The Marketer

While every writer knows that marketing must play some part in a book’s creation, few have the professional expertise and natural talent that Jan Karon has brought to her books from the start. Karon got her first, entry-level job in the advertising industry around 1955, when she was an eighteen-year-old mother with a three-year old child. Over the next three decades, she moved further and further up in the field, receiving promotions and awards for work that showcased her verbal and visual talent and natural wit.

Her success eventually gave her the financial resources to quit advertising and become an author. As the archive shows, she used the skills she had built in her first career to achieve spectacular success in her second. As an unknown, older, first-time novelist, whose first book did not follow any of the conventions of successful popular novels of the time, finding an audience was no small task. Yet she knew that her passion — to create a wholesome, spiritually healing literature — was also a gaping hole in the book market. Shown here are artifacts that reveal how Karon, like all writers, pushed hard to extend the reach of her message to a larger and larger audience.

Above: A letter from Nancy Olsen to Jan Karon, 15 December 1994 (Box 49).

Building a Network

An undated photograph of Nancy Olsen (left), Jan Karon, and unknown man (Box 86.13)

The letter shown here marks a transformative moment in the history of Mitford. After being rejected by numerous mainstream publishers, Karon’s first novel, “At Home in Mitford,” had been acquired by Lion, a publisher of Christian-oriented books. Believing strongly in her work’s potential for widespread appeal, Karon almost immediately began to seek a new publisher. Her tenacity was rewarded when a serendipitous chain of events put her in contact with Liz Darhansoff, an influential New York literary agent. Mary Richardson, Karon’s neighbor in Raleigh, had passed along a copy of “At Home in Mitford” to Nancy Olson, the legendary owner of the iconic local bookshop, Quail Ridge Books.

Enamored by the book, Olson introduced Karon to Darhansoff, who then put Karon in contact with Carolyn Carlson at Penguin Books. Thanks to Olson’s introduction, Karon was able to re-negotiate her contract with Lion and publish her third Mitford novel, “These High Green Hills”, with both Viking Penguin and Lion. Following that publication, Karon left Lion and signed exclusively to Viking Penguin, one of the most prestigious of literary imprints.