HarperCollins boasts of signing Canada’s No. 1 gossip columnist to a book deal. “Shinan Govani’s pitch written on back of cocktail napkin,” their press release says — a cliché parodied by Joe Queenan in a Fast Company article in 1999, which described the American Hall of Fame plan to mount an exhibition of 1,215 such napkins. The lack of flow charts, graphs and decision trees on the napkins provided the necessary space for ingenuity to flourish.

"The cocktail-napkin industry is proud of the role it has played in shaping the industrial landscape of America," says Len Cavuto, chairman of the Great Lakes Cocktail Napkins Manufacturers Association. "By making available a tasteful literary appurtenance to the entrepreneurial community, we feel that we have contributed in no small measure to making the American dream come true. Remember that the next time you sop up a spilled Bud with our napkins. Yes, our products are absorbent. But they are so much more."

Really, though, National Post columnist Govani has spent the past year musing about how to write a roman-a-clef reflecting his experiences on the society beat. And never lacking for self-deprecation toward his daily tasks: making boldface names out of overpaid chefs, TV’s past and present Designer Guys, and former colleagues who acrimoniously left the National Post — a scheme designed to keep the embers burning while he waits to be fed the occasional celebrity scoop.

The ability to do this in Canada for almost 10 years must mean Govani is a natural born fiction writer. Now he’s going to try it for real.

“I think he has something unique to say,” claims HarperCollins editorial director Jennifer Lambert. “The column he writes isn’t just about hot tidbits. He’s a real raconteur — one who spins a great web of contacts, except a lot of what goes on in the people’s lives is stuff they don’t want to see in print.”

Bold Face Names, the working title of Govani's book, will therefore blend fictional, semi-fictional and real life characters to follow “the glamourous career of a gossip columnist whose life is turned upside down when he’s forced to babysit a mysterious Hollywood D-list starlet who is hiding something shocking.”

Chick lit inspired by the Canadian media lifestyle could’ve almost qualified as a trend two years ago: Lambert worked on How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad, and HarperCollinsCanada scored a hit with The Continuity Girl by Leah McLaren. The sales pitch on both books was that the fabulous life ain’t always so fabulous  — a message for exasperated everywomen to take to heart.

Govani is traipsing into a slightly different genre, though, one that enthused relatively few readers in the United States. Jared Paul Stern — the Ottawa-raised contributor to the New York Post’s Page Six column until he was dismissed amidst extortion allegations — signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster in 2006, even though the deal was cancelled the following summer.

“Gossip Gets a Book Deal, but What About Sales?” asked The New York Times, pointing to the fact that 4% Famous, a novel by New York magazine columnist Debroah Schoeneman, sold just 4,000 copies in hardcover. And another ex-Page Six scribe, Ian Spiegelman, was estimated to have sold just a 1,000 copies of his roman-a-clef about a gossip-mongerer, Welcome to Yesterday.

“There was no genre when I wrote it,” emails Spiegelman, who is currently the weekend attendant at Gawker. “The only genre I even thought about when I was writing it was noir mystery.  The process of writing and getting it published took three years in all, and it was only toward the end of that when I found out that most of those other books were in the works.

“All I can do is write what's in my head as well as I possibly can. What happens after that has nothing to do with me.”

But specialists in online schadenfreude haven’t translated to the shelves, either. The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media, released last fall, sold in the low-to-mid hundreds. And a bound version of Go Fug Yourself hasn’t fared much better.

Shinan Govani, however, hasn’t made his name by being nasty — the most acerbic he gets is reveling in his own ridiculousness.

“Maybe he’ll be the Canadian Capote trashing thinly-disguised members of the equestrian class,” guesses Frank editor and publisher Michael Bate. “But I can’t imagine he can afford to be too candid. He’d risk being cut off.

“And the Toronto market is a small pond — it won’t play outside that, even if I’m looking forward to reading it and guessing who’s who.

“Which raises another point: Are there sufficient numbers of larger-than-life characters so that we’ll even know who he’s referring to?”

Bold Face Names has a manuscript deadline of October, giving new socialites on the scene all spring and summer to wiggle into its pages. Publishing date is set for the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival — a reflection of faith in Govani’s high-profile employability, if not the newspaper he’ll continue to file columns for.

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