'Those people don't read' That old notion was just one roadblock auto racer Burt Levy encountered on the way to selling his novel about a very hot sport. By Carolyn Alessio, Chicago Tribune deputy editor, Books Burt Levy built a career on the knowledge that a successful test drive depends upon a product the customer can't resist. He has extended this philosophy from early stints as a car salesman and maker of leather vests to other areas of his life: racing vintage autos, managing a packaging and labeling firm and, most recently, promoting his first novel, an auto epic called "The Last Open Road."
"You can't have a product without PR," Levy, 52, is fond of saying. He whipped up interest in his novel by pressing the flesh at the raceways where he competed as a driver. Before St. Martin's Press accepted the novel and released it this spring, Levy had sold $150,000 worth of the self-published version, one customer at a time.
"I'd be out there at a racetrack corn-beefing (chewing the fat) with a guy, and I'd just say, 'Read a few pages. Give it a test drive,' " Levy said during an interview at his Oak Park office.
These days Levy rides in the PR passenger seat, anxiously monitoring St. Martin's efforts to promote his novel to a wider audience with a marketing campaign that could never be as fervent as Levy's own. Relinquishing control both relieved him of responsibility and made him a little uneasy.
Not long ago, he admitted to being "sad" when he learned that St. Martin's printed only 6,000 copies of his novel, a figure the editors initially kept from him. (A typical first press run from a large publishing house rarely dips below 15,000 copies.)
But Levy didn't indulge his disappointment. "There's a saying in vintage racing," he said. "You have to go as fast as you can, no matter how slow that is."
"It's chancy to have an unknown author with a screwy subject," he acknowledged.
Levy's good-natured pragmatism and natural salesmanship were some of the qualities that convinced St. Martin's to take a risk on the novel.
"No book is worth it in itself," said senior editor Michael Denneny, who championed the novel. "Burt's smart; if he has a criticism or is trying to push us, he's been a salesman long enough to know that having a tantrum on the phone is not the way to get something done."
Levy developed his car smarts and business savvy simultaneously, though the process took years. Breaking into the brusque world of publishing with a niche-market novel wasn't the first time Levy has been a pioneer of sorts. Growing up in Winnetka, he had an anomalous penchant for hot rods. Even as a teenager, Levy says, he wanted to do two things: race and write. Unfortunately, nobody in his family was particularly mechanical or literary. The closest he had to a role model was his Uncle Howard, who was well-read and drove a Porsche that Levy got to ride in at funerals.
Inspired, Levy began to scavenge car parts and haul them home. "I'd go out to the garage and sit around an engine like a kid around a campfire," he said. "I started reading Road and Track and I bought a go-kart."
After two attempts at college (he left Michigan State University and Columbia College after accruing 280 credit hours but no degree), he drifted to Colorado, where he worked as a dishwasher and wrote a futuristic novel that "stunk." Then he headed out to California where he took a job at a leather vest factory in Oakland. "It was in the '60s," the balding Levy said. "I had hair and it was long."
Accelerate a few years to 1974, with Levy settled back in the Chicago area, newly married to Carol, an actress, and the owner of a Triumph TR3 with "Just Married" announced on the back in stick-on letters. A hybrid of other Triumph TR3s, the car contained several salvaged parts from Levy's first racecar, named My Pound of Flesh.
"As a mechanic, I was like Dr. Frankenstein," Levy said, "taking pieces from all different cars to try and make my car go faster."
The method backfired, and the monster turned on Levy. At the first race after his marriage, he was out on the track fighting for the lead when the car's throttle linkage fell apart.
"Some idiot - me - forgot to put a cotter pin in. When I came out of the pit, I was a couple of laps behind, but I took off anyway, like a scalded cat, and I rolled the car after everyone else was done racing."
More lessons in hubris and humility followed, including the failure of Mellow Motors, the Chicago auto repair shop opened by Levy and his wife. Several years later, when he was a salesman for Chicago's Loeber Motors, a Rolls-Royce convertible was stolen from him at gunpoint during a test drive. (Story) But none of these harrowing experiences-not even a raucous stint as a stunt car driver for the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers" - would quite prepare Levy for the brusque, high-speed world of New York publishing.
In 1994, after seven years of writing (in addition to his day job and frequent freelancing for several car magazines), Levy finished his novel manuscript. "The Last Open Road," a nostalgic tour of racing in the 1950s, revolves around a young Italian mechanic in New Jersey who is mesmerized both by the engine of an XK120 Jaguar and by Julie Finzio, his boss' voluptuous niece.
Levy set the novel in the '50s for several reasons: People still raced cars on open roads, and the racecars didn't all look the same, as today's do. In short, Levy yearned to return to a Norman Rockwell kind of time, when the "TV news didn't bring misery into the world every night."
Yet Levy claims not to have overly romanticized the time period, pointing to an African-American character in the novel who was an ace mechanic but was offered only the demeaning title of "car porter." This character, Levy said, was evidence of people excluded from the "national consciousness." THINK FAST INK MOTORSPORTS PROMOTIONS 1010 LAKE ST., SUITE 103 · OAK PARK, IL 60301 · 708.383.7203 · FAX 708.383.7206 thinkfast@mindspring.com |