You might be able to find an email address from a website they might maintain, or a Twitter handle from a search. That of course is only part of the effort, because that just means you've been able to direct a query outward, but may mean you'll never get an acknowledgment, or an answer back to your submission. And if the digital addresses are lacking, and you try and contact them at the publishing house with USPS mail...well, good luck with that one too. Someone still has to answer you.
I found myself shutout when I attempted to contact Mr. Jason Matthews, author of 'Red Sparrow' and 'Palace of Treason' at his publisher the old fashioned way, via USPS. Mr. Matthews has freshly written two CIA spy novels that read like news. If that's your kind of book, then both are recommended.
Well, Mr. Matthews (if that's his real name) lives in Southern California and may not be plugged into snail mail directed at him at his publisher. I've had that experience before, trying to reach an author through their publisher. Contact was established some other way, that now escapes me.
I tried Mr. Matthews's editor, Mr. Colin Harrison at Scribner's. I even offered a funny bit about Ulysses S. Grant and how he found he stopped getting mail when he stopped answering it. Thus, he took up stopping for good. I think others have joined him. Guys, it's working.
The question to either Mr. Matthews, or Mr. Harrison, was that two principal characters in the books are uncle and niece. Uncle Vanya ( I swear) and niece Dominika. Only his last name is spelled Egorov, and hers is Egorova. Pourquoi le difference in spelling, especially since she is the child of the Uncle's brother? You'd expect the surnames to be the same.
Did Dominika add the 'a' when she started working where the Uncle worked? You know, to avoid the appearance of nepotism? The fact that they both work for the new KGB, the SVR, doesn't seem strong enough to explain it. And a typo was ruled out-of-hand. Would have been way too many for a publisher to make.
I did take French in high school, and still maintain a smattering knowledge of the language. I know about genderized words. Le, la, the whole bit. What I seemed to have found out about Russian is that they genderize the last name. Thus, Vanya, the uncle's (I swear) last name is Egorov. The niece's last name is feminized by adding an 'a' to Egorov, making it Egorova. Thus, if she had a phone listing, it might be safe to expect that Dominika's name would appear in the phone directory as Egorova.
If in the old days this allowed weirdoes who might have been using phone directories to get to women in the phone book in motherland Russia and make heavy breathing phone calls, I'll never know. Maureen Dowd quipped after the first presidential debate with Al Gore and George Bush, that Mr. Gore's heavy breathing caught so well and amplified by the sound equipment and broadcast the world over was enough to make women remember why they got caller id in the first place.
The tactic in the States for obscene callers was to look for feminine first names in the phone book. This was circumvented by making the listing with only an initial of the first name. But, if you've got to be Egorova in the phone book, then no matter what the first name is, you've got to be female.
I've enjoyed finding the answer to my unanswered question for myself. At least I think I have. I'm willing to go with it.
It's unlikely the character Dominika's name was ever in the Russian phone book. Enough trouble finds her in both books to make a phone listing, or doorbell listing highly irrelevant.
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