Somewhat ironically for one of the country’s leading PR practitioners, Terry Fallis was conducting media interviews Wednesday rather than arranging them.
The co-founder and vice-chariman of Ottawa and Toronto-based PR agency Thornley Fallis spent much of the day juggling media requests after his 2007 novel The Best Laid Plans was named the winner of the CBC’s 10th annual Canada Reads competition.
“I’ve been describing it as a head-on collision between shock and joy,” said Fallis shortly before driving to Brantford, Ont. for a book reading. “It’s an amazing and wonderful turn of events. I didn’t expect the novel to be anywhere near the top 40, let alone the top 10, then the top five. It just kept getting more surreal as the days passed.”
This year’s version of the so-called “battle of the books” competition saw Fallis’ novel, which focuses on a reluctant first-time politician, beat out the late Carol Shields’ final novel Unless and Ami McKay’s The Birth House.
It joins a list of prior Canada Reads winners that includes Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, the late Paul Quarrington’s King Leary, and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.
A book lover with a fondness for comedic novels, Fallis determined there weren’t enough books in that particular milieu and so set out to write one of his own. While spending weekdays overseeing a thriving 45-person PR practice that counts Rogers Communications, Royal Bank of Canada and Pfizer Canada among its clients, Fallis wrote The Best Laid Plans late on Friday nights and early Saturday mornings.
It took him nearly a year to write the novel, and he then went the customary aspiring author route of sending out query letters, plot synopses and sample chapters to “dozens and dozens” of agents and publishers across the country.
“I waited and waited, and followed up, and waited and waited, and was greeted by a deafening silence,” he says. “I just could get no traction going the traditional route.”
Fallis subsequently issued a chapter-by-chapter podcast of the novel–which garnered between 4,000 and 5,000 downloads–before selling about 1,500 self-published copies. After winning the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2008, the novel was picked up by McClelland & Stewart, which also published the sequel The High Road last year.
Fallis said that McLelland & Stewart has ordered up another 20,000 copies of the book in the wake of the Canada Reads victory. “It puts it in a whole different stratosphere,” he said.
In a publishing environment where the likes of Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol Palin is contracted to write a memoir, Fallis said it’s increasingly difficult for aspiring writers to attract attention.
He said that the rise of eBooks and the iPad and the Kindle represent a possible way forward for the publishing industry. “I like to think that represents an opportunity for the publishing world as much as it is considered by some to be a threat,” he said.
Fallis is currently working on a third novel that eschews the political realm. He hinted that future work could tackle the PR world, but is adamant that it won’t be an indictment of the industry, however.
“It’s been very good to me the last 20 years, so I won’t be eviscerating it,” he said. “It’ll be a fond look at it.”
