But the book of the moment, Matthew Sharpe's stunning, offbeat coming-of-age novel, The Sleeping Father , a tale of two teenagers whose father has recently come out of a coma, had neither of the above. Rejected by more than 20 major publishers, Sharpe's third book-his first two, Stories from the Tube and Nothing Is Terrible , were published by Villard, which passed on this one-was bought by tiny, Brooklyn-based Soft Skull Press for an advance of $1,000. The publisher, which employs five people in various part-time arrangements, has no publicity or marketing budget to speak of. What's more, the book is a paperback original-and paperbacks traditionally get next to no space in rapidly shrinking review vehicles. Still, The Sleeping Father received a full-page rave in The New York Times Book Review -and four weeks in a coveted "And Bear in Mind" slot-and a mention, also in The Times , by the novelist Anne Tyler. The novelist Susan Isaacs chose it for the February Today show Book Club pick, and as of last week, it has gone into a third printing, bringing the total to almost 40,000. As of this writing, it's the 548th best-selling book on Amazon.com.

This kind of success almost never happens in contemporary publishing. While many paperback originals-Downtown Press' Chick-lit series, for example-sell reasonably well, I can think of only two that broke out: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City , which spawned a whole genre, and Jhumpa Lahiri's debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies , which won a Pulitzer Prize. And while out-of-the-mainstream publishers occasionally produce a best-seller like Girl with a Pearl Earring or The Time Traveler's Wife , most of the books you know about come from the same old New York biggies.

So The Sleeping Father is an interesting case-especially when you factor in that until late 2001, Soft Skull was best known, if it was known at all, for re-releasing the scandal-ridden George W. Bush biography, Fortunate Son . Why, then, has The Sleeping Father made such noise?

The answer, of course, is as complex as the book itself, and involves at least as many characters. There's the tireless agent, Collins McCormick's Leslie Falk, a fan of Sharpe's underread earlier works, who represented the book along with her boss, David McCormick; there's the eagle-eyed journalists, outgoing NYTBR head Chip McGrath, and his editor, Alida Becker, who, Mr. McGrath said, "picked up on" the book early on. There's the Irish-born theater-director-turned-publisher Richard Nash, who in late 2001 stepped in to take care of Soft Skull's disastrous finances and "by default" became the publisher. And, of course, there's Matthew Sharpe himself, who, after all, wrote the "perfect book" that Mr. Nash bought.

But this being publishing, there's also a moral to the story, a moral that is one part David and Goliath and one part The Little Engine That Could . While Mr. Sharpe is quick to credit Villard editor Bruce Tracy-who, he says, sent him a note after The Sleeping Father was picked by the Today show-for "launching my career," there has to be at least a little glee that the book Mr. Tracy rejected is the one that took off. (Mr. Tracy did not return a call for comment.) "I hate to hearken back to the old days," said one established novelist who admires Mr. Sharpe's work, "but publishers used to nurture authors, not toss them aside after one novel." Or, as Mr. Nash puts it, the story of The Sleeping Father 's publication is practically mythic. "The two-book deal with a big publisher is supposed to be the Holy Grail," he said. "But it turned out, in this case, that the Grail was made of bronze." In the end, it took a tiny publisher to restore Mr. Sharpe's luster.

Never mind that the online retailer accounts for only about 10 percent of a trade book's total sales (slightly higher for business books, somewhat lower for children's). By my count, the reviews and the ranking system on Amazon.com count for about 95 percent of writers' hopes, anxieties and dreams.

Which is why last month's glitch on the Canadian version of the site-which for a week revealed the reviewers' real names-sent a shudder down the collective spine of the writing community. Even if few were as publicly honest as the author John Rechy, who cheerfully admitted to The New York Times that he had praised his own book on the site, many had their own dirty little secrets. I, for one, was suddenly panicked that the world would know that several (though, I must say, far from most) of the positive reviews of my book, So Many Books, So Little Time , were written by people I know. (A further sign of my insanity: When a negative review of the book would appear on the title's home page, I'd suggest to friends that if someone were to write a positive one, the bad guy's piece would slip further down-and maybe even eventually off-the home page.) The writer Katherine Russell Rich, for example, told me that when her book, The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer-and Back , was published in 1999, she was coincidentally seated in a restaurant next to a colleague whom she knew had hated the book; after making uncomfortable pleasantries, Ms. Rich said, the two diners left the restaurant and raced home to Amazon. Ms. Rich wrote a positive review to offset the negative one she knew was coming from her colleague. (Sure enough, both reviews appeared shortly.) Even far more established authors pay attention, if not homage, to Amazon: James Marcus, author of the forthcoming Amazonia , an incisive and funny account of five years working for the Seattle-based company, says that he once came upon a review posted by Paul Theroux, defending his own book, Sir Vidia's Shadow .

As for the rankings: Don't get me started. At a publishing party last fall, I met up with a well-known and very successful journalist who kept making trips to the host's bedroom to check his (and my) book's status on Publishers Marketplace, one of several sites that allow users to track the movement of many books at once at both Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com. "Do you want to check one more time before you leave?" he asked me as I headed for the door. (It goes without saying that I did.) In the ensuing months, I've had dozens of friends and acquaintances comment, unsolicited, on my book's rise and fall, and one radio interviewer told me he'd decided to invite me on the show because "your Amazon numbers have gotten good again." It doesn't matter how many times editors and agents tell us that "Amazon doesn't matter"-authors are addicts, and Amazon is easily as habit-forming and even more accessible than crack. Not to mention, of course, that it's also free.

But why has this eight-year-old upstart of a bookstore become our drug of choice? Other Web sites and blogs-dozens of them-contribute to the vox populi , and BarnesandNoble.com posts customers' reviews and ranks book sales. Still, you rarely hear a writer obsessing over his BN.com scores. (His brick-and-mortar Barnes and Noble orders, placement and sales … well, that's another story.) Partly, of course, Amazon was the first site of its kind, and as Mr. Marcus makes clear in his book, there was, from the beginning, something about the energy of the place that attracted even the most serious literary types. Amazon-even more than BN.com, to that site's eternal dismay-also got a ton of news attention in the late 1990's, thanks in part to its juggernaut of a stock price. Amazon.com is also a place to find jacket copy, publication dates and author information: "Many professionals use it as a research tool," according to Lorraine Shanley, a principle in Market Partners International and co-publisher of the monthly newsletter Publishing Trends . It has a reach and an influence far beyond its sales figures, in other words.

But what draws authors so addictively to the site is something both simpler and more insidious: In its user-friendly way, it taps into what is apparently all writers' need to quantify and compete and, yes, fight back. Even the few book-review outlets that still exist usually don't give an outlet to authors. And about those rankings: Since most publishers are vague (even with their authors!) about how many books have been printed and shipped, let alone sold-and since BookScan, the closest thing the book world has to a real-numbers tally, charges six figures for access-the lowly, anxious writer has nowhere else to turn to see how he's doing.

Besides, we're all just following in a venerable literary tradition, albeit one with different yardsticks. The poet T.S. Eliot famously lamented that we measure out our life in coffee spoons. The 1990's pop heroine Bridget Jones chronicled hers in cigarettes, calories and pounds on the scale. It follows that we, in the early 21st century, look to words and numbers on a Web page for our sense of self. For now, at least, it's the best we've got.

It may come as a shock to those who work in more normal businesses, but this kind of thing doesn't happen every day. According to a long-time publicist at a major conglomerate, books that are grossly disliked and clearly "not ready" for publication are released every month, and in the rare event that a substandard book is canceled, the publisher often doesn't bother to try to recoup whatever portion of the advance it has already paid-unless the author is subsequently successful in placing it elsewhere. (For the record, an "advance" usually means that the author gets one-third or so of the stated promised fee up front, another one-third or so upon delivery and the last portion on publication.) Before the days of six- (or, in this case, seven-) figure advances, after all, it would seem unlikely that a publisher could squeeze a poor fiction writer for the, say, $20K advance he'd been living on for the previous six months.

But the Nannies-as everyone calls Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus-are different: After a very modest $25K advance, they earned well over a million from their first book, which was published by St. Martin's, and this second book was a high-profile, high-priced buy. What's more, it was purchased by the old regime at Random House-Ann Godoff, who was soon fired and is now the head of Penguin Press-for a price that seemed particularly outrageous, given that the 18-page proposal was "all over the place," as its kinder readers put it. The less generous might have called it "barely written in English."

But what accounts for the extraordinary amount of glee that publishing watchers are feeling at the Nannies' demise is not so much the deal itself-a deal that may or may not have been worth $3 million after all. (One source who has been close to the two authors said that the original agreement was for multiple books, one of which was supposed to be a sequel to The Nanny Diaries ; when the authors balked at being pigeonholed into writing a sequel, they refused to sign, this person said, and a new deal, sans sequel, was struck.) Rather, the authors have committed the unforgivable sin of making themselves unlikable in both the book and the journalistic worlds. Difficult and demanding authors even in the realm of the difficult and demanding, they had three agents in as many years (Christy Fletcher, who sold The Nanny Diaries to St. Martin's; Molly Friedrich, who took them on soon after; and William Morris literary department co-head Suzanne Gluck, who made this Random House sale); they demanded perks more suited to movie stars than novelists (professional hair and makeup for all public appearances, for example); and they turned down many high-profile "branding" opportunities-including offers to write for Esquire and the New York Times Op-Ed page-because they didn't like the "direction" the editors were trying to take their ideas. In short, they had become the authors from hell.

At the beginning, executives at Random House chose to ignore the warning signs, even suggesting that the girls had simply been misunderstood and mishandled by their previous publisher. But when the first draft of the new manuscript arrived at the house last fall, several executives said, they knew they were in trouble. Opinions and book doctors were sought, both from within and without the house. And even before the cancellation became official, according to one publishing executive, Ms. Gluck had begun to shop Citizen Girl to other publishing houses, including at least one Random House sibling.

But apparently the authors, who declined to comment, either refused or were unable to make the drastic changes Random House required, and after much discussion between the book's nominal editor, Lee Boudreaux, and her bosses, Dan Menaker and Gina Centrello, the deal was undone. Not only could the "new" Random House unload what was likely to be a bomb of a book, but in one fell swoop, executives could also differentiate themselves from the old regime: Ann Godoff might have taken these chances, they seemed to be saying, but the new Random House is going to be more cautious.

And that, ironically, is an attitude that has won the house praise instead of criticism from its competitors. Instead of bashing Random House or enjoying their misfortune, even rivals are seeing the Nanny Debacle as an indication that there is justice in the publishing world after all. "The book should not have been bought-at least not for that price," as one competitive publisher puts it. "And now, it hasn't been." The authors themselves, however, are on the receiving end of no such generosity; having made one fortune and having tried to make another by chronicling disaffected and vindictive employees, the Nannies now find themselves unemployed. And given the arrogance they've displayed in the past, many can't help but feel they've gotten what they deserve.

But this being publishing, of course, there's already a backlash. "People were practically dancing on the tables around here when they heard the news," said one publishing executive who has dealt with the authors. "But I like the girls. The first book was great. It's just that they were so young, they got carried away. Now, all this is making me feel sorry for them."

The executive's house-like the others-has no plans to bid for Citizen Girl , however. At least not yet.

You'd think this would be good news for everybody: Publishers and agents and authors will have a more realistic basis on which to negotiate future projects, because they can know for sure how similar ideas or the author's previous books have fared. Also, because BookScan can "slice and dice" the numbers a lot of ways, including by price and by region, publishers using the service can get an edge on pricing and marketing. The advent of BookScan promises that news outlets and their readers will no longer have to try to decode best-seller lists, the most important of which-the New York Times best-seller list-compiles its data by a complex system of weighting and extrapolating that only a Kremlinologist could love. As for authors-well, the BookScan reports that your agent or publisher can show you are a whole lot easier to read than your average royalty statement. And besides, such reports can be made available weekly.

But this being the book business, reaction to BookScan has been far more complex. Why? Because for all the bottom-lining and conglomerating of recent years, publishing is still a business built on passion and perception. "We talk about the BookScan numbers in editorial meetings," said one prominent publisher who didn't want his name used-and who then admitted that the numbers are not always factored in when projects go to auction. "On the one hand, we want to buy books that sell, and BookScan can give us an indication of how well a project might sell," this person continued. "On the other hand, when you want a project, you usually have to pay more than somebody else. The competition can get very heated-and you end up paying more than you probably 'should,' based on the numbers, because you don't want somebody else to publish it." Besides, an editor hell-bent on acquiring a book can be perversely happy about being in the dark, numbers-wise. "O.K., sometimes I knew the agent had puffed up the author's track record," said one former editor. "But I was grateful to be able to talk back to a skeptical marketing department that had doubts about selling the book I really wanted. Nobody had inarguable numbers."

Agents, too, are wary of BookScan, probably precisely because hard data undercuts what they do best: the enthusiastic spinning of a project's viability. ("Spinning" in this context is a "generous word," one disgruntled publisher told me.) "These numbers are both a good thing and a bad thing," said the agent Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group and agent to such megasellers as Janet Evanovich and Dean Koontz. "They are an indicator, but an overreliance on them can be misleading." For one thing, he and others point out, they tell only part of the story; according to Jim King, vice president and general manager of Nielsen BookScan, the service receives reports from most, but not all, retailers-Wal-Mart is conspicuously absent on the roster, for example-and the company suggests that it reports around 70 to 75 percent of all sales. So a book that sells very well in non-reporting retailers-a book like The Purpose-Driven Life , for example, which has been sitting at or near the top of virtually all nonfiction best-seller lists for many weeks-as well as the kind of mass-market, Wal-Mart- and book-club-popular authors that Mr. Gottlieb represents, may not appear as huge sellers on BookScan.

So BookScan isn't foolproof-but it's the closest the book business has ever come to knowing itself, and you'd think that fact-seeking journalistic outlets would embrace it. For one thing, it efficiently collects data that, until now, the periodicals have had to collect from retailers themselves by phone, fax or survey. But ambivalence reigns in journalism, too, apparently. While The Washington Post recently contracted with BookScan to receive its services-under their agreement, the paper can publish its rankings but not the hard numbers, according to Mr. King-the venerable New York Times has made no such arrangement, and a spokesman for the paper declined to say whether its executives were even considering doing so. "We sample a portion of the known book-selling market, and we essentially extrapolate from that," Richard Meislin, The Times ' editor of news surveys, told me.

But it was his next comment that made me think, for one minute, that I was talking to a dyed-in-the-wool book publisher:

"We like doing things the way we do them," he said.

I'm finding all this out, in fact, on an afternoon spent with the 62-year-old author to discuss his enormous, Joycean cultural history, Queer Street , which is just about to be published by W.W. Norton. We begin at the Monkey Bar in the Hotel Ely´see, which to you and me might seem like a sometime publishing hangout serving overpriced Caesar salads. Doubtless, most visitors get upon entering that there's a pop-celebrity history here-there are photos of movie stars like Gregory Peck on the walls-but I need Mr. McCourt to fill me in on the real story: In the pre-Stonewall, homosexuality-is-a-crime 1940's and 50's, the "easy lay" hotel boasted one of the few restaurants where "queers could go and feel comfortable," he says. And yes, the ultra-straight Peck was a regular patron-but so were, according to Mr. McCourt, such louche luminaries as Montgomery Clift and Tennessee Williams, who died mysteriously in a room upstairs, from whence fled a young man who was never seen or heard from again.

In fact, spending the afternoon with Mr. McCourt (whom everyone affectionately refers to as "Jimmy"), while a whole lot of fun, is only slightly less exhilarating than reading these and many other scenes in his book. Subtitled "The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985," Queer Street lovingly takes its readers on a tour of a New York where drag queens and female impersonators co-exist with movie stars and cops, a New York where gay culture as we know it was born and flourished, albeit sub rosa.

Which is somehow fitting, since books like this-ribald, rollicking, loopy, erudite, high-low narratives (think Angels In America without the slow parts)-rarely exist any more, at least within mainstream publishing. While there are plenty of novels and memoirs about gay life-Michael Cunningham and Edmund White, to name but two, have built careers on the topic-true overviews of the culture are surprisingly rare. In 1997, Houghton Mifflin published Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis , 1940-1996 , but invoking that chronicle's linear and, well, straight tone is like comparing a closeted accountant to one of Mr. McCourt's fearless drag queens. "It's like a brilliant experimental opera," said the agent Ira Silverberg, who knows Mr. McCourt but does not represent him.

And like experimental operas-a particularly fitting description, since Mr. McCourt is best known as the author of a novel with the unpronounceable name Mawrdew Czgowchwz (say: "Mar-dew Gorgeous"), a satire about the opera-big, fat, wild books on controversial topics rarely have easy comings-out.

Queer Street , in fact, was originally submitted as a series of unconnected essays to Mr. McCourt's longtime Knopf editor Vicky Wilson, who declined to publish it, saying-reported Mr. McCourt with typical discretion-that the house would rather just stick with his fiction. It wasn't until Norton executive editor Bob Weil saw those essays that Queer Street -with major connective tissue still to be constructed-was born.

How it will fare, of course, is anyone's guess. Norton executives, while apparently wildly enthusiastic about the title, decline to reveal how many copies they're printing, and though Mr. McCourt has had some powerful friends in the media-the late New York culture mavens Veronica Geng and Leo Lerman, as well as departing New York Times Book Review editor Chip McGrath, for example-the book is far from an easy sell.

Which is too bad: Queer Street 's author comes off like the N.Y.U.– and Yale School of Drama–educated version of Dennis Miller, boldly making cultural references and connections that no man has done before, and his book may be one of the bravest, most enlightening literary and cultural histories to appear in a long time.

It's enough to make you think that some publishers, at least, may not be so tentative and timid and compromised after all.

Never mind that it's also unrealistic and unrealizable.

I published my first book last month, and no sooner had the boxes arrived in the stores than people-those in publishing and those outside-began asking: When do you go on tour? How many cities are you going to? My answers: I was going on a tour-lette, to just a couple of places where I actually had some friends and thus could beat the drum and send mass e-mails and call in old favors to get people to show up-and oh, by the way, this was not necessarily an all-expenses-paid-by-the-publisher boondoggle, but rather a cobbled-together financial plan involving my publisher, the venues that were hosting me, my day job and my very own bank account. To some, this was all surprising: Surely, the thinking goes, if a publisher is really "behind" a book, the house will pony up the money and the arrangements for an author's soon-to-be-triumphant national tour.

Yet while I have no doubt that Hyperion, say, has paid for publicists to cater to Steve Martin's whims as he goes around the country flogging his beguiling new novel The Pleasure of My Company, or that HarperCollins is covering Gail Collins' multi-city trip on behalf of America's Women, I'm equally sure that most so-called "mid-list" authors-like, God-willing, me-aren't getting the same treatment.

But this is not a complaint; it's a fact. And besides, the publishers are right: In an age of dwindling local-newspaper book coverage, formidable Internet, radio and TV outlets and-let's face it-strained budgets and stagnant (at best) book sales, most authors shouldn't spend thousands of anybody's dollars to show their faces in Cleveland-unless, of course, they happen to have grown up in Cleveland. It's simply not cost-effective, especially since even the author of a book showing modest to decent sales will likely end up in a Barnes and Noble in Berkeley with only three audience members, two of whom are homeless.

"I'd rather they just gave me the money," opined one such mid-list author whose name you'd know if only he'd let me use it. Or, better yet, spent the cash-and, not incidentally, the publicist's energy-on ads, or on placement in stores, or on national radio coverage. "I'd spend days and days planning an author's trip and arranging local TV shows in St. Louis-where we'd ultimately sell five books," said a former book publicist. "It would take away from the time and energy I might have had to get the book on Charlie Rose or Fresh Air."

But to authors, appearances-

especially public appearances-

remain important.

"I can't tell you how many authors still believe a publisher's love is measured by the number of cities on their book tour," said Barb Burg, a senior vice president and director of publicity for the Bantam Dell Publishing Group. "I tell my authors, 'You'll know I really love you and care about your book when I spare you the humiliation of empty bookstores and lonely hotel rooms and spend our publicity time, energy and dollars on what's best for the book.'"

That said, even the most harried publicist and frustrated author will agree that the human touch-a personally signed book at a reading or, maybe even more important, a friendly relationship between author, publisher and smart independent booksellers-never hurts sales. Yet it seems to me that you can establish those relationships without necessarily getting on a plane. My publisher, Putnam, brilliantly suggested that I send personal notes and signed books to booksellers around the country-some of whom I've met, thanks in part to my column in this paper-but also to many I have not. I've also been making a point of stopping in bookstores and signing stock; who knows if one of those "Autographed Copy" stickers might sway a wavering book buyer?

And yes, I've gone out of town, too-I'm writing this from a hotel room in Florida, in fact-but I doubt I'll ever log as many miles as Jill Nelson, the journalist and author of Sexual Healing, who said at the Sarasota Reading Festival on Nov. 1 that she's visited more than 20 cities since her book appeared last summer. Her novel-from tiny, brand-new Chicago-based publisher Agate-is doing well; it's selling strongly and has been sold to the movies.

But is a book a hit because its author toured, or is a tour successful because the book's a hit?

Whoever wrote the four-page memo faxed anonymously to the offices of The Observer obviously thinks so. Titled " The Unprofessionals Gets Unprofessional Publication at Random House," the document chronicles the life (and, its author suggests, untimely death) of author Julie Hecht's first novel, The Unprofessionals , which was published by little Random on Sept. 3. The gist of the unsigned treatise, which seems likely penned by Ms. Hecht herself or someone close to her:

Because the slim, dark comedy bounced from HarperCollins to Random House along with its editor, current Random House editor in chief Dan Menaker, it fell through the cracks in the marketing and sales departments. The memo suggests that Random House didn't sell any copies to Barnes and Noble, the major book retailer.

"On approximately September 16th or 17th, the author's husband goes to New York," the memo reads. "[He] calls her to say the book is not in the biggest Barnes and Noble in New York, and the Barnes and Noble salesperson/manager has researched on the computer and informed him it is in no Barnes and Noble in New York, or anywhere across the country."

To sell a book without Barnes and Noble is like trying to make bouillabaisse without fish: The retailer is a basic and noticeable ingredient. And it's hard to believe that Random House "forgot" to approach the Barnes and Noble buyers. More likely, executives there screwed up in a more typical and prosaic way. Because the book was rushed over from HarperCollins, and because Ms. Hecht had been assured it would be published this fall (the same season it would have appeared had she stayed with HarperCollins), it had to be rushed into the catalog and out to the reps-not a recipe for the best possible marketing push. "We did present and sell the book to Barnes and Noble," said Carol Schneider, vice president and executive director of publicity and public relations for Random House. And after the book received stellar reviews, "we went back a second time to ask them to order more, which they did." The total now: 1,000, a little less than half the number bought by the other major chains.

Writers are never satisfied with the way their books are promoted and sold, and the business is full of woeful tales of books not arriving in time for in-store signings-or at all. Moreover, even some best-sellers find themselves on constant back-order. (See: David Lipsky's Absolutely American [Houghton Mifflin], which was hard to find even as its author made the rounds of the major media-and eventually signed a TV development deal.) And Ms. Hecht, like most writers, surely hates the fact that even successful, well-reviewed, well-loved books often sell in the low thousands. But her case is particularly upsetting because of the history involved. A respected fiction writer whose ties to Dan Menaker date back to his New Yorker days, when he published several of her stories (he also published her two previous books, Do the Windows Open? and Was This Man a Genius? , about Andy Kaufman), Ms. Hecht chose to follow Mr. Menaker back to Random House and must have expected to be treated as a star writer, with her book given such marketing muscle as a table display at Barnes and Noble, which is arranged and paid for by a book's publisher. And why wouldn't she, after Publishers Weekly had this to say about The Unprofessionals : "Hecht has a loyal following, which will undoubtedly grow with the release of this novel."

But the ugly reality of the business today-downsizing publishing conglomerate or no-is that you have to sell to be a star. And Ms. Hecht's book, while brilliantly reviewed, isn't "working" particularly well. Ingram, which is responsible for distributing about one-fourth to one-fifth of all trade books, records only a few hundred copies sold-which gives Barnes and Noble reason to question the value of stocking up. But then, the Hecht camp might rightly wonder if, without much early Barnes and Noble exposure, the novel ever had a chance in the first place.

Whether the impasse can be solved remains to be seen. One of the remedies under consideration is relaunching The Unprofessionals , with all the requisite sales and promotional fanfare. While nobody is talking-Ms. Hecht's agent, David McCormick, declined to comment, Mr. Menaker is traveling in Europe and Ms. Hecht was unreachable at press time-discussions are still hot and heavy, according to a source close to them. Which may make The Unprofessionals one of the first books to be negotiated over after it was supposed to have landed in the stores.

The first sign that the Penguin Press is not your run-of-the-mill commercial publisher is the plain-brown-paper catalog cover. (An earlier version of the cover was made of the more typical metallic paper; it was nixed as "too commercial.") Inside, each of the 14 books gets a two-page spread, as opposed to the one-page announcement that many catalogs give most books. Each book cover is shown in black and white (surely, in the flesh, there'll be some color) and otherwise illustrated with sepia photo strips. Nothing flashy here. The message seems to be: "We're Old World-smart and subdued." Penguin Press is the publishing equivalent of shabby chic.

So are the books themselves: all nonfiction except for one novel, The Shadow of the Wind , by Spanish-born Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated by Lucia Graves. Many are current-affairsy: Ken Auletta's Back Story: Inside the Business of News , Roger Lowenstein's Origins of the Crash . There's only one business book: The Carolina Way , by Dean Smith. And for sentimental value (and upmarket cachet), there's Colored Lights , the collected articles and columns of the late, beloved journalist Michael Kelly. "There's not much fun here," admits one publishing executive who worked for the company at the time the list was being put together. Even the one surefire best-seller in this history-obsessed age, Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton, is pitched as serious homework and makes barely any mention of the sexual scandals that plagued the founding father. That all the authors here are male is probably coincidental-"for reasons more cosmic than practical," as Ms. Godoff says in her letter at the front of the catalog-but it's striking that they come mainly via three of the toniest agencies: Melanie Jackson, the Wylie Agency and I.C.M. (Noted nonfiction agent Kathy Robbins has one book on the list, as does Thomas Colchie, who represents virtually all of the literary Latin American books published in this country.) To further the sense of upmarketness-and, not incidentally, to fill out what would be a thin catalog-Ms. Godoff also publishes excerpts from all the featured books. This is super-serious stuff: "A bunch of books for serious readers!" it fairly screams. It's almost as if Ms. Godoff-who, for all the accusations of literariness, published such crowd-pleasers as Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation books and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -has taken to heart what both her critics and fans have said. She's a serious publisher, goddammit! She'll leave the fluff to the other guys.

And yet … there's a self-consciousness about this catalog, this list, that makes you root for it. First of all, there's that letter in the front. While it's not unusual for an imprint founder to introduce herself and her list to journalists and booksellers, the tone here is an endearing combination of feisty and defensive. "It's back to old-fashioned publishing for the brand-new Penguin Press," writes the woman who fell afoul of the newfangled variety. But then she backtracks. "If you build it, will they come?" she asks plaintively. "Knock wood." And, as if to thwart speculation about what will come next, the publisher includes a list of authors whose books are forthcoming from Penguin Press. Never mind that the naysayers point to the former Godoffites who aren't there-Zadie Smith, Adam Gopnik-the to-be-published list is pretty impressive and a lot more varied. It includes John Berendt (which puts to rest rumors that he would stay at Random House) as well as Hendrik Hertzberg, David Nasaw, Michael Pollan, Alexandra ( Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight ) Fuller, and food mavens Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters. Could it be that, over time, Ms. Godoff will build the kind of rich and varied list that made her the star she was for so many years at Random House? Nobody at her old shop wants to talk about it, naturally, and Ms. Godoff, as is her wont, declined to be interviewed for this article. Apparently, she believes that the books speak for her, and for themselves.

Then again, she's already said it, and I'm just repeating: "Knock wood."

Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time , published by Putnam, a division of Penguin (USA), is in bookstores now.

In Mr. Mnookin's case, at least, there was no conflict of interest about his jumping off from the research he'd gathered at Newsweek . " The Times was an institution I was covering from before [I got to the magazine]," he said. "Technically or legally, there was no issue." Still, when Mr. Mnookin asked Newsweek brass about the possibility of a leave, he was refused-for other reasons. "The most they give in this situation was two or three months," he said. Besides, most places only grant leaves to longtime staffers, and Mr. Mnookin had been there only a little over a year. The result: He resigned his job.

Or did he? "I'm still writing media pieces for them, and they're paying me," he said. Never mind that they're no longer paying him a salary or benefits and that the magazine is under no obligation to hold his job for him. "They've said they'd love to have me back," he said.

The world is full of journalists who look for-and get-book deals. (In the depth of the recession, a lot of us believe it's easier to get a book contract than a raise at our day jobs, or even a new staff position altogether.) But who gets permission to do a book, and who gets a leave of absence, and why, and what it all means, varies from case to case and place to place.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out why journalists would seek out extracurricular writing projects-"How else can we supplement our not-great salaries?" one asked, rhetorically-but the issues are different for management. "Granting book leaves is a way for companies to reward people they like; not granting them is a way to get rid of people they don't," said one former New York Times staffer who was one of the latter. Which might explain why the brass is always so vague about how they make their decisions. "We won't comment on specifics," said Bill Schmidt, associate managing editor of The New York Times and the person with whom staffers are supposed to discuss their book plans (along with their department heads), when I try to ask him about two recent Times people: Jere Longman, who wrote Among the Heroes for HarperCollins, and Alex Kuczynski, who is currently at work on a book for Doubleday about women and power. Ms. Kuczynski said she expects to return to the paper by the beginning of the year.

"While we want to encourage people to have rich and full careers, you always want to know what this is going to do to demands on their time," said Mr. Schmidt, adding that his first concern is conflict of interest: "We're very leery if a reporter is keen to write a book about an ongoing story that he or she is covering that moment." As for whether the leave-grantees get to keep their benefits, access to their offices and/or their jobs in the long term (perks I thought were, in fact, the very definition of a "leave"): At The Times , anyway, that's now "all part of the negotiations," according to Mr. Schmidt.

Basically, it comes down to this: Sometimes it means granting you a full-out leave with perks, like the kind John A. Byrne got when, in 2000, he took 101¼2 months off from BusinessWeek to write Jack Welch's autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut -and retained his office and his benefits. And sometimes it means offering certain "incentives" intended to help both the individual and the organization. At The Times , for example, authors in search of publishers are encouraged to sit down and negotiate with Times Books-a publishing imprint jointly operated by Henry Holt and The New York Times . Writers who have considered publishing with Times Books say the terms of the leave they're offered-office access, benefits, sometimes even their salaries or portions thereof-are far more favorable than the ones they'd get if they opted to publish with, say, Simon and Schuster. The problem, said one person close to the Times Books set-up, is that the advances they offer are not competitive.

So sometimes the news organizations have to be even more creative in finding ways to protect their own stories and hold on to the reporters who cover them. Take the case of The Smartest Guys in the Room , Penguin Portfolio's forthcoming book about Enron. The authors of the book are Bethany McLean, who wrote one of the first stories about the corruption at the energy giant, and Texas-based reporter Peter Elkind, under the guidance of Fortune editorial director Joe Nocera-who, Ms. McLean said, had the original idea for the book and decided "it was the right time" to pitch it. Both Ms. McLean and Mr. Elkind-who had never worked together before-are Fortune writers now on leave from the magazine. According to Ms. McLean, however, they retain their titles, their offices, the use of such facilities as the Time Inc. library and, most importantly, their salaries. (They have contributed only a few small pieces to the magazine since embarking on the project.) They will also share the byline, which doesn't include any mention of the magazine that employs them, so as to head off any suspicion that the book includes recycled or unoriginal material. So what's the catch? "This was a deal that was done with Fortune , not with the individuals," said someone close to the process. Which means, presumably-though neither Ms. McLean nor a Fortune spokesperson will confirm it-that the authors were at least one level removed from the negotiating process, that they didn't necessarily get any of the advance and may not even be getting future royalties. When I suggested to Ms. McLean that she might have gotten a better deal if she'd struck out on her own in search of a publisher for the story many believe she "owned" from the beginning, she said she was "not necessarily comfortable jumping off and doing the book myself." She pointed out that had she gone it alone, she would have had to hire her own researchers, find her own place to keep documents, and suffer without double phone lines and high-speed computers-not to mention without the companionship of an office full of helpful (but not intrusive) colleagues.

All of which may not be the best reasons for letting your magazine bosses take control of your book deal, but they're not inconsequential ones, either. "If I hadn't been at Fortune , we wouldn't have done as good a book," Ms. McLean said.

Spoken by exactly the kind of staffer you really want to keep.

There's Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them , a Dutton title at the top of The Times ' nonfiction best-seller list, thanks in part to HarperCollins' ridiculous legal shenanigans for the benefit of Bill O'Reilly; but there's also Joe Conason's successful Big Lies from St. Martin's (now No. 26 on the Amazon best-seller list), which expresses many of the same ideas and opinions. There's Bernard-Henri Lévy's Who Killed Daniel Pearl? , the French philosopher's take on the Wall Street Journal reporter's murder, which was rushed out by its tiny American publisher, Melville House, hoping to grab some of the thunder of A Mighty Heart (Scribner), the much-buzzed-about book by the reporter's widow, Mariane Pearl. And next month, Penguin Portfolio will publish The Smartest Guys in the Room , a book about Enron by Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, who-depending on whom you ask-may or may not have been the first reporter to figure out what was going on at that corporation. (That book was co-written with Peter Elkind; longtime Fortune contributor Joseph Nocera, who edited the original piece in the magazine, served as an adviser.) While there have already been several Enron books, this one is the second in a one-two punch begun last month when HarperCollins published 24 Days by Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller, an account of how The Wall Street Journal really broke the Enron story.

Not that there's anything new about any of this: There were at least two books about the late-90's Microsoft trial, a handful of titles about the muddled 2000 election and a slew, of course, about Sept. 11. Publishers will tell you there are definite advantages in having your book appear at the same time as another house's offering on the same subject-sometimes canny book-review editors assign collective reviews when they might not have covered each book individually-but there are also obvious drawbacks. Like, for example, that by the time the books appear, the public will have lost interest in the specific "news event" and may not want to buy even one. (You'd be hard-pressed to decide which election 2000 book-Jake Tapper's Down and Dirty or Jeffrey Toobin's Too Close to Call -was a bigger sales disappointment.)

So why do publishers do it?

"Piling on is just a fact of publishing life," said one executive who has contributed his fair share of it. "Especially with nonfiction, we're all reading the same news reports and getting the same ideas. But it makes sense when the book you're publishing has a different take on the subject. It can create dialogue."

What he doesn't say, but what is often the case, is that me-too publishing can also create inter-house competition and play on divisions of the personally political kind. In early 2001, Adrian Zackheim, then at HarperCollins, rushed out John Heilemann's Pride Before the Fall to beat the appearance of Ken Auletta's World War 3.0 from Random House-a maneuver that inspired Mr. Auletta's agent, Esther Newberg, to embarrass him at Michael's by sending over a plate of coins and a note implying he was a "Judas." So it hardly seems an accident that last year, soon after Mr. Zackheim left HarperCollins to head up Penguin Portfolio and announced his acquisition of the Fortune -backed Enron book, his old house jumped to sign up 24 Days by the rival Enron mavens at The Wall Street Journal . How appropriate that a battle between business reporters should be supported by tiffing publishers.

No doubt about it: It's a tough intramural sport, this topical publishing, and it looks to me like the winner is not necessarily the one who publishes first, or even the one with the best book. It's all about the spin. "You buy what you buy," one publisher said. "But then, when you look around at whatever else is out there, you have to figure out how to sell it." Which would explain, I guess, why HarperCollins is pitching its Enron book as "a reporter's eye view of the tug of war between journalists and a giant corporation," an angle that would seem of limited appeal to the average reader, and Zackheim's appears much more user-friendly: "[Our] intention is to lay the matter to rest by telling the whole story and to understand much deeper what happened," he said.

24 Days was-big surprise-a bestseller on the Wall Street Journal list after having been excerpted in that paper. The Smartest Guys hits bookstores next month. And then it'll be up to book buyers to decide. Never mind that both Microsoft books were bombs, and that very, very few of the Sept. 11 accounts ever saw the best-seller lists. Will it be déjà vu all over again for warring publishers?

Stay tuned.

Sara Nelson's So Many Books, So Little Time will be published next month.