If Sonny Barger can do it...

This should provide inspiration (of the pull your hair, bang your head on the wall kind) for the aspiring novelists among you. Publishers Lunch reports that Ralph "Sonny" Barger, who rode at the head of the Hells Angels for many years, and who has his own line of beer, has sold his second thriller 6 Chambers, 1 Bullet for six figures. His protagonist is biker Patch Kinkaid, who "lands in prison only to use the experience to his advantage." William Morrow will publish. Sonny's website has the news that he will be on book tour in Paris for a week in April.

Also for Lunch:

• Risa Green's About to Burst, "in which a high school guidance counselor at posh Beverly Hills High becomes pregnant, thoroughly unprepared for motherhood, and learns what it's all about from two of the most unlikely 'motherhood mentors,' the troubled teenage daughter of a movie mogul and a nerdy boy." NAL gets the book, and another as well.

• Eli Wallach's memoir The Good, the Bad, and Me, about the actor's "early days in Brooklyn and his over 50-year acting career in New York, Hollywood, and Europe." Harcourt buys.

Separately, CaliforniaAuthors.com has updated its list of upcoming books. Among them is POPLORICA: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America, due March 31 from HarperResource by Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger. Smith is a novelist, former editor of Orange Coast Magazine and at the Register, now a senior editor at the L.A. Times Magazine; this is his first non-fiction book. Kiger is a journalist as well who wrote the cover story in yesterday's LAT magazine.

The book is made up of essays about weirdly pivotal, unappreciated moments in American culture. They include Betty Ford's intervention, Alfred Kinsey's disastrous honeymoon, Julius Erving's landmark slam dunk at the 1976 ABA All-Star game (which they say made Dr. J one of the first crossover black athletes and turned pro basketball into an above-the-rim game) and the invention of the superabsorbent disposable diaper. Naturally, there is a website.