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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Document//EN"
+   "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0/oebdoc1.dtd">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/x-oeb1-document; charset=utf-8" />
+<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/x-oeb1-css" href="DrBillBio.css" />
+<title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: Publishing</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+<h1>Publishing</h1>
+
+<p>Bill Wattenburg is also the comical author Will Harvey who once entertained
+nationwide audiences on major TV shows such as “The Phil Donahue Show” and
+“The Tonight Show”. Wattenburg’s media career began when he wrote a surprising
+best-seller while he was the president of a scientific laboratory in Berkeley.
+He had written short stories during his college days. He told us that in 1971 a
+group of women at a University cocktail party, who had read some of his short
+stories, bet him that he couldn’t write a book that was funnier than the New
+York Times’ then best-seller on sexual fantasies,
+<i>The Sensuous Woman</i>. So, he whipped
+out a book for them in three weeks with the title <i>How To Be Good To A Woman</i>,
+which they liked enough to make hundreds of Xerox copies of the manuscript to
+send to friends all over the country. But New York publishers said it wouldn’t
+sell when he tried to give it to them to publish, free—so his friends could buy
+cheaper copies. Unconvinced, he changed the title of the book to <i>How To Find
+And Fascinate A Mistress</i>, changed “woman” to “mistress”
+in the text, and had a Berkeley printer produce the first five thousand
+hardcover with a catchy jacket designed by his engineering draftsmen. He then
+gave away 200 copies to airline flight attendants (for whom he had written a complimentary
+chapter in the book). Orders began coming in from all over the country.</p>
+
+<p>Three months later, his kitchen publishing company, Montgomery Street Press,
+had shipped over sixty-thousand hardcover copies to every major bookstore chain
+in the country. The New York publishing houses that could have had the book for
+nothing were soon bidding for the paperback rights. Pocketbooks (Simon and
+Schuster) finally bought the paperback rights for a reported $650,000.
+Pocketbooks sent him out on a national promotion tour to a few major TV shows.
+Requests then poured in from other shows all over the country who wanted him.
+Over the next year, he appeared as funnyman Will Harvey on over 130 local and
+national TV and radio shows. He was invited back to some major shows several
+times in 1972. Paperback sales of his book climbed to over 2,000,000 as he
+tickled audiences all over the country with his cowboy humor and the image of
+the hapless male struggling to keep up with the sexually aggressive women of the
+burgeoning feminist movement.</p>
+
+<p>A former Pocketbooks executive has told us that Wattenburg received an
+advance for the paperback rights of “over $500,000”. She remembered
+that he caused quite a problem at Simon and Schuster during the bidding for the
+paperback rights to his book. She recalled: “He didn’t have an agent. He
+thought that our standard royalty contracts with authors were crazy. He demanded
+a guaranteed cash payment up front—not conditioned on future book sales, as was
+the usual case. He cleaned up after that. I think he still owns the
+hardcover. … He wouldn’t stay at some of the best hotels we booked him into
+during the promotion tours. He found out that travel expenses were being
+deducted from his royalties after sales went above, I think, 2,000,000. … He
+drove us nuts. We had to plead with some famous newspaper columnists and book
+reviewers to meet him for interviews at Holiday Inns. …”</p>
+
+<p>Before it was over, the book that he had tried to give away had earned him
+over $1,300,000! It was published in six countries. Bantam books bought the
+rights to his next book for an undisclosed sum. He says he still has to explain
+on the radio to women who like to tease him that “in no way could I ever
+live up to the exploits of Will Harvey.”</p>
+
+<p>We asked him in 1990 why he didn’t write more books. He said: “You can
+sometimes beat the pros at their own game once. But they don’t often let you get
+away with it a second time. It’s much easier to find another field.”</p>
+
+</body>
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