NEW PUBLISHING COMPANY BETS ON PROVOCATIVE TITLE
Houston, January 2003. What do the president of an ad agency in Toronto, an engineer turned writer-artist in Scotland, and a classrom instructor in Utah have in common?
They are among Great Reads Books LLC's consortium of owners who are convinced J R Lankford's The Jesus Thief, their first title, will make bestseller lists worldwide.
Due out in March, Lankford's sweeping novel is about an attempt to clone Jesus using DNA stolen from The Shroud of Turin. GRB is committing significant resources to its publication and plans a repeat for the sequel, Risen.
It doesn't seem to matter that these three men and the six other owners live in three different countries (Canada, Ireland and the USA) and have yet to meet face-to-face. Or that they're white men and Lankford, a woman, is black. They were drawn together on the Internet by their passion for novels--reading them, writing them and now making this one available to the public.
Chuck Schwager, President of Polaris Healthcare Services in Massachusetts and Great Reads Book's initial "angel" said, "I take literature seriously and I finished Lankford's deeply compassionate book in two sittings over 36 hours. Her writing is delicious. It is clear, concise and provoking. Her vision is broad. Her plotting is superb. She deserves the chance for another book or two or ten. The experience of reading was so enjoyable, so intense and so powerful that I couldn't put the book down."
He followed her progress for a year, increasingly impressed by her writing.
"She is more than a uniquely talented author," says Dave Shields, Director of Marketing for a real estate development company in Utah. "When I heard about this venture, I wanted to participate and not only because The Jesus Thief is one of the most important novels I've ever read. I knew that waiting in the wings are a number of other terrific novels by talented writers."
He's referring to NovelDoc.com, the fiction workshop with high admission standards that Lankford founded in 1997. In it, authors help authors in ways inconceivable before the advent of the Internet. Lankford credits its revolutionary critique clinics with having sped her finalization of The Jesus Thief.
Great Reads Books plans to accept submissions exclusively from NovelDoc authors, thus their slogan: When readers rave, we publish. In 2003, the company will launch its second novel about a crime victim who takes on the NRA: Paula Sherman and The National Rifle Association by Lynn Hoffman.
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Great Reads Books LLC, P. O. Box 2112, Bellaire, TX 77402, 713-668-5825.