moving day!

With many thanks to all who have followed Ad Broad over the years, I invite you to follow me to my new virtual office at helenkleinross.com where I'll be posting about writing other kinds of fiction.

Some of you may know I am publishing books now. Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue came out in 2013 from Simon & Schuster. It's a coming-of-middle age story about a woman and a business (advertising.) It’s sort of like Mad Men thirty years later, from the point of view of an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson.

This year, I published a novel about kidnapping. WHAT WAS MINE is about a seemingly ordinary woman who does something extraordinary in a desperate moment: she takes a baby girl from a shopping cart and raises her as her own. It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, friends, and coworkers at the ad agency where she works as a copywriter/creative director.

My next novel is set in an old house in Connecticut that has been in a family for generations. A murder takes place there in 1926. The crime becomes a family secret that everyone knows, but no one talks about until 2016 when the house is being renovated for a wedding and something is found in a powder room wall that connects to the crime--and the reader finds out what really happened.

I hope you will join me on my journey into other kinds of writing by following me here. Of course, advertising will always be part of what I am writing because you can take the Ad Broad out of advertising, but...

how to sell a book before it is published

My book isn't out until January, but generous friends hosted a party for it this weekend after I mentioned to them a few months ago (trying to sound casual) how important pre-orders are for authors, especially unfamous novelists publishing a debut. It was a great party, with lots of good friends/neighbors/ supporters in attendance. We called it a Preview Party, not a Pre-Order party, but people got the idea. Today, I checked my Amazon numbers --yes, I'm months away from publication, but already checking my rankings--and my “best sellers rank" improved by about half a million--whatever that means, surely NOT that I sold half a million books.

A book party is like a wedding in that, while on the whole it's fantastic, one of the best events in your life, there's a few things you'd hope to remember, should you ever do it again. Like--

1. If more than two dozen people will be there, GET A MIKE. Most writers aren't great talkers (that's why they're writers) and unless you've got the big, booming voice of a trial lawyer or James Earl Jones, give a break to the people who've gone to the trouble to come out and support you--make it easy for them to hear you. Especially if your audience includes boomers who spent their formative years lying on shag carpeting listening to Procol Harum at max volume on lo-fidelity earmuffs. Also--think of the mike thing before the day of your reading or you might not be as lucky as I was when I frantically contacted my host's caterer, who was able to provide a last minute hookup. (Don't be insulted when the sound guy shows up and seems disappointed that his fancy setup will be used only for reading, and asks hopefully if he ought to tweak a few settings because maybe someone in the audience will want to play something?)

2. If your book isn't out yet, MAKE CHAPBOOKS AS PARTY FAVORS. These look like the galleys, but contain only about the first fifty pages or so... just enough to give people a taste of your book and hopefully give them an appetite for the whole enchilada and seeing it lying on their kitchen counter will remind them to put in a pre-order. I am exceedingly grateful to my editor for making these for me, but if yours can't, you can do it yourself at a Kinko's.

3. APPOINT A PHOTOGRAPHER. It doesn't have to be the professional photographer friend you've already imposed upon for your author photo. It can be any friend with an iPhone and a good eye who isn't too shy to ask people to pose holding your chapbook. (See above.) I really, really wish I had done this, because images are valuable content for social streams.

4. ASK PEOPLE TO POST One of my guests had the social savvy to hashtag the event and post a photo on Instagram, but I wish I had thought to ask others to do so. Social buzz can help start up interest in books.

5. WEAR SOMETHING COMFORTABLE. I'm grateful to my husband for this. There I was at the mirror, trying to decide between shoes--Toms or heels--and he said I should go with whichever pair would be better to stand in for hours, trying to remember people's names. There aren't nametags for book readings. I guess because the only name that you want on people's minds is yours.

6. READ FROM A SCREEN, NOT FROM A PAGE. Especially if you're an older (ahem) writer who needs reading glasses. You can adjust type size on screen, so you won't have to perch readers at the end of your nose. (I've gotten progressives which eliminates this problem, but it's weeks before you can wear them without feeling like you're falling downstairs, so don't make the mistake of making the switch the same month as a reading.) Also, the light emitted from Ipad or Kindle or whatever you're using will save you from having to worry about finding a reading light.

7. BRING BUSINESS CARDS If your publisher has been good enough to provide you with chapbooks, your contact information probably isn't in them. I've used MOO to make cards with my book cover on one side, which reminds people later who the heck you are. The best part about book events is the connections that you make with new readers, other authors, booksellers and even (in my lucky case) someone who asks for an ARC because they want to review it. Business cards stuck in a wallet can remind people of idle offers they made once at a party.

mad men reading list

It's a soggy Saturday where I am (Northwest CT) making it an excellent day to do what you never have time for anymore: reading longform. For Mad Men fans, I've compiled a list of books that memorialize those who fought in the Advertising Wars:

Jerry Della Femina's seminal ad memoir "From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor" was first published in 1970 and made the ad business sound so enticing it inspired me (and many others) to go into it.

Yes, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a film but the novel is better imho, even without Gregory Peck's moving performance. Great writing, complex portrait of Mad Men-era office life and satisfying exploration of surprisingly contemporary theme of relative values of family vs. career.

And speaking of novels that are (way) better than films adapted from them, Revolutionary Road tells a dark story in Yates' stellar prose, the tale of a couple who buy into the American Dream of the 1960s and how it all unravels for them. She's a homemaker (of course) and he's got a thankless job in the ad industry (oxymoron?) The book resonates with vivid Mad Men-esque scenes like the one in a hospital waiting room, where everyone is smoking cigarettes.

Joshua Ferris was a copywriter in a cubicle in Chicago which gave him the chops to write a hilarious fictional sendup of the business Then We Came to the End. I defy anyone in advertising to read this without laughing. Out loud. Like I did. On a subway. So loud, the person next to you gives up the seat.

If there is a real-life Peggy Olson, it's Jane Maas who started at Ogilvy in 1964 and rose to be creative director and agency officer. With good-humor, wit and convincing detail, Mad Women tells the story of what it took to break into the mad men's club with award-winning work like the "I Love NY" campaign while raising two daughters you want to grow up to be normal.


I was freelancing at McCann when ECD Nina DiSesa's book came out and corridors were abuzz with alternating takes on the book: "It's brilliant!" "It's slander!" "It's her swan song before getting out of the business!"I immensely enjoyed Seducing the Boys Club which is not only the well-told story of how DiSesa herself ceiling-crashed to the top, it's advice to women in her wake on how to "Lean In" and grab those titles and agency stock-options.

I worked down the hall from John Kenney at Ogilvy and have long admired his writing, not just his elegant copywriter prose, but his humor pieces in the New York Times and the New Yorker which are LOL-funny. So is Truth in Advertising, a new satire on the business, which is alternately sweet and sad and hilariously on target. Gwyneth Paltrow doing a diapers commercial that has to stop filming because the baby cast to be hers turns out to be black? Only a veteran of the business could come up with that.

What are the odds that two ex-copywriters from Ogilvy would come out with a novel set in advertising, at the same time? From the same publisher? Another debut novel from Simon and Schuster this season is my own: Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. It's a coming-of-middle age story about a woman and a business (advertising, of course.) It’s sort of like Mad Men thirty years later, from the point of view of an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. One of the themes explored is technology, and the book offers readers opportunities to further explore characters in a digitally enhanced epilogue. Advertising, meet Transmedia. (Hey, where better to peddle your wares than on your own blog?)

Happy reading!

my novel goes on sale today

I'll admit, when I started writing a book (um, ten years ago?!) I had no idea how difficult it would be, nor how many people would need to become involved in the making of it. I guess I'd thought a novel would be sort of like writing a veeerrrrry looooonnnnng commercial or print ad. And indeed, my first draft probably read like that. The agent I sent my first draft to mailed it back with a few kind words and also (kind) harsh ones, "A novel needs to tell a story. Yours doesn't." Back to the drawing board--er, keyboard--after some crying and gnashing of teeth. The next draft came a few years later (I was also, you know, writing for actual pay) until I had piles and piles of scenes and plotlines and my husband (tired of carrying the piles out to the car when we went upstate on weekends) suggested I devote a summer to finishing the novel, just to get it out of my system. And now, thanks to the interventions of him and a few others (which I'll save for more posts) I have a novel coming out today from Simon & Schuster. It's called Making It: A Novel of Madison Avenue. A story set in (where else?) Adland from the POVof an older, wiser, married Peggy Olson. (The book is not affiliated with AMC's Mad Men, need I say?) Feeling morose on a Monday? Cheer up by doing an adbroad a solid. Buy the book here. Each sale improves my ranking on Amazon by at least a thousand. Thanks!