By Pauline M. Millard
The Associated Press

NEW YORK - Lauren Weisberger is in a Barnes & Noble, fielding softballs from the audience as she promotes her anti-fashionista novel, The Devil Wears Prada.

Describe your "writing process." What are you working on now? Is the book really being made into a movie?

Then comes a zinger.

"So was Anna Wintour (editor-in-chief of Vogue, where Weisberger once worked as an assistant) as difficult as your Miranda Priestly character?"

Weisberger blushed. "I thought I was going to get through this without having to answer that," she responds.

"The first thing that people need to understand is that I am not the Andrea character and Anna Wintour is not the Miranda character," Weisberger says. "I was never as cynical as Andrea is. In fact, I like to think that Andrea starts a little wowed by the world before she starts to backpedal."

Her book, which began as a writing workshop project and is now a best-seller, is among several new books focused on the women's magazine industry. Weisberg's smirky novel is joined by In Full Bloom by Caroline Hwang and Fashionistas by Lynn Messina.

One about a guy

Stephen Glass added his autobiographical novel The Fabulist, about a young, disgruntled magazine writer whose career is unraveling, after he was fired by The New Republic for fabricating stories. His work and Weisberger's have received the most attention.

Weisberger says The Devil Wears Prada became a book somewhat accidentally.

When she graduated from Cornell University in 1999 and moved to New York City, Weisberger started looking for a job at a magazine. Like many other young hopefuls, she submitted a resume to Conde Nast and soon interviewed and landed a spot at Vogue as Wintour's assistant.

Weisberger stayed for about nine months before leaving for Departures magazine, a high-end travel magazine that let her do a little more writing. When her work day was over at Departures she sharpened her writing skills at a fiction writing seminar through the Writer's Voice. The Devil Wears Prada started out in the class as a series of vignettes.

"I never thought of it as a book," she says. "But everyone else in the class was writing chapters every week so I figured I should do the same."

Soon her teacher encouraged her to turn it into a book and to show it to a few agents. It was sold - unfinished - to Doubleday in June.

Only 100 pages were written. Now, more than 250,000 books are in print.

The book has gotten its share of bad reviews, some more personal then others. The New York Times ran two scathing reviews, one from former Harper's Bazaar editor Kate Betts.

"Of course, nobody would be interested in this book if Weisberger were spilling the beans about life under the tyrant of The New Yorker ( "The Devil Wore Brooks Brothers'?)" Betts wrote in The New York Times.

"I set out to write a fun, over-the-top book. This isn't great literature," Weisberger says. "I never set out to write anything that took itself too seriously or to be mean."

Author fired

Messina, meanwhile, was working as a freelance copy editor at InStyle magazine in New York when she got the idea for a novel in 2000. She took a few months off to write Fashionistas.

While the book was eventually bought by Red Dress Ink, an imprint of Harlequin dedicated to stories about single young women, she went back to InStyle. But she was asked to leave once her bosses found out about Fashionistas, from a blurb in Women's Wear Daily.

"I think the whole Anna Wintour factor in The Devil Wears Prada made people look," Messina says. "From there I think that interest spilled over into other books that revolved around magazines."

Caroline Hwang, a freelance magazine writer in New York, found herself somewhat pressured to write In Full Bloom after agents started seeking her out. She had written an essay for Newsweek magazine back in September 1998 about cultural identity and at the end of the piece was a blurb that said she was writing a book. When the agents started calling, Hwang realized she should start writing.

Age and life experience vary in the three books. Andrea in The Devil Wears Prada is 22, new to New York City and dying to get into the New Yorker via any means necessary, including logging a year as whip girl to Miranda Priestly.

Different characters

Vig Morgan of Fashionistas is pushing 30 and stuck in associate editor purgatory at the fictional magazine, Fashionista. Writing fluffy celebrity and fashion copy is quickly losing its appeal to her, so being part of a plan to overthrow the editor seems like a nice change of pace.

Meanwhile, Ginger Lee in In Full Bloom would love to write some of the fashion articles that Vig is shirking, instead of being an assistant at age 30 at her magazine, A La Mode.

The story of In Full Bloom revolves more around Ginger's struggle to get her Korean mother off her back about getting married to a nice Korean man.

"The book is more of a mother-daughter story and explores the culture gap," says Hwang. "The character just happens to work at a magazine."