The email was intoxicating. It sat there in my inbox for three weeks, a relic I could return to for years — an early record of our unlikely, astounding success. The little-known athlete and the even-lesser-known writer, embarking on the impossible, selling their version of the Everyman sports story — the indelible life lived and championships won — to a major publishing house and winding up with a runaway bestseller, a PG-13 movie and the athlete’s future all sewn up as a fixture on the fifteen-grand-plus-a-pop motivational speaking circuit.
Seventeen publishers on that email. Seventeen of the biggest ones you’ve heard of. And the editors … the people at the height of their profession mentioned in the parentheses, the men and women with whom I’d have the honor of working, well, career-changers — all of them. Our highly respected literary agent had shoved our longshot proposal in front of these icons’ faces and it was all about to pay off.
Two sample chapters. A detailed chapter outline that stretched to twenty-nine pages, single-spaced. A marketing analysis replete with six compelling comparable titles, proof that books about “nobody” athletes really can sell and often do. People are tired of reading about billionaires who have had everything handed to them all their lives, we insisted and our agent agreed. It’s time for a story about a real person who just happens to be an athlete. Exactly. We all couldn’t have agreed more.
The email appeared the day the proposal went out to all seventeen publishers. I knew it was time to continue writing Chapter 3 and get moving because real deadlines would soon be arriving, along with a nice advance check. But I couldn’t continue. Not now.
For three weeks I stared at the email with the seventeen names and Googled them to death. I learned about all their winning titles. I read about how one of the editors works with his authors to get the most out of them. He’s tough, but he’s supportive. He knows how good they are. Hell, he wouldn’t have bought the damn book if he didn’t love it.
We heard back from the agent on a Thursday, which in summer in New York counts as a Friday. “A few said no,” he wrote, “but that’s what publishers do. Many are interested. We should know a lot more next week.”
Oh, we did. On Monday we learned of a Thursday conference call with a publisher who had real interest. During our powwow prior to the conference call, the agent informed us that only two publishers were left in the mix. The conference call lasted forty-eight minutes and went well, the agent told us.
The next week we heard nothing. The week after that, we found out that we had done the impossible. We had gone 0-for-17.
“We’re in a bad market,” the agent said. “He’s just not well-known enough for publishers to take a chance that the book will fail. They’re all protecting their jobs.”
And so on and so on. I was assured that it had nothing to do with me. The editors who wanted it had their hands tied when it came time for them to pry the money out of the suits. The project is now dead. We’re not willing to pitch it to minor publishers and watch it go ignored.
So now it’s time to come up with another idea: a YA spy thriller series about vampires who become zombies in a futuristic society without oxygen?
A super-charged political expose in which protesters and economists at a world summit clash and then decide that they’re all actually replicant arsonists hell-bent on creating a new Utopia from this dying Earth’s ashes?
A hybrid of “The Kite Runner” and “Marley and Me” in which a Bedouin family’s beloved camels stick up for their owners in light of racism and religious oppression?
Please let me know what you think. I’m ready to reply to that email.
***
Give Tom another hug right here …
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Travel memoir starring Laskey, Jablow, etc – I’d read that.
That sucks, man, sorry. You have to go to the richest publisher again and say, “What the fuck? It’s not going to, but even if it does fail you can afford it, beeeootch!”
The other think you can do is push the envelope on the whole e-book thing: Become the first author to sign independently with Kindle. Think of the advert power of Amazon and how much they would do with their 1st foray into self-publishing! Caveat: I may have no idea what I am talking about.
Either way, just keep writing. It’s what you love to do and you are good at it to boot.