Jules Vernon (yes, she’s heard all the jokes) has made a career out of two-year stints at jobs.  She’s battled what she calls Impostor Syndrome—the secret belief that she’s not nearly as good at anything as people might think—for her whole life.  Now she’s handed a plum job on a platter, as a rookie production coordinator on Hollywood’s newest reality TV show.

In AMERICAN IDLE, Alesia Holliday takes a hilariously entertaining jab at the insanity that is reality TV, while introducing us to a charming heroine who confronts the chaos of broadcast TV production, a hypochondriac boss with bubonic plague, a murderous coworker, and a hot guy who thinks she’s an alcoholic, just to discover that reality isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—and sometimes finding yourself is just a matter of standing still to look.

 
AMERICAN IDLE marks Dorchester Publishing’s leap into the trade paperback market and is the launch book of the Making It imprint for chick lit.  The book will be supported by a nationwide marketing campaign in the print, online and radio media.  Further titles will include more chick lit–style romances and a new fantasy line.

Holliday first received national attention with her nonfiction book, E-mails to the Front, for which she toured with best-selling author Suzanne Brockmann.  In August, she also turns her hand to young adult fiction with the novel SUPER WHAT?, which will be published under Dorchester’s Smooch imprint. 

 MORE ABOUT AMERICAN IDLE

Auditions

Jules’s first day on the job consists of auditioning 472 bad singers (and two good ones) for the finals of POP STAR LIVE!, a cheesy American Idol-meets-Survivor wannabe.  From there, it’s a multi-city tour to round up the rest of the contestants.  Along the way, she has to contend with a size-zero judge who has Diva down to an art form, a hypochondriac judge who drops his pants in her hotel room to convince Jules that he’s dying from testicle fungus, a contestant who’s part of the Indiana mob (“we’re big in bottled water”), and a coworker who’s trying to kill her with bad mayonnaise. 

Hollywood

When the show gets to Hollywood and live TV, all the latent and not-so-latent neuroses of the crew and contestants are shoved to center stage.  Jules tries to maintain an oasis of calm in the center of the madness, which almost works, until People magazine assigns a team to follow her 24/7 to profile her as The Face Behind Reality TV.

Countdown

When Jules meets the hunky new set designer, her year of self-imposed celibacy suddenly seems like a bad idea.  But a very hot contestant who may or may not have been a gang member, one of the show’s judges, and her father’s set-Jules-up-with-a-blind date habit may all get in the way of true love (or even finding the perfect orgasm).  As Jules fights to make a success of the one job for which she finally believes she’s good enough, she wonders if romance is easier when you know which version of yourself is Reality and which is just Made for TV.

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Read the first chapter of American Idle.

Find out more about Making It.