaged to look like paperbacks. Steinberg of Publishers Weekly recalls being impressed. “It stands out as a major book among the hundreds of copies I get--just in case I’ve come from the moon and haven’t heard of Judith Krantz.”

Costly Promotion

Crown claims the costly promotion has been worth it. “We have orders now for almost 35% more books than we had for last time,” notes editor-in-chief Betty Prashker.

But there’s even more hype ahead: the “Judith Krantz extravaganza” at Walden Books.

It is “bigger than anything we’ve done before,” bigger even than the huge displays for James Michener, Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy, says spokeswoman Dara Tyson.

The bookstore chain initiated discussions in April for the unprecedented Aug. 15-21 promotion, which consists of two major signs in front of stores announcing “Till We Meet Again” and smaller signs inside for Krantz’s three, repackaged Bantam paperbacks.

In contrast, Walden is presenting Clancy’s “The Cardinal of the Kremlin,” as well as his other titles, under a general banner proclaiming, “Summer Escape.”

“He’s part of a larger theme, although he’s prominent,” Tyson explains, picking her words as carefully as a soldier marches through a mine field. “The Judith Krantz promotion is just that--a Judith Krantz promotion.”

Even Krantz’s evil twin would have to like that.