Soaps And Serials

Our man has been dreaming up new business ideas since his days in the sandbox, only to watch others make a business of them. But this is the last straw.

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It just isn't fair. I've had only three commercial ideas in my life -- and now they've all been done.

You know the weighted doughnut that ball players slide on their bats as they take practice swings? I thought of that. Even as a six-year-old hopelessly devoted to the New York Yankees, I knew swinging two or three bats together to warm up was dumb. But apparently, so did others. Hillerich & Bradsby Co., the folks who make the Louisville Slugger, were recently selling the On-Deck Bat Weight (U.S. patent 3,521,833) for under $10.

Idea Number 2 was automobile tape decks. That way, on long trips my parents couldn't subject me to hours of listening to Andy Williams singing "Moon River" on the radio. With a built-in tape player, I could banish Andy forever and listen to somebody good -- like the Shirelles. I lost out on that one, too. Tape decks started turning up in cars a few years later, in 1969.

But my best idea, the one in retrospect that would have let me retire at age 10, involved Napoleon Solo, the man from U.N.C.L.E. In its first year, "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." aired at 8 p.m. No problem there. But the following season, NBC moved the show to 10 p.m., well past my bedtime. I begged to stay up, but my folks didn't hear me. Neither did NBC. Hauling out my father's battered black Remington, I typed a letter to the network pleading for copies of the scripts. If I couldn't watch the show, I said, at least let me read it.

NBC never answered -- but Sidney R. Seltzer has, and that's why I'm frustrated. Some 20 years after my inspiration, Sid Seltzer has taken my idea and turned it into Pioneer Communications Network Inc.

Pioneer takes the scripts of soap operas ("Days of Our Lives" and "The Young and the Restless") and of serials ("Dallas" and "Knots Landing") and turns them into books. The novels, which are published monthly by Seltzer and his staff of seven, started showing up in supermarkets and bookstores last May. And to add insult to my injury, Seltzer has already taken the company public. Its NASDAQ listing is SOAP.

Now, if Sid Seltzer were an agent or a Hollywood producer, with all kinds of contacts, I'd understand why he -- and not me -- was destined to be rich. But he came up with this idea when he was at Xerox Corp., where he was director of new-product development for the educational publications division. You know what's worse? Seltzer's not even a fan of these shows. Maybe he'll catch an occasional episode of "Dallas" or "Dynasty," but he's yet to see a daytime soap.

So how did he come up with my idea? I'll let him tell you himself:"

"I was negotiating a deal with ABC for Xerox. And while I am talking to an executive there, I am staring at the three television monitors he has on the wall. It is the middle of the afternoon, and they are all showing soap operas. And I say to myself, 'That is very interesting.' Romance novels were hot at the time [1979], and I thought there might be an opportunity here. I asked the guy from ABC if anyone had ever tried to turn the soaps into books."

The answer was a qualified no. Years before, he recalled, a couple of publishers had done books based on soap operas, but they didn't do well.For that matter, neither have books based on some of the most popular prime-time television shows. "People see television every day," says Lester Borden, vice-president and general manager of Columbia Pictures Merchandising. "It is hard to get them to respond to a book based on a TV series. We do well on movie tie-ins and even TV miniseries, but television shows are another matter."

So why does Seltzer think he'll succeed with my idea? "We are different," he says. "First, we are a continuity series -- we'll be out there with a new book every month. The previous attempts to do soap opera books were one-shots, and you just can't put the necessary promotion behind one book like you can for a series. When people tried to do more than one book, they picked action/adventure shows like 'Miami Vice,' geared to men. And men don't buy books."

He's right about that. According to Book Industry Study Group Inc., "Book readers are most likely to be white, female, and under the age of 40" -- very much the same female market A. C. Nielsen finds watching daytime soaps and driving the ratings for nighttime serials. To hook these women, Seltzer hopes to provide them with the definitive history of their favorite shows. "There is no way at all for anyone to go back to the very beginning of a soap opera," Seltzer says. And since some of these soap operas started on radio in the 1930s, Seltzer's source material guarantees he can turn out books for decades to come.

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