Nicola Kraus, Brooklyn mother (Amazon)

Nicola Kraus is one half of the team responsible for 2002's best-seller The Nanny Diaries: a book in The Devil Wears Prada vein that dealt with the horrors not of the publishing industry, but the UES child-rearing business.*

Adapted into a film in 2007 with Scarlett Johansson, the world's most realistic nanny, Ms. Kraus hit the residuals jackpot again last summer, when it was announced the Ryan Seacrest Productions and The Weinstein Company would be producing The Nanny Diaries as a series for ABC, helmed by Gilmore Girls' creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. (Now that we'd watch.)

Ten years later, and with a child of her own, Ms. Kraus recently opened up about how she's raising her child in an interview with NYNatives.com...a dicey subject for someone most famous for her take-down on New York mommies.

Don't worry though...Ms. Kraus lives in Brooklyn, not the city. Which means her childcare services are way more chillaxed:

Sophie is in full-time daycare and has been since she was three months old – the joys of Brooklyn living. I actually picked our neighborhood, Cobble Hill, for the daycares...I do, however, have an army of babysitters.

How is a babysitter/daycare different than a nanny? Well that's like asking how a raven's like a writing box. Or how Sally Draper fits into Ms. Kraus' theory of motherhood.

Now I live in Brooklyn, and what strikes me every day is what I call “The Sally Draper Phenomenon” – everyone trying to overcompensate for their own narcissistic parenting by wearing themselves out. I hear people constantly, angrily lamenting that they haven’t seen a movie in two years, never go anywhere, never do anything. Why? There are these great things called babysitters.

It takes a leap in logic to connect the reference: is Ms. Kraus saying that Sally Draper will grow up to live in Cobble Hill and resent her children for not giving her enough time to see a film? How do you connect Sally Draper's hypothetical miserable future with a refusal to use babysitters? We need to hear more about this Sally Draper phenomenon before we buy it. (And what about the Bobby Draper Complex, where young boys grow up and live in the Meatpacking district, experimenting with their sexuality and dressing like their mothers?)

Well, we guess there's only one way to parse the logic of Ms. Kraus' baby-raising sensibilities: go out and buy her new book, Between You and Me (which she co-wrote with Nanny Diaries' Emma McLaughlin). We don't know if it has to do with motherhood, but we're sure there's a couple digs about New York parents in there somewhere.

*Not to be confused with Nicole Krauss,  National Book Award and wife of Jonathan Safran Foer...though both women live in Brooklyn.

And now here comes Suzanne Hansen, an erstwhile lactation consultant and labor/delivery nurse and married mother of two who’s written a tell-all about her time (a couple of decades ago) as nanny for the former super-agent Mike Ovitz and his family. Her pretty, pink-covered, palm-tree-bedecked book mushes together two subgenres: the inexplicably unstoppable category of “assistant lit,” like The Devil Wears Prada; and the jaded Hollywood homily—hence the title, a reference to the late producer Julia Phillips’ big hit You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1991).

You’ll Never Nanny is scads less cynical—and far more lightweight—than its namesake. Ms. Hansen arrives in La-La Land as a wide-eyed adolescent from Cottage Grove, Ore. (“a cross between Dodge City in the 1800s and Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show”), having matriculated at the shabby Northwest Nannies Institute because she lacked career direction and, you know, always sorta liked baby-sitting. She’s a bit hung up on her hick of a high-school boyfriend, Ryan, and misses her “Norman Rockwell painting” upbringing—but she’s hungry to explore the glamour of Tinseltown. Imagine her surprise when she discovers the real seedy Los Angeles (a rite of passage for outsiders that’s perpetually diverting to us residents): Oh my God, what’s with all the mini-malls? Where are all the movie stars? How can you stand this … smog?

After a placement agency sends her on a few amusing false starts, Ms. Hansen lands what seems to be a dream gig with Mr. Ovitz, his wife, Judy, and their three children: a stubborn brat named Josh; an only slightly less stubborn brat, Amanda; and an adorable baby, Brandon, whose mother has seemingly never administered a 4 a.m. feeding nor followed through on a time-out. Unbelievably, the savvy power couple fails to draw up any sort of written contract for their new employee (was she paid off the books, one wonders? This was before Kimba Wood), an arrangement that leaves Ms. Hansen underpaid, dissatisfied, and scribbling feverishly and frequently into her diary—or “journaling” as she puts it—about life chez Ovitz, with one-liners like “Me working here is like trying to mix Metamucil in water—I never fully blend.” The savvy power couple also apparently neglected to draw up a nondisclosure agreement.

Like Bridget Jones and a flock of other scatty chick-lit heroines before her, Ms. Hansen has a remarkable tendency to get into scrapes—sometimes quite literally, as when she plunges headfirst down the slide of the family swimming pool during a stolen nighttime swim, hitting the bricks of the deck and “hurtling through the short length of the pool like a torpedo launched from a nuclear submarine,” ending up with a wound that demands eight stitches. Then there’s the time she borrows a housekeeper’s Chevy truck on the way to a game-show audition (only in L.A., kids) and ignores a parking-structure sign that reads “maximum clearance 8 feet 6 inches.” Or the time she trips hurrying to catch a flight out of Eugene, sending tampons and loose change and self spewing across the tarmac, to the raucous amusement of the waiting passengers.

The Ovitzes, meanwhile, come off as variously clueless (“How do you put him to bed?” asks Mrs. O. re Brandon); crass (she lets Josh pee on a front-lawn tree); cheap (though Disney head Michael Eisner proves even cheaper, sending stuffed Mickey and Minnie Mouses as an anniversary present); and downright cruel: “You make a good coat rack,” remarks the imperious employeress, piling ski paraphernalia on poor Suzy so the family can take a photo op sans nanny in Aspen, during a trip which leaves Ms. Hansen feeling like “the Griswolds’ Aunt Edna in Vacation.” Mr. O. emerges somewhat more sympathetically: worrying that his own kids don’t recognize him; impressing the impressionable Suzy with his wardrobe and unflappable mien (“his very being demands respect,” she “journals” a bit moonily, “maybe it’s because he’s always so impeccably dressed”); procuring her and a friend dinner reservations at Spago; and even occasionally taking her child-rearing wisdom seriously—to the intense displeasure of his wife, of course. One can’t help feeling that the young Ms. Hansen was something of a doormat for the overbearing Ovitzes. Why doesn’t she just quit? you wonder, again and again.

Eventually, she does quit. Predictably, Mr. O. threatens to make it impossible for her ever to work for an entertainment figure again, but she manages to find two more bearable posts: helping dedicated mommy Debra Winger (a staunch proponent of breastfeeding); then tending to the jolly brood of the diminutive duo Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman.

Ms. Hansen isn’t a bad writer. And thanks to her keen memory and nattering network of friends in the nannysphere, the book is full of celebrity cameos (Dustin Hoffman is cranky during a private movie screening! Tom Cruise, né Mapother, is nice on a phone call to an Ovitz child!), not to mention transparent blind items: Gee, wonder who “the daughter of a famous dead rock star and a certifiably crazy mother whose nanny actually wanted to adopt her because she feared for her safety when her mother was on a drug binge” might be? This stuff might have passed for delicious in the People- magazine era of 20 years ago, but at a time when gossip about the famous is measured and digested in gigabytes to the second, it feels about as fresh as warmed-over formula.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

Having sold 1.4 million copies of The Nanny Diaries, you'd think Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus wouldn't need to resort to the infantilizing gimmick of using the word "girl" in the title of their second novel. ( Girls' Poker Night, Dirty Girls Social Club, Gossip Girl, Metro Girl …. Gag me with a girl.)

But Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus had a surprisingly rocky time with Citizen Girl: The manuscript was rejected outright by the original publisher, Random House-a rare humiliation. It was subsequently picked up by Atria Books, a division of Simon and Schuster, and Atria's marketing department obviously decided not to take any chances with brand recognition. They needn't have worried: Citizen Girl doesn't stray far enough from the Nanny Diaries template to risk alienating the authors' core constituency.

As a social satire, The Nanny Diaries had excellent timing, appearing just at the moment when the hyper-parenting trend (time outs, Baby Einstein, etc.) collided with the high-end consumerism of the early 2000's. It featured a wealthy Manhattan mother, Mrs. X, who only allows her 4-year-old son Grayer to eat cookies if they're unsweetened, and to drink milk if it's soy. Mrs. X is so busy trying to get Grayer into Collegiate (unsuccessfully) that she doesn't notice that her husband is having an affair at the office. Nanny, an N.Y.U. senior majoring in child development, goes to work for the Xes and gets chewed up worse than the plastic caps on Courtney Love's medicine bottles. The detail was deliciously spot-on-music lessons at Diller Quaile, lavender linen water from Gracious Home-a felicity that more than made up for the canned dialogue and the unnecessary boy-meets-nanny subplot. Mrs. X and her ilk were fine fodder-fish in a barrel, well shot. Nanny Diaries wasn't subtle, but it was satisfying.

Citizen Girl takes the same basic formula-young female gets abused by her employers until she finally tells them to shove it-but instead of overbearing Upper East Side parents, the oppressors are chauvinist male bosses, a far less culturally specific target. This time around, our gal heroine is a recent graduate of the women's-studies department at Wesleyan, even though the book is set in the era of the dot-com bust, a full 10 years or so after most liberal-arts colleges stopped churning out old-fashioned Movement types. The fact that this supposedly orthodox adult feminist lacks a proper name and is called "Girl" throughout (just as the nanny was called "Nan") is one of several of the book's misguided ironies. (About as clever as if, instead of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth had named his alter ego "Jew Boy.")

Girl (the character) enters the working world as a research associate for a nonprofit and discovers-surprise!-that entry level sucks. Then she gets fired, and discovers that unemployment sucks worse. So when she senses opportunity at a women's Web portal called My Company (think IVillage), she puts aside her scruples about using breast cancer to sell mascara and jumps at the job.

Citizen Girl is strongest when milking such postfeminist incongruities. As the book's promotional materials tell us, Girl "isn't afraid to ask some tough questions. Mainly: Have any of us come a long way, baby?" And indeed, in the age of Girls Gone Wild, much can-and should-be said about the current notion that turning the female body into a sex object is an act of "empowerment," so long as it's the woman herself doing the objectifying. I remember going to a fiction reading a few years ago and being asked to make a donation to an organization that purported to help prostitutes-not by getting them off the street and into better jobs, but by trying to improve their working conditions. (Health insurance for hookers-there must be worthier causes!) Further convoluting the original feminist message, young women now ape bad-boy behavior by going to strip clubs and having sex parties, a trend New York magazine identified a few years ago as the advent of the Female Chauvinist Pig. Yes, there have been backlashes before-just ask Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf-but never quite as disheartening as seeing the Playboy Mansion made cool by the presence of Gwyneth Paltrow, or Meredith Vieira taking pole-dancing lessons on The View.

Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus grind this legitimate ax quite noisily. I will allow them the improbability of My Company being run by a bunch of male yobbos, even though a ball-busting caricature of Candice Carpenter, the real founder of IVillage, would have worked better. Girl (the character) fights the good fight for as long as she can, but eventually becomes a pawn in the commercial scheme of the Man. She conceives of a bang-up proposal for how to sell My Company users more stuff by "reconfiguring and relabeling what some would call sexist content under a feminist banner, thus encouraging them to embrace the term." Not that she doesn't feel horribly conflicted: "I continue nauseously on and on, uninterrupted. On and on and on, through a list of ideas, which, upon hearing out loud, should revoke my NOW card." Are there any 22-year-old members of N.O.W. these days? You certainly don't need to be one to know that the mass media is still sending out mixed messages to women, and that Cake parties ("female-focused events that provide women with the opportunity to experience sexual culture as entertainment") are retarded.

Unfortunately, the authors have once again larded a perfectly fine send-up with an inane romance. This one begins when Girl meets a guy named Buster at a job fair. "We take each other in, smiling, the creases around his lovely eyes bringing a tingle." It goes downhill from there, with a very strange detour into an ambiguous date-rape scenario, from which Buster somehow emerges as a viable long-term prospect. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus should stick to satire, and leave the relationship stuff to Helen Fielding and Anna Maxted. After all, as a real dyed-in-the-Donna-Karan-pantsuit feminist would say, a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Not that any of today's girls could tell you whose line that is.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg is a freelance journalist in New York and a former deputy editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.

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.

Last week,Ms. McLaughlin, 28, and Ms. Kraus, 27, informed their literary agent, Molly Friedrich of the Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, that they would be signing with William Morris agent Suzanne Gluck. The move comes less than two years after the pair, who have sold 800,000 copies of their book, fired their first agent, Christy Fletcher of Carlisle & Company, for Ms. Friedrich.

It was Ms. Fletcher who originally sold The Nanny Diaries to St. Martin's Press in the summer of 2000, after suggesting to Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin, who had met as N.Y.U. students, that their idea for a joint memoir of their days as nannies to prominent New York families would be better-and legally safer-as a novel. Ms. Fletcher shopped a partial manuscript to publishers. She was turned away by many who deemed the novel too New York–y, until Jennifer Weis at St. Martin's bought the book for an advance of $25,000. Ms. Fletcher later sold British rights for around $125,000, audio rights for $25,000 (with Julia Roberts doing the reading), and film rights-which Miramax bought in May 2001-for $500,000, plus best-seller bonuses that will ultimately total over $1 million.

During the process of completing the manuscript for St. Martin's, Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin became dissatisfied with the way the book was being handled. One publishing-industry source said that the women heard negative things on the New York party circuit about St. Martin's, a respectable press-and one often willing to take a chance on unconventional first books by unknown authors-but a publisher that lacks the cachet of a Knopf or Penguin Putnam. Another source said that, anxious to meet their initial publication date, the authors became frustrated with Jennifer Weis' slow editorial pace. Ms. McLaughlin, reached by phone, said that she couldn't comment on the situation, and Ms. Kraus could not be reached for this story.

"These are very ambitious girls, and they were worried about the house and their editor. They were afraid that the book was going to get lost, and they just panicked," said one source familiar with the situation. Ms. Weis, who did not return phone calls for comment, took a maternity leave during the publishing process. Ms. Fletcher got married and took several weeks off for her honeymoon. When she returned in April 2001, she received a letter informing her of Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin's intention to make Molly Friedrich their new agent.

Even after she lost Ms. McLaughlin and Ms. Kraus as clients, however, Ms. Fletcher retained her rights to 15 percent of all future grosses of The Nanny Diaries , as well as her stake in the film, audio and foreign editions of the book. Ms. Freidrich's position is not quite as fortunate: The authors' second agent-who helped them navigate the final stages of publication, including book design and final edits-may be left high and dry by the departure of Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin. One source close to Ms. Friedrich confirmed that since Ms. Friedrich didn't sell The Nanny Diaries or the pair's (still unsold) second book-and since she prefers handshake deals to binding contracts-she probably won't receive any future sale or royalties money from either book.

Ms. Friedrich, who represents authors like Frank McCourt, Sue Grafton and Terry McMillan, wouldn't comment, but through an associate, Lucy Childs, issued this statement: "Refer to the acknowledgements at the back of Nanny Diaries and we have no further comment." The acknowledgments open by thanking "Molly Friedrich and Lucy Childs … for their unflagging support-should Nanny ever have to go head-to-head with Mrs. X, these are the women we'd want behind her!"

Reached by phone, Ms. Fletcher seemed to have no hard feelings about her former clients. "Suzanne Gluck is the perfect agent for Emma and Nicky," she said. "Given their interests in the entertainment industry, it makes perfect sense for them to be at William Morris."

Ms. Friedrich put a great deal of time into developing the pair's second book, which is about a girl named "Girl" who begins a job at a dot-com. Any deals for that book will now be cut by Ms. Gluck.

Ms. Gluck refused to comment for this story.

Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin's disillusionment with the film contract they signed appears to be substantial. Sources involved in the negotiations said that Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin were distressed to learn that in signing initial binding short-form agreements with Miramax, they had signed away rights to their characters, not just to the novel. They were also upset that Miramax would have the right to turn the story into a television property. But The Nanny Diaries had already hit the best-seller list, and Miramax was sitting on a potential gold mine.

Asked whether Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin suffered from a nagging sense that they could've gotten a better film deal, a source familiar with the deal said that a loss of creative cinematic control, not money, was the root of the authors' concerns.

According to sources involved in the film's development, the authors also requested that they be let out of the standard confidentiality clause that would prevent them from talking about their experiences with Miramax. Sources said that the authors were hoping to turn the story into a Spalding Gray–type show about Miramax. Some of the long-form contracts are still unsigned by the authors, although this will have no impact on Miramax's plans to make the film. Jennifer Wachtell, Miramax's vice president for creative affairs, said that "it's not unusual to take some time to finalize a deal."

Ms. Wachtell said, "The project is in development and we're having nothing but a great experience," adding that "it's very difficult for anyone, especially two young women, to be thrust into this kind of spotlight very quickly. The scrutiny is difficult for anyone. But we've been having fun."

One publishing-industry source said that Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin's new creative ambitions are one of the byproducts of the critical success of The Nanny Diaries , and that the women now consider themselves literary writers. Since the book's publication, the pair have been writing short stories for women's magazines. Susan Kittenplan, the executive editor of Allure , said that she had nothing but warm feelings for the pair, who published a short story in the magazine's August issue: "I had a great experience with them. Particularly for best-seller writers, they were incredibly professional and enthusiastic." But another editor who knows them said that "they obviously were thinking of themselves as doing pieces for The New Yorker more than they were thinking of themselves as writing for Cosmopolitan ."

While it's not unusual for authors who have hit it big to "trade up" their agents, editors or publishing houses, the way Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin have replaced agents bears some resemblance to the way that their book's antagonist, the spoiled and unhappy Mrs. X, tears through child-care help. Several sources speculated that though The Nanny Diaries is acid-tongued about chilly Upper East Side wealth, Ms. Kraus and Ms. McLaughlin could reasonably expect to become a part of the very world they've skewered. Both are from comfortable backgrounds: Ms. McLaughlin grew up in Rochester, N.Y., the daughter of a college professor and landscape designer while Ms. Kraus, whose parents own a bookstore on the Upper East Side, grew up in Manhattan and went to Chapin. The authors have contractual deals for hair and makeup at every public appearance, and they have developed a fondness for writing little notes-à la Mrs. X-on their own Nanny Diaries stationery.

One person who met the women said, "They both used the word 'lovely' about a million times. It was like having Gwyneth robots trying to kill you." The fundamental irony about the authors and their book may be that in the guise of a cautionary morality tale about the wretched excess of New York's social elite, they wound up writing a paean to that world and the women who inhabit it.

"It's a little like Toby Young skewering [ Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter, when you know that he thinks Graydon walks on water," said one source. "There's a reason that they were able to write the book that they did. A Dominican nanny would not have been able to do it. By writing it, they're establishing that they are a part of that world. They are not the nannies, but the mother in this book.

"I want to show you what they wrote me,"Ms.Newman said, pushing a copy of The Nanny Diaries across the table.

The inscription, in a girlish script,read: "To Joyce-our savior. You are the Easter Bunny, our Fairy Godmother,&Santa Claus rolled into one truly awesome teacher-we would be tongue-tied without you." It was signed, "Emma and Nicki."

Ms. Newman's perfectly manicured hand snatched the book back. "Isn't that special?" she said.

To the modern fiction writer's small, fleeting entourage-agent, editor, publicist-now add the media coach, an image consultant–slash– communications expert hired by publishers to bang the author into fighting shape before he or she faces down Katie or Matt (for the cheesy books); Terry or Leonard or Charlie (for the tweedy books); or the Big Kahuna, Oprah (for those who would straddle the difficult fault line between cheese and tweed).

The so-called "chick-lit" set must also contend with The View . "Star Jones was tough ," said Ms. Newman about the Diaries duo's experience. "With Star, it's always about Star. And you have to know that going in. Was it comfortable for them? No. You know what? It was what it was-get over it, go on to the next thing, don't obsess."

In exchange for his or her publisher paying the coach a fee of a few thousand dollars-the size of many first-time novelists' entire advance-an author might receive an afternoon of videotaped mock interviews, a set of customized talking points, and tips on grooming and dress. "I've taken people out of a video session and said, 'O.K., we're going to continue this at Salon AKS,'" said Ms. Newman, a fifty something honey blonde with vivid blue eyes who seemed at ease in her flowered Capri pants. "Video is the instant ego-leveler."

The long list of authors who have submitted to her ministrations include such unlikely bedfellows as post-feminist Katie Roiphe, Simon & Schuster editor in chief Michael Korda and Helen Fielding, author of the blockbuster Bridget Jones's Diary .

"Media training one of great delicious experiences of life," wrote Ms. Fielding in a 1998 account published in England's The Daily Telegraph . "Word 'scarf' came up within three minutes …. Suddenly understand why Americans so fluent and sound-bite-esque on TV. Am trained to 'scope out' my 'bullet points' …. Must, however, not try to be funny but simply decide what going to say; tell them am going to say it, say it, then tell them have said it whilst ignoring interviewer, apart from using interviewer's name as often as possible and remembering to 'stay in the moment' and clenching the buttocks to avoid tense-looking mouth."

The literary Wunderkind of the moment, 25-year-old Princeton graduate Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated , has clenched buttocks with an Upper West Side coach named Bill Parkhurst-a favorite of Mr. Foer's publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Not that either of them want to admit it.

"My specialty is what I call 'zero to 60's,'" said Mr. Parkhurst. "Somebody who is on a best-seller track and nobody's heard of the person, but the book is likely to make the best-seller list, and that's when the publishers tend to bring us in-to hopefully spruce 'em up. What I always find is that you'll get somebody just off a campus whose only media mix is All Things Considered , and they're always the ones who have to do the Howard Sterns of Tampa."

Though he wouldn't cop to coaching Mr. Foer, he said that he had recently worked with a "first-time literary author, someone breaking through," who he is "quite certain … will have a best-seller within five or six weeks."

Neither Mr. Foer, Mr. Franzen, Ms. McLaughlin nor Ms. Kraus returned calls inquiring about their media training.

A quick survey of the old school ran the gamut from unfamiliarity to dismay.

"What a terrible idea, oh dear," said John Updike. "Has it come to that? Maybe I need a media coach, but I didn't know they existed. My goodness."

"To tell the truth, I never heard the term before," said Tom Wolfe. "I've heard of something like that for businessmen, but it seemed like more to deal with uncomfortable subjects and so on."

Joan Didion, who recently appeared in a glamorous Vogue spread, said plainly, "I've never heard of a media coach" and that, "for better or worse," she just wings it.

"I don't have, and never would think of having, a media coach," said Gay Talese. "I don't know any writer that I would hold in such high esteem that I'd call him a writer that would have a media coach." Told that Michael Korda had used one, he said: "But of course, he's a Hollywood guy!"

Oprah's B.S. Alarm

While Mr. Parkhurst works exclusively with authors, Ms. Newman also plies her trade in industries like NASCAR racing and doughnuts. A former speech therapist, she fell into media training after she married a public-relations man with a seminar business and attended one of his oral-communications workshops. "It was like A Chorus Line ," she said. "You know, 'I can do this!'"

Her first book project was the racy Shirley Conran novel Lace in 1982, from which she had to extract passages and anecdotes for TV and radio appearances that would pass muster with the F.C.C. "I loved Shirley," she said. "Shirley and I really bonded."

But while media coaches may have been brandishing their A/V equipment since the Network era, it seems that only recently-perhaps since Ms. Winfrey underscored just how a few minutes on television can make a book-have they been called in to straighten out rumpled literary authors.

Not every contemporary author is willing to kowtow to the process. Take David Foster Wallace, who turned down the morning shows entirely and accepted a turn on Charlie Rose with the condition that his buddy Mr. Franzen, and the then-hot Mark Leyner, accompany him for what became a discussion of modern fiction.

"I think part of what I think makes his readers respect David, and admire him, is that there's no screen between him and them," said Mr. Wallace's agent, Bonnie Nadell. "He will say, 'Boy, I'm so nervous.' You really can tell that this is not what he likes doing, and I think the audience appreciates this and in some ways is won over by this-a genuineness, a certain lack of slickness that they can say is really there."

Paul Bogaards, vice president and executive director of publicity at the über -literary imprint Knopf, eschews media coaches entirely.

"My view is, you can't reanimate a corpse, O.K.?" he said by cell phone in a car on the way to an event for Andrew Weil, the best-selling health writer. "If it's too canned and structured, it's a turnoff." He recalled working on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh at William Morrow years ago with author Michael Chabon. "The host of CBS This Morning would ask Michael a question," he said, "and Michael would pause and look up toward the ceiling before answering the question. So I said, 'Michael, are you aware of the fact that you kind of look away at the interlocutor and up at the sky?' And he said, 'Actually, I am aware of it.' I said, 'Why do you do that?' And he said, 'That's where the answers are!'"

Ms. Newman has no patience for these dreamers.

"A book is a product," she said. "My job is to take information out of the book and find a way to package it. I do not make any book a best-seller. The authors are talented. They're writers; they have a great story to tell. But just because you can write doesn't mean you can necessarily speak . I am a teacher. I teach them to tell that story in three minutes, four minutes, seven minutes or 10 minutes."

She offered some tips for going on the Today show, gratis: "Know that Katie may have only read excerpts of the book, but she will have done her homework. She starts out pretty general and then can ask a couple of wringers, but if you know what you're going to say and what your messages are, you can keep coming back to them-as long as you give her something that she feels is going to be entertaining and informational for her audience. Matt is not as chatty. It's more of a gender thing: He's more direct, he'll interrupt more, he'll ask you to wrap up more quickly-'All right, come on, get to it, what are you really saying?'"

Meanwhile, here's Mr. Parkhurst's limn of Ms. Winfrey: " Never try to impress Oprah," he said. "She has a B.S. alarm, and she doesn't really suffer fools. So if you're going on the Oprah show, don't try to get too clever, because what the Oprah show is always about is self-discovery and transformation of the house-bound woman, and if she doesn't embrace the book, trying to push it is a fool's errand."

Of Jonathan Franzen's Oprah dust-up, Ms. Newman would say only, "He didn't do the homework," deflecting questions to Farrar, Straus & Giroux's senior vice president of publicity and marketing, Jeff Seroy.

Mr. Seroy said that it's extraordinarily rare that Farrar, Straus & Giroux brings in a media coach, because the list is "highly literary and not driven by television." He explained the Band-Aid use of Ms. Newman: "Two things that were said initially and repeatedly by Jonathan Franzen and others is that he thinks in very complicated, long, interconnected thoughts. He's a kind of 'Why use one word when a thousand words will do?' person. That doesn't work on TV, O.K.? And the second thing is that you may have picked up that Jonathan has a principled and constitutional animadversion to television, and yet he was suddenly famous and television was calling, and television was part of why he became even more famous, and television seemed to be the appropriate medium for him to use to show people who he was and express his feelings and positions. Everything he said and did was in his own words and his own thoughts, and it was really a matter of refining those so that they worked through the medium."

The Corrections had been on the best-seller list for a long time, but by that hot Thursday, it had fallen off the Top 10. "It was a very complex book, but everybody who read that book sees somebody they know," said Ms. Newman. "You can have the best book in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's a ' So what? ', not an ' Ah-ha! '"