When I sold my first novel to E.P. Dutton in 1988 for a
substantial advance, I thought I had it made as a writer. Richard Marek, the
editor who bought it and also the chief executive of Dutton, had been Robert
Ludlum’s first editor and the one question he had for me before he made the
offer was whether I’d be willing to write other similar novels.
Uh, sure. It had been my ambition from age 10 to be a writer
and I went into journalism to further that goal. When I first signed up with my
agent, June Hall, in London, she suggested pitching a nonfiction book first,
since they are so much easier to sell, even though my goal all along had been
to write fiction.
So in 1982 she got me in to see Lord Weidenfeld in his home
on the Embankment and he bought UK rights (he wanted global but June wanted to
make separate sales) to my nonfiction book on the debt crisis on the basis of a
10-minute pitch, without a word being written and not even an outline. We
subsequently sold U.S. rights to Doubleday (Phil Pochoda) and Canadian rights
to Lester & Orpen, Dennys (Louise Dennys).
The dream continued and Debt
Shock, as it became, got a full-page review in the New York Times Book
Review when it was published in 1984.
Those were the days. Dick Marek bought my novel, a financial
thriller entitled Gold, on the basis
of five chapters and a synopsis. He worked on it himself and had a number of
very helpful suggestions on plot, characters, writing – a great editor.
However, virtually the day in 1989 my novel was published, Penguin shut down
Dutton, firing all the editors, including Marek, and keeping it only as an
imprint. My book was orphaned without any support.
Working full time as a journalist, it turned out, was not
necessarily conducive to writing books, so my next proposal came in 1992 for an
ambitious labor of love – a book about post-Communist Europe based on Joel
Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America.
This book became The New Superregions of
Europe and Dutton, which had the option to buy my next book, exercised the
option and published it in 1994.
A number of things kept me from writing another book for a
while – changing jobs, a move back to the U.S. after 20 years in Europe,
divorce, parents’ illness and death. Then came 9/11, which prompted me to
abandon a political thriller I had been working that included a terrorist
attack on Washington. Just didn’t have the stomach for it (though Vince Flynn
and a number of other thriller writers have had great success with that plot).
I returned to an idea then that had caught my attention in
the years I spent covering Deutsche Bank – the building of the Baghdad Railway
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Deutsche Bank played a major role in
financing the railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad because the Kaiser was
very interested in completing a land link to the Indian Ocean (in Germany the
project was generally referred to as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway). The British,
concerned about a threat to their overseas empire in the subcontinent, were not
keen on the project and it became a pawn in the Great Power maneuvering over
the ailing Ottoman Empire.
Great stuff for an historical thriller, I thought, and I
worked on it for years, making a British peer who was an accomplished
Orientalist and a sometime agent for the British Foreign Office the protagonist
of what I hoped would become a series set in the Middle East just prior to and
during World War I.
I thought it would be a great field for adventure, intrigue
and a chance to revisit a Middle East that has vanished but is the stuff of
legend that lies deeply embedded in the subconscious of us Westerners. When I
finished the novel, I found an agent, Mel Parker, who was equally enthusiastic
about it. Mel had been a longtime editor in chief of the Book of the Month Club
and was used to having his finger on the pulse of what people would buy. He was
confident he could sell the book.
Alas, it was not to be. A publishing market rocked by
evolving technologies and then the financial crisis was floundering and making
it particularly difficult to sell fiction. The consolidation of the industry,
the focus on the bottom line, the disappearance of midlist authors had
transformed a cottage industry into a manufacturer and franchiser of
bestsellers. Editors no longer edited, they acquired, and they acquired books
that were similar to books that had just been successful, until by some fluke a
Da Vinci Code comes along and changes
the paradigm for what is considered successful.
Mel worked hard at it but we eventually had to accept there
was not a market for the book in the New York publishing world.
In the meantime, technology continued to evolve. The
Internet, social networking, smart phones destroyed the role of gatekeepers in
media, hitting newspapers, magazines and eventually book publishing. For books,
print on demand became an initial liberator, transforming the tainted world of
vanity publishing into something more credible. POD became possible because
Amazon brought the corner bookstore into everybody’s home.
It is, however, the ascendancy of the e-book in the past
couple of years that is truly transforming the world of books. Amazon’s Kindle
was revolutionary, and then the iPad definitively tipped the balance, not only
because of its own massive sales but because it increased the acceptability of
other e-readers. Now, it is said, sales of e-books exceed sales of print books.
Friends and colleagues of mine were reporting new success in
finding an audience for their unpublished books. Whereas even a few years ago,
the paradigm for self-publishing was to order up a hundred POD copies of your
book and pack them in your trunk to make the rounds of bookstores for signings,
the new paradigm now is to sell your book in digital format for $3 and promote
it through Facebook, Amazon and other powerful social networking tools.
Publishing houses may continue to have a role in
manufacturing bestsellers. Increasingly, they will seek their new acquisitions
among the growing stream of self-published books.
It has taken me some time to accept all this. I was spoiled
by earlier successes into thinking that my road was what I continued to think
of as the “high road.” But traditional publishing is about to be blown away.
There is no high road or low road, just a broad digital highway that allows
readers to find the books they are interested in and writers to find their
audience. I found a great packager to design my POD and e-book and my
historical thriller about the building of the Baghdad Railway, The Grand Mirage, has just been published,
under my imprint of Barnaby Woods Books.
Steve Hamilton's debut novel won both the Edgar and Shamus awards for first novel, and it is indeed very good. The writing is crisp, the voice fresh, the first-person main character, Alex McKnight, is well-drawn, able but flawed and mostly sympathetic.
