How Opal Got Her Book Signed

May 8, 2006 by admin | No comments

And here’s the missing piece of the puzzle: how Opal got her book signed.

A Passage to Harvard

It was, unsurprisingly, IvyWise [college admissions company] founder Katherine Cohen (Brown ‘89; Yale PhD ‘97) who got Viswanathan into the book-writing business. Cohen (author, “Rock Hard Apps: How to Write a Killer College Application”) wondered why Viswanathan hadn’t listed her novel-in-progress on her résumé. You can almost see her application-glazed eyes lighting up: Okay, here’s our pitch: “Not just another high school newspaper editor-in-chief, Indian American science nerd!”

Which is where the next round of packaging comes in. Cohen sent Viswanathan’s work to her own agent, who hooked up the teenager with Alloy Entertainment, a book packager (yes, this is really a business) that specializes in churning out teen-lit like so many Moschino miniskirts. Deeming her original concept too dark, Alloy “helped Kaavya conceptualize and plot the book,” according to the company president.

It’s no excuse, but with all this third-party positioning, is it any wonder that a person — especially a teenage person — could forget (or ignore) the fact that some of the writing in her book is not actually hers?

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