Among the many BEA tasks for Betsy Burton, co-owner of The King's English in Salt Lake City, is to find the first novels that she thinks her customers might not hear about from other sources. Those galleys are our life blood. Without them we wouldn't have the knowledge to stay ahead. Burton said she would be scanning the aisles at BEA for first fiction but that she is a little leery of the publisher's push with new talent. That's another reason why we need galleys.
First fiction is certainly popular when it comes to galleys.
Based in an apartment building in Bombay, the novel explores the many layers of Indian life. Even better than a galley, Harcourt Brace will have actual hardcover giveaways of Under the Skin , a first novel by Michel Faber. Faber, who has been everything from a pickle and medical guinea pig, has written a comic paradoxical allegory about a woman who picks up a cast of hitchhikers in the Scottish Highlands. As so many new writers are compared to two known writers, Faber has been called a cross between Roald Dahl and Franz Kafka. One bookseller who said he was not going to BEA predominantly to grab galleys was Robert Fader, buyer for Posman's Books in New York.