Best Seller Out of Winterset

Writers love words. Take “best” and “seller,” join them into the compound noun bestseller, and we are launched into a dreamworld where our book is reviewed favorably in the New York Times, beloved by book club readers, earns big royalty checks, and becomes a TV miniseries.

Back in the early 1990s, I actually co-wrote a best seller—not a novel, but a craft book titled Quilter’s Complete Guide. Liz Porter and I spent three years creating what is considered the bible of quiltmaking. At birth, our manuscript weighed 13 pounds.

That’s the 13-pound manuscript on the left, the hard cover first edition of the Complete Guide on the right, photographed on a park bench on the Madison County Courthouse lawn.

The publisher, Oxmoor House, paid us a generous advance on royalties, the final chunk after we shipped the manuscript and boxes of step-outs to Birmingham for how-to photography.

That advance was the tip of the proverbial iceberg, as, over time, QCG sold over half a million copies. This was before Amazon and the Internet, when direct mail was the way lots of book buyers bought books. Publishers sent fancy promotional packages to thousands of potential buyers, who could have a “review” copy sent to them through the U.S. Postal Service. Lots of cookbooks were sold this way.

Oxmoor House did a huge mailing while the Complete Guide was still in production. The response was so robust it paid off our advance, and then some.

I was a divorcée by then, my kids around 14, 10, and 7. We had moved into town, into the house (next door to the Winterset Post Office) where my grandparents lived in the 1960s after they retired from farming. I popped next door to retrieve my mail one Saturday morning. (The kids were sitting around the dining room table in their pajamas, eating their Cheerios.) As I was leaving, Hannah asked, “Do you think I could get a haircut today?” I said, “We’ll have to see, honey,” figuring I’d check my billfold when I got back to figure out if we could afford it.

Among the mail in my mailbox was a #10 business envelope (a window one!), Oxmoor House’s logo in the upper left corner. Back home in the dining room, I pulled out a royalty check for, I don’t know, $18,000. Waving it around, laughing hysterically, I leaned against the wall and slid to the floor. “Get dressed and find your shoes, kids,” I said, “we’re going to the mall! Yes, Hannah, you can definitely get a haircut.”

The royalties from the Complete Guide, which stayed in print, both in hard and soft cover, for years, helped put food on my family’s table and enabled me, sole breadwinner, to pay my children’s tuition at the University of Iowa.

Quilter’s Complete Guide was published in hardcover by Oxmoor House, in soft cover by Leisure Arts, revised and republished in 2000, and is back in print now from Dover Publications.

All of this is wonderful, but as a literature major (BA, MA, English, Drake University) who didn’t bother to get a teaching certificate, “Sew Piece A to Piece B,” doesn’t hold a candle to, “Call me Ishmael.” The Complete Guide will never be a hit TV miniseries.

There I am, on the right, listening to my mother, Dorothy Graham, read to me and my siblings in the early 1950s. I’m pretty sure she was not reading a craft book.

After my business partners and I sold Fons & Porter in 2006, I began to pursue an encore career as a novelist. I studied craft, enrolled in classes at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Iowa City, at StoryStudioChicago, at the Washington Island Literary Festival, and other venues*. I joined a writers’ group, started hanging out with fellow writers, and in five years produced a novel about Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (set in Iowa, believe it or not). Miraculously, I landed a wonderful agent who loved my book and tried valiantly to sell it. When we did not succeed, she encouraged me to pursue a second idea—a novel set in Winterset in the late 1950s, early 1960s.

I’m days away, now, from sending my new manuscript to Stephany in New York.

Wouldn’t it be sweet, residing as I do in the heart of Madison County, to see my name on the cover of a new and different best seller?

Love it or hate it, The Bridges of Madison County was among the top-selling novels of the twentieth century, along with Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jaws, Valley of the Dolls, and Peyton Place.

*A closer-to-home location where Iowans can learn about writing and hang out with writers is the Okoboji Writers Retreat, launched in 2021, which I only found out about earlier this year. It’s coming up September 22-25. Go!

I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, a group of over 60 journalists and authors writing from and about the great state of Iowa. Access all of us here.