Los Angeles Times writer Mary Mcnamara follows The Canal House author Mark Lee down to an East Texas beauty parlor/bookstore and into the heart of a new force in publishing: the book club circuit.

With their rhinestones and leopard skin and banana pudding potluck, the Pulpwood Queens may look like the antithesis of the New York publishing chic elite, but beneath those tiaras is the newest marketing force in a flailing multi-billion dollar industry.

And the Queens know it.

What is happening here, quietly, in Jefferson, Texas, population 2,100, is the collision, and collusion, of several potent cultural forces at work in the combustible publishing industry — regional color and national mega-marketing, plain-folks intimacy with an eye on the camera.

But mostly, it’s proof that even amid our high–tech, mondo–corporate culture, the little guy can still get a piece of the action. All it takes is a little ingenuity and a lot of moxie.

Lee, for his part, arranged this trip himself. He knows, from experience, that unless you are J.K. Rowling or Hillary Rodham Clinton, your publisher is not going to send you on a 20–city book tour. He also knows that book clubs drive the fiction market, as much as anything can drive a market so impossible to predict. Many mid– or low–list authors now automatically create Web sites devoted to their books, do phone interviews with book groups around the country, and generally throw themselves at the public like an alchemist tossing powders on a flame, hoping for that magical explosion.

Lee sent Patrick his book — a story of love, war and moral choices among characters who include a foreign correspondent, a photojournalist and a doctor/relief worker — with the knowledge that if she picked it, his sales would instantly increase by at least 300, not to mention the inevitable word of mouth and displays in an array of bookstores across the South. When Patrick chose it for June’s read, he was happy to log on to MapQuest and figure out just where Jefferson, Texas, was in relationship to the Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport.

Lee’s road trip rolls into North Louisiana, guided by book club franchiser Kathy Patrick, in an adventure that’s “one part Empire of Oprah, one part ‘Steel Magnolias’ and one part Walt Whitman standing on the street corner hawking ‘Leaves of Grass.’ ” Read more. Read chapter one of The Canal House here.