Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 50

What Good Agents Know

Let’s get back to my series about Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point from www.storygrid.com.  Once the magazine piece debuted in The New Yorker, it was smooth sailing from there on in, right?  Not exactly. 

So a longform piece like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point in the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker is a slam dunk easy sell as a book project, right? It went from four thousand words in a magazine to seven figures worth of guaranteed book advance just based on its level of professionalism and readability.

Gladwell’s literary agent Tina Bennett probably just called up Random House and Doubleday and Little Brown and HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press and Houghton Mifflin and Viking etc. and asked their big nonfiction book editors to read Gladwell’s article and then call back with offers, right?

The hard part for her was over at that point.

Signing Gladwell was the big win for her. There were probably a score or more of book agents pounding on his door to get him on their client list since his first piece, Blowup, appeared in The New Yorker, right?

Once Bennett beat out the hoards of other hungry young agents wining and dining Gladwell the rest of her work was autopilot city.

I mean there’s a hard and fast process in place for agents to convert great Story ideas into guaranteed book advances, right?

Once you have the sponsorship of a big literary agency, like Bennett did working at Janklow & Nesbit, then all you have to do is plug into the system—that old boys and girls network. If the stuff you represent is fantastic (and who wouldn’t immediately recognize that The Tipping Point was masterful work) you’re set. You just field offers, funnel off 15% of the proceeds and pound the streets for more clients. In time, that Hamptons or Berkshire country home is yours.

Right? That’s the way it works, right?

No. That’s not how it works at all.

Here is what I know for sure.

Selling a magazine article as a book is extremely difficult. Most in the business would tell you it’s more difficult than selling original material.
If you have nothing “on the page” explaining specifically how a magazine article could become a book, you have no business calling an editor and asking them to make an offer.  Even asking them to read the thing in the first place takes Chutzpah.
I’d wager that Gladwell had very few agents pursuing him. I’d even make a confident guess that Tina Bennett was the only one. I’d even guess that she didn’t “pursue” him. She met him through a friend and over time the two of them thought maybe working together could be fun.
There is no ironclad 100% reliable process for converting an idea for a book into a commissioning contract from a publishing house. Working for a big agency can get your phone call returned, but it will not get an editor to take you seriously.  If you blow the pitch, your Ivy League suit or your close ties to Hollywood or the fact that your mother plays bridge with the publisher mean absolutely nothing—actually worse than nothing. Subconsciously, the editor will enjoy rejecting your project because he hates the Ivy League, thinks Hollywood is filled with idiots, and can’t really stand his publisher or bridge.

Here’s how I know.

I’ve made a living on both sides of the buy/sell transaction.

And if you as an agent do not know how editors think you will not get them to raise the remarkable amount of courage it takes them to walk into their publisher’s office—interrupting his or her afternoon cocktail or cup of tea—and ask that the company back their hunch that a bunch of words they’ve read will contribute to the company’s corporately mandated 10% net return on dollars invested.

Okay that’s a sufficiently dramatic and longwinded answer.

Good agents know how editors think.

So how do editors think?  That’s up next.

The Artist’s Journey, #7

Continuing our serialization of The Artist’s Journey … to refresh our memory, the primary thesis of this book is that our evolution as writers and artists hits an inflection point on that day when we realize that our Searching Years are over, our questing dues have been paid (in other words, our “hero’s journey” has reached its completion), and we must now advance into a second journey, in which for the first time we with full awareness and seriousness embrace our calling as artists. At that point, we “turn pro” and start asking the questions all artists must ask of themselves on their creative journeys: “Who am I? What is my gift? What work was I put on the planet to do?” 

If you’re just plugging into the series for the first time, click on the following links to access the first six parts of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.

26. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS ABOUT ACCESSING THE UNCONSCIOUS

You can attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, get a degree in Literature from Harvard, hang on your wall a framed MFA from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. You can serve in the Navy SEALs in Afghanistan, survive heroin addiction in East St. Louis. You can break your back at hard labor, break your heart in love, break your balls in the school of hard knocks.

None of it will do a damn bit of good if you can’t sit down and open the pipeline to your muse.

The artist’s journey is about that.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else counts.

27. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY LASTS THE REST OF YOUR LIFE

There is no other journey in this lifetime after the artist’s journey (other than, perhaps, the transition to the next life).

Once you board this train, you’re on it to the end of the line.

 

B  O  O  K    T  H  R  E  E
P O R T R A I T   O F   T H E   A R T I S T

 

28. WHAT IS AN ARTIST?

Before we dig deeper into the nature of the artist’s journey let’s pause for a moment and ask ourselves, “What exactly is an artist?

What qualities can we attribute to this peculiar subspecies of the human race?

29. AN ARTIST HAS A SUBJECT

Mean Streets

Taxi Driver

The Last Waltz

Raging Bull

Goodfellas

Cape Fear

Casino

Gangs of New York

The Aviator

The Departed

Hugo

Shutter Island

The Wolf of Wall Street

Silence

Did Martin Scorsese sit down as a young filmmaker and ask himself, “What’s my subject?” I doubt it very much.

But a subject arose just the same. (Actually probably two: Outlaw Life and Love of Cinema, with a couple of outliers thrown in.)

You have a subject too.

You were born with it.

You will discover it on your artist’s journey.

30. WHAT IS “SUBJECT?”

Subject does not mean “the Civil War” or “feminism.”

Consider Bruce Springsteen’s subject. It isn’t just dudes and babes in cars in New Jersey.

It’s thematic. The Boss’s theme, to which he returns over and over, is the worth of passion and the integrity of what we might call “the common man” (and woman).

His subject is red-white-and-blue, fucked-over, fucked-up, but still shining and worthy and unbreakable.

Subject is deeper than topic. It’s not “what it’s about,” it’s what it’s really about.

31. HOW SUBJECT ARISES

It sounds facile to say, “We don’t pick our subject, our subject picks us.” But I’m convinced that that statement is true.

It’s not your subject. It’s your Self’s, your Muse’s, your Superconscious’s.

You were born with that subject but you never knew it.

Have you ever met someone who says, “I have no passion for anything. I wish I could feel it, but I can’t. The only thing I feel is boredom.”

Bullshit.

I know this is a lie because I’ve lived it myself for years.

Show me someone who claims he doesn’t give a shit and I’ll show you a born artist who’s scared out of his wits to become that artist.

Our subject is sitting right in front of us but we can’t see it because we’re terrified.

We’re terrified that, if we recognize and acknowledge our subject (which is our calling as an artist), then we’ll have to act on it.

We’ll have to make a decision.

We’ll have to put ourselves on the line.

We’ll have to take a risk.

I can say truthfully of every book I’ve written that, before I saw it as a subject, I had no idea I was even interested in it. In fact I wasn’t interested in it. Or if I was, I dismissed that interest as purely idiosyncratic, a feeling that applied to me only but would never apply to anyone else.

The books picked me, I didn’t pick them.

It’s a mystery, this art racket.

Good Faith or Good Practice?

About 15 years ago, I sat at a conference table with an author and his soon to be publisher, and listened to the publisher’s counsel state that the publisher likes to have all copyrights in its name.

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

The author, who was also my client, didn’t question the publisher, nor did he ask about options to recover the rights when or if the book went out of print, nor the option to recover the rights at any other point.

I attended the meeting as a publicist. The author wanted me there during negotiations for the contract, to discuss PR and marketing, who would do what, and so on.

All these years later, I can’t remember why the contract wasn’t signed that day, but I do remember saying something to the author later. I asked him if he wanted to retain the copyright and license it to the publisher or if he really wanted to turn over complete ownership of the book to the publisher.

He believed the publisher was acting in good faith, that it wasn’t operating with intent to deceive, and that things would be fine.

Look up “good faith” and “law” together online and you’ll find a number of definitions, all of which tend to be anchored to the phrase “honest intent.” Here’s the good faith definition from Cornell Law School:

“A term that generally describes honest dealing. Depending on the exact setting, good faith may require an honest belief or purpose, faithful performance of duties, observance of fair dealing standards, or an absence of fraudulent intent.”

There’s also a definition for “bad faith” on Cornell Law School’s site, too:

“A term that generally describes dishonest dealing. Depending on the exact setting, bad faith may mean a dishonest belief or purpose, untrustworthy performance of duties, neglect of fair dealing standards, or a fraudulent intent.”

So how do you know if someone is acting in good faith or bad faith when you enter into a contract with them?

You don’t.

It’s unlikely you’ll ever meet someone who states at the gate that he or she is operating in bad faith. Afterall, why would you ever sign a contract with such a person?

So what do you do when a publisher (or any other entity with which you’re negotiating with) asks for terms that aren’t what you expected, that sound “off,” and/or don’t pass the gut check?

You protect yourself.

You might believe that the publisher is acting in good faith, but you don’t sign a contract partially based on assumptions. You sign a contract that spells out everything, so that assumptions are eliminated.

In the case of my client, he went back to the publisher and said he wanted to retain the copyright and would license the rights for publishing. The publisher agreed and that was that.

The author could have signed as the publisher initially wished, because the author was scared of losing the contract. Instead, he countered. He stated different terms.

If you’re scared of losing a contract if you don’t sign, then you need to hold back and really consider if what you’re doing is good enough for now or the best for the long run. It might be that the company is acting in good faith, but if you don’t understand all the terms and/or are operating on assumptions, at a much later point, you might find yourself feeling you are on the end of a deal that isn’t in your best interest.

There’s about a two-minute segment of VH1’s “Behind the Music” episode about the group TLC, which has stayed strong in my mind, even though almost 20 years have passed since I first watched it.

In the episode, “Left Eye” breaks down “how a group can sell 10 million albums and be broke.”

Ok. There are 100 points on an album. TLC has seven. Every point is equal to eight cents. Alright? Seven times eight . . . Fifty-six cents. That means that every time an album gets sold, TLC gets fifty-six cents. So, ten million records . . . $5.6 million. Seems like a lot of money. Well, it’s not a lot of money when the record company has spent $3 million to record your album. And, in the record business, we pay all costs back to the record company. We pay recording costs, video costs. So, now, we have $2.6 million left. Well guess what? When you have that much money, you’re in about the 47, 48, 49 percent tax bracket. Well, that immediately gets deducted to $1.3 million.Then, you split the rest three ways. You got about $300,000 a piece, if that much. Okay? $300,000. I can buy a nice house with that. And, what am I gonna pay my bills with?

OK. Let’s just cruise by the reality that many people make do on less than $300,000 a year. That’s not the point here. The point is that the group entered into a contract with specific terms.

When you’re on the other side of such terms . . .

I’d be mad myself if I made $300,000 and knew that there were a lot of other people making millions of dollars off of my hard work. Yes, they might have had the expertise to get it all done, and maybe I wouldn’t be a household name if not for them, but . . . I want to be banking some of that money for the future, too.

That’s exactly what Dolly Parton did when she said no to Elvis Presley recording her song “I Will Always Love You.” I wrote about this a while back, in the post “Horse Sense: Lay a Little Heavy on the Business Side.” A few days before Elvis was set to record the song, Colonel Tom Parker (a.k.a. Elvis’ manager) called up Dolly and told her:

“Now, you do know that Elvis is recordin’ your song. And you do know that Elvis don’t record anything that he don’t publish or at least get half the publishin’ on.”

Dolly responded:

“I can’t do that. This song’s already been a hit with me. And this is in my publishing company. And obviously this is gonna be one of my most important copyrights. And I can’t give you half the publishing, ’cause that’s stuff that I’m leavin’ for my family.”

Elvis didn’t record the song, but years later, Whitney Houston did—and her recording became one of the best-selling singles of all time. Dolly Parton’s eye on tomorrow instead of today served her well.

Were Colonel Tom Parker or TLC’s recording company acting in bad faith?

Or did the artists accept certain terms that ended up tasting like bad faith after the fact?

I can’t answer those questions for them, but I learned lessons from them.

Know your rights, understand the terms, and always follow good practices.

Good faith is a priority, but it can lead to assumptions and a chance you’ll end up in a bad place.

There’s also the reality that some people are really snakes. They’ll say they are acting in good faith, but the opposite is closer to the truth.

Protect yourself.

The Artist’s Journey, #6

Continuing our serialization of The Artist’s Journey … to refresh our memory, the primary thesis of this book is that our evolution as writers and artists hits an inflection point on that day when we realize that our Searching Years are over, our questing dues have been paid (in other words, our “hero’s journey” has reached its completion), and we must now advance into a second journey, in which for the first time we with full awareness and seriousness embrace our calling as artists. At that point, we “turn pro” and start asking the questions all artists must ask of themselves on their creative journeys: “Who am I? What is my gift? What work was I put on the planet to do?”

 

21. ON THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY, ALL STRENGTHS ARE MENTAL

 

Courage.

Honesty, particularly with oneself.

Self-confidence.

Humility.

Compassion for oneself and others.

The ability to receive criticism objectively.

Patience.

Curiosity, open-mindedness, receptivity to the new.

The ability to focus.

The ability to defer gratification.

Will.

Mental toughness.

The capacity to endure adversity, injustice, indifference.

 

22. ON THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY, ALL STRENGTHS ARE SELF-GENERATED

 

None of the capacities listed in the previous chapter is innate, but all may be acquired by effort and force of will.

 

23. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS A JOURNEY OF THE IMAGINATION

 

I’m an American, and Americans have scant patience for anything that can’t be reduced to a number (a sports score, say, or a sales figure). We Yanks feel comfortable in a world that can be cut and measured, boxed and shipped, extracted from the earth and hauled to market.

The artist’s journey has nothing to do with that.

The artist on her journey will make everything up, including herself.

Her creations will be fictional, apparitional, chimerical. And yet the artist is neither a fabulist nor a charlatan. She is not lying. She is not deceiving.

Rather she sees, with the vision of imagination, what lies beneath the box scores and the market quotes.

She sees what is real and brings it forth so that others can see it.

 

24. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS A JOURNEY OF DREAMS

 

I never wrote anything good until I stopped trying to write the truth. I never had any real fun either.

Truth is not the truth.

Fiction is the truth.

The artist’s medium is not reality, but dreams. I don’t mean “dreams” in the sense of made-up bullshit. I mean dreams as the X-ray of truth, truth seen through and seen for what it really is, truth boiled down to its essence.

The conventional truism is “Write what you know.” But something mysterious and wonderful happens when we write what we don’t know. The Muse enters the arena. Stuff comes out of us from a source we can neither name nor locate.

Where is it coming from? The “unconscious?” The “field of potentiality?”

I don’t know.

But I’ve had the same experience over and over. When I write something that really happened, people read it and say, “Sounds phony.”

When I pull something completely out of thin air, I hear, “Wow, that was so real!”

 

25. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY PROGRESSES BY INCREMENTS

 

Album #1 (1964)

Route 66

I’m a King Bee

Can I Get A Witness?

I Just Wanna Make Love To You

 

Album #2 (1964)

Under the Boardwalk

Susie Q

Confessing the Blues

It’s All Over Now

 

Album #5 (1965)

Satisfaction

The Last Time

Play With Fire

The Under-Assistant West Coast Promotion Man

 

Album #11 (1968)

Sympathy For the Devil

 No Expectations

 Street Fighting Man

 Salt of the Earth

 

Album #12 (1969)

Gimme Shelter

 Love in Vain

 Midnight Rambler

 You Can’t Always Get What You Want

 

The subject stays the same, but the artists have peeled back the onion from the surface to deep, deep within the core.

Chekhov did it this way, as did Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Tolstoy and Turgenev, all the way back to Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

The artist mines the same vein over and over. He just digs deeper over time.

Getting in the Ring

[We’re bringing this post back from December 23, 2011. With the launch of Steve’s new site and the launch of The War of Art Mini-Course it seemed time to revisit The War of Art’s backstory, as well as how Steve and Shawn starting working together, and the projects that followed.]

At the end of the year 2000, I had it all figured out. I left my job as senior editor at Doubleday to start up a new kind of publishing house called Rugged Land Books. Rugged Land would publish a very small list of titles, twelve original books a year (one per month), and would focus on finding unique ways to find, listen to, and engage readers in the particular genres I knew best.

I loved the motto that my former business partner quoted to me about the meaning of the name and I still do:

“It is better to live in a Rugged Land and rule, than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave to others.” —Herodotus.

The writer I most wanted to publish at Rugged Land was Steven Pressfield.

I’d known Steve for about four years. I acquired Gates of Fire and Tides of War at Doubleday and we’d already been through a lot together. Gates and Tides were bestsellers and the company was very pleased with the critical and commercial successes of both. But I thought that they could have been much bigger sellers if they’d been given more time to catch on. More attention. More commitment. And I wasn’t shy about saying so. While my colleagues (Publisher, Editor in Chief, Business Manager on down) were sympathetic and did what they could to help, the big houses like Doubleday at the time were extremely regimented. The publishing process was firmly established.

Here’s how it worked:

An editor acquired a book. The book was assigned to a publicist and a point person in marketing. Plans were drawn up nine to twelve months before publication to plot how to best launch the book in the trade. The book was presented at a national sales conference. The sales department made their own determinations about which books had the best shot at hitting it big. The priorities on the list were then reevaluated and rejiggered after a consensus between editorial, publicity, marketing, and sales had been reached.

The consensus usually went sales’ way.

Editors and publishers were considered, and perhaps still are and perhaps still rightly so, as unreliable narrators by the sales department.  Editorial had secret agendas—big guaranteed advances on the line or desperate pleas to make an author’s sliding sales track record rebound with verbal bullshit and sizzle. If the publisher didn’t justify the advance she authorized to acquire a book or an editor didn’t save his prize author from becoming superfluous . . .

Sales didn’t have any agenda but to sell the most books possible. That’s how they got paid. So sales reps could be counted on to give it to an editor or publisher straight . . . your favorite book doesn’t stand a chance or we’re gonna make it work. The books that struck the biggest chord with the reps usually got the lion’s share of attention.  Who knew the customer better than the sales rep anyway? Don’t forget that bookstores, not consumers, were the primary customers pre-eBook. If the physical book wasn’t visible in a bookstore, marketing to a consumer didn’t mean diddly to the bottom line. So, publishers ignored the very people who bought their books until they had a saturated distribution—so many books out there that they had to be stacked in corners. And even when they did, they gave it two weeks of consumer awareness promotion to sell through the inventory—at the most.

Steve was a darling of the Doubleday sales reps. In fact, early plans for Gates and Tides were expanded after their respective sales conferences. Steve had it all going for him and it worked. This was a very big deal. An entire genre (historical war epic) had been reinvented by Steve and Doubleday. Copycats from other houses came in and rode the resurgence. To this day, terrific historical war fiction is published year after year. Steve’s work and Doubleday’s commitment to it are the reason.  Attention must be paid to that achievement. Kudos.

But even Steve couldn’t get the system to bend and try something new. No matter how much ruckus I made to try some new marketing or publicity gimmick to target consumers, little came of it. Once the 4 to 6 week sales window for Gates and Tides closed, the case closed, and the energy of the house went to the next “big book.”

What wasn’t broke didn’t get fixed. I understood the system, but didn’t agree with it, so I left the well-oiled machine and tried to create a new one.

But the chances of getting Steve Pressfield’s next book in Rugged Land’s debut 2002 publication catalog were as likely as the Borders Group going into bankruptcy. Steve was committed to publish his next novel with Doubleday and while he would have loved to continue to work with me as his primary editor, the reality was that he couldn’t. He made a large part of his living from Doubleday and Rugged Land was a romantic enterprise…noble but perhaps destined to fail. There was just no way around that.

We grabbed a beer in New York just after I left Doubleday headquarters and Steve let me know how much he appreciated what I was doing.  He wanted to be a part of it but he couldn’t figure out how.

But Steve is that rare kind of person who doesn’t let life’s insurmountable and obvious impossibilities stop him from doing important work. He intuitively knew that what we were capable of together as writer and editor was not even remotely exhausted.

I thought c’est la vie.

We shook hands at the end of that night and Steve flew back to California. Like scores of writers I’d worked with before, I thought the next time I’d see him would be as some boring-ass publishing event. We’d smile, do a bro hug, down a shot of John Jameson and play remember when . . . That was cool. I liked doing that.

The next afternoon—literally—Steve called me and said he had an idea.

He had a bunch of pages in his drawer that he’d been xeroxing for aspiring writer friends. That’s right, not photocopying, Xeroxing. Remember the term Xeroxing? It wasn’t weird back then. Steve estimated that the copies he gave out had saved him hours of time explaining the unromantic, but indispensable blue-collar attitude he found necessary to getting his ass in a chair and confronting a blank piece of paper. He called the wad of manuscript, A Writer’s Life.

He didn’t really know what I could do with it, but he asked me to just look and see if there was anything there. I thought it was nice that Steve had some specious crap he could use to get people to leave him alone, but the last thing I was going to do was publish a book called A Writer’s Life. Who gives a shit, right?

Steve also explained that he’d run the idea by his agent (publishing icon Sterling Lord, Jack Kerouac’s agent and the last gentleman in the business) and that Sterling thought it appropriate to share the pages with the hordes of other editors who’d expressed interest in Steve’s work too. Sterling thought I was a nice enough guy and a good editor, but why put limits on his client’s options? Wise man.

Great! Even if this thing is publishable, there’s no way I’ll be able to compete at the advance level with Doubleday or William Morrow or Random House . . .

I said as much to Steve and he told me that we could figure that out later. He didn’t write these pages to pay his mortgage, he wrote them to help his friends. If they could do something for me and Rugged Land, that would mean a hell of a lot more to him than a better model of car.

I read the pages in about an hour. Then I read them again and sketched out some notes. I had zero experience with these kinds of books (thrillers, military nonfiction, sports nonfiction, and historical fiction were my calling cards and what I would push at Rugged Land). I didn’t even know how to characterize A Writer’s Life. I wasn’t even sure if it was a book . . . but it moved me. It made me believe even more in what I was doing and who I was as a human being.  It was priceless.

I called Steve and gave him my notes, and I shared the notes that others at Rugged Land put together. I told him I wanted to publish the book, but it needed a new title, some sort of beginning, middle and end, and I thought since it was his first nonfiction book we should reach out to a bestselling writer in the arena to write an introduction to it. Plus some sort of unique package that made it look different from anything else in the bookstore.

Steve said, “Tell me what to do next!”

While we waited for the rest of the publishing universe to get back to Sterling, Steve and I worked on the book. As far as I was concerned, we had a handshake agreement that Rugged Land would publish it and I trusted Steve. Even if hundreds of thousands of dollars from one of the big boys were offered to Sterling for A Writer’s Life, I thought Steve would go with me.

But I was worried. Steve ekes out a living just like any other writer. Who was I to hold him over a barrel if the big cash came calling?

It didn’t come to that.

Every other publisher passed on the book. The editors had the same concerns about it that I did.  The book was made up of very short chapters, some just a sentence long.  And each chapter had a definitive title that was as much a part of the content of the book as the body copy. A major design and continuity challenge.

And while the surface focus of the book was about writing, it was also about doing anything creative—from starting a plumbing supply business to running for political office. Too all over the place, too hard to convey in an elevator pitch.

A Writer’s Life could be a page a day calendar or a collection of 4 x 6 index cards, but it most definitely wasn’t a “book.” In the parlance of respectful rejection letters, it just didn’t “fit into our publishing program at this time.”

Sterling called and told me it was mine. We agreed to a pittance advance and I banged out a contract that was fair for Rugged Land and for Steve. Basically, if the book made any money after paying for everything, Steve would get 50% and Rugged Land would get 50%. We’d share it like partners.

Then we got down to the real work on the book. Steve and I thought the three-part structure was a good choice because we both were fans of the three-act story structure. I called some pals in the business and asked them to tell me how self-help publishing worked.

What I found out was that self-help was about 1) Defining problems and 2) Offering solutions. Sounds simple but many a potentially helpful book has been upended by failing to clearly do so. Steve nailed the problem part with his concept “resistance,” and he nailed the solution part with his advice to “turn pro.”  But he also had the cojones (or stupidity) to offer something else—his take on the metaphysics of the creative life.  He had wonderful pieces in A Writer’s Life that had nothing to do with defining or solving problems. They were explorations about the necessity of art in human life.  For these, I suggested we add a third part to the book, something I suggested we call The Higher Realm.

Steve was cool with it.

My reasoning was commercially motivated.  I thought that some people would vehemently disagree with Steve’s ethereal point of view but would still fall in love with the first two parts of the book. So the third part would be dessert for those of us who appreciate Steve’s perspective and a throw away for those didn’t care for the dessert. How many meals have you had where the dessert ruled your opinion?

Together, we rejiggered the pieces so that each section of the book had a beginning, middle and end so that the cumulative effect would build to a catharsis for the reader at the very last page. Like a joke or a movie or a great novel—we were looking at self-help as a story.  We thought it was working.

And then we hit a wall.  We suspected that A Writer’s Life had the potential to inspire a lot of people.  But “a lot of people” aren’t a clearly defined or easily reachable target market.  We needed to identify who would care.

Steve was known at the time in two arenas—golf fiction and historical war fiction. What we needed to do was to somehow attract the people who bought The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and Tides of War to this book. If they didn’t respond to it, then we were in trouble.

We needed something easy to understand, intriguing, and hinting that the book was destined to be a classic. It wasn’t Steve’s attempt to whore himself for a buck. Far from it. It could ruin him if it wasn’t authentic.

For weeks we pulled our hair out searching for a phrase. We focused on what was the common denominator in Steve’s previous work.  As The Legend of Bagger Vance was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, Gates of Fire inspired by the heroic Spartan stand at Thermopylae and Tides of War inspired by a pivotal figure in the Peloponnesian War (Alcibiades), it was pretty obvious that Steve’s work explored internal and external wars.

War as metaphor was just what we needed to attract Steve’s previous readers. We also liked it because it was on the other side of the spectrum of the traditional touchy feely self-help arena. This book was self-help for Warriors dedicated to art, one form or other. Warriors willing to do whatever it takes to create something meaningful. This wasn’t a book for wimps. It was a throw down.

Once we figured out the war component, our title, The War of Art wasn’t too far behind.  The fact that it echoed Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War, was an added bonus. Then, Steve went back through the book and integrated more martial language into the text. Defining the problem became “defining the enemy.” Solving the problem involved “combatting resistance.” All would lead to examining “the higher realm.”

Now we needed a subtitle to propose an answer to a core “How to” proposition.  That is, it had to tell the potential buyer of the book what they could expect to get out of reading it. How to save money at the grocery store, or how to lose weight, or how to make a tree house . . . And we needed to make the subtitle consistent with the title. Write Your Novel Now! or Build a Business to Last! or Attracting the Angels Among Us! wouldn’t work. Not only were they cheesy, they were non-sequiturs in comparison to the ass kicking title. And they were too tightly focused on specific markets—writing help or business help or Angel believers. We wanted to embrace as many people as possible intent on creating something of their own. They could take what they needed and leave the rest…

We came up with Winning the Inner Creative Battle.

I still love that subtitle, but when we made a deal with Grand Central books (previously Warner Books) to publish the paperback, Steve’s editor there, Emily Griffin, convinced us that focusing the book for the writing market was the way to go for the long backlist haul.

Now the subtitle is Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. Promising writers that this book will break their writers’ block was a very good idea. It gave us a very tight focus and a focus that echoes A Writer’s Life. Thank you Emily!

Back to the initial hardcover publication. After we agreed on a subtitle, the task was to find a bestselling writer with a reputation for no bullshit—writing in the same general literary world as The War of Art—willing to put his reputation on the line to support us. Steve and I said the name as the same time, ROBERT MCKEE!

McKee’s classic book, Story, sells tens of thousands of copies (in hardcover!) every year since it’s bestselling initial publication. (Thank you Judith Regan for getting Bob to finally write it.) And his STORY seminar is legend. Here’s a profile of him from The New Yorker: “The Real McKee.”

McKee read The War of Art.  He hated the third section, The Higher Realm. But, as I suspected, he loved the first two parts. Absolutely loved them so much that he agreed to write an introduction to the book. But he wasn’t going to do the usual logrolling 100% bullshit sign off for the entire book. Instead he did the job that we couldn’t do ourselves–he would convince readers who didn’t agree with Steve’s ideas at the end of the book (no one disagrees more with Steve on this than Bob) to buy it for the first two parts. Now we would get McKee devotees to check out the book too. Bob even bought a couple thousand copies himself to sell at this seminars. Our “take what you need and leave the rest” strategy was working.

(Full disclosure, McKee is now one of my clients)

Then we had to come up with a compelling hardcover package. What would the book look like?

I shared The War of Art with a dear friend and a wonderful graphic designer, Timothy Hsu. One of the messages of the book kept coming back to him. It was for artists to take a good hard look in the mirror and get to it, get their Asses in their desk chairs and get to work.

Timothy came up with the idea of strategically placing three mini-mirrors on the cover to represent the three parts of the book. And to make the texture of the entire book a reflective silver mosaic. It was an expensive idea, but one we thought would make the book stand out from the pack at the bookstore. Steve let me run with it. First editions of The War of Art sell for more than $100 apiece today. Steve calls it the “silver bullet edition.”

Rugged Land Books published The War of Art in June 2002 and we pitched the book as a perfect graduation gift to the usual print magazines, industry journals, etc.

It didn’t set the world on fire.

But it sold just enough (about 8,000 hardcover units) to start conversations among artists. Rugged Land and Steve made some money on the sale of the paperback to Grand Central and the book percolated along via word of mouth for years, selling a consistent 10,000 paperbacks a year. Meanwhile, Steve and I kept in touch while he wrote more novels for Doubleday and I published 45 books at Rugged Land.

While Rugged Land had seven New York Times bestsellers, the inertia of the capital intensive, paper driven, bricks and mortar, selling to retailer book publishing model took its toll on me—financially, physically and emotionally. Every arena of my life became Rugged Land driven and after all kinds of turmoil and the painful realization that my dream to become Bennett Cerf was never going to happen. Rugged Land discontinued publishing in 2007.

A bittersweet moment came when I had to sell off the furniture and miscellaneous office supplies by myself. A friend of mine placed a bunch of ads on Craigslist etc. for me and the locusts arrived to pick apart the Rugged Land carcass. People were literally giving me $.50 for an extra carton of garbage bags that I bought for $3.99. The office was across the street from the Hudson River and I was thinking how refreshing a nice dip into its icy depths would be when a woman noticed a copy of copies of The War of Art stacked in a corner. She picked one up and looked at me as if I was Brad Pitt.

“Did you publish this book!” she stammered.

By that time I was incapable of verbal communication, but I nodded in the affirmative.

“It changed my life. Thank you.”

As Bill Murray’s character Carl Spackler said in Caddyshack “I’ll always have that going for me . . . which is nice.”

An agent friend, Richard Abate, emailed me the moment he heard Rugged Land was in trouble. He hired me as a literary agent for a new division he was starting up at the big fancy outfit called the Endeavor Agency. It was a great place to land and I learned how to work the other side of the publishing desk all the while given the opportunity to provide for my family. Nothing is ever as bad as you think it is.

While I was at Endeavor, Steve and I would talk every few months, just to check in as pals, and he told me about putting together www.stevenpressfield.com. The War of Art was increasing in sales every month after he began blogging a weekly column called Writing Wednesdays. How about that?

It didn’t occur to us until four or five months later that The War of Art was a blog book before anyone blogged.  It was 10 years ahead of its time. The format is exactly blog, easy to read, fun and each chapter/post is a self-contained mini-story.

Writing Writing Wednesdays also gave Steve a chance to meet the actual people who read and liked The War of Art. He could talk to those who recommended the book to their friends and they talked back. He could find, listen and engage with them. Annual sales of the book went from 10,000 before Steve’s blog to 15,000 in just one year. He couldn’t add a second floor to his house, but a 50% increase in sales is nothing to roll your eyes at either.

In 2009, the Endeavor Agency and the William Morris Agency merged. I decided not to pursue a position at the new combined agency and started Genre Management Inc. Endeavor allowed all of my clients to come with me and as arrivedercis go, it was pretty painless. I called Steve and told him my plans.

“So you are a completely solo operation now?” he asked.

“Yep, Genre Management Inc. is a laptop, a cellphone and whatever’s left of twenty years of book publishing inside my head.”

“I think we can have a lot of fun working together on the website and who knows what else . . . Do you have room for me as a client?”

He hired me as his literary manager right then and there and pledged 15% of his future book income to me. Even though Sterling Lord was still his agent collecting the same 15%. And he never let on that he’d heard the word on the street was that I had been fired. He really didn’t care.

I did a few editorial passes on The Profession with Steve before it went to Crown for acceptance, and we worked up a bunch of ideas to market the book with Callie and Jeff. Like a lot of Steve and my ideas, they may have been a few years ahead of their time . . .

We started this blog What It Takes a year ago to share our experiences with you. It began as a no-holds-barred look at what it takes to market and sell a book in this transitional era from paper/retailer to electronic/reader as publishing’s driving force.

One wonderful thing that came out of our marketing ideas was The Warrior Ethos. Steve wrote it over the holiday and into January last year. After we edited it, I called our old friend Timothy Hsu to come up with a cover for the book that would seem as if it had been found in an archaeological dig. He commissioned a painting of a Spartan shield and we wrapped it around the front and back covers.

The idea behind it was that if the hero of The Profession, Gent Gentilhomme, had to codify the ethos to which he subscribed, The Warrior Ethos would be that book. We would use The Warrior Ethos to promote The Profession as a way to get readers thinking about Warriors through time.

And as The Warrior Ethos was ours and ours alone, we published it ourselves for fun. Steve personally funded an 18,000 copy special military edition print run of the book for the men and women in the armed services. Callie and Steve found a network of wonderful people—you’d be amazed at the list of people who are devoted to Steve’s work—who ensured that the books would get into the hands of warriors in Afghanistan and Iraq. And we decided to let anyone who couldn’t get a copy read it for free on www.stevenpressfield.com.

We were having a ball. But it was an expensive operation, a sea of red ink. At the very least, I wanted Steve to get the marketing money he spent out of his own pocket for The Professionto come back to him. So, I suggested to Steve that we do a “soft launch” and put The Warrior Ethos up for sale in electronic and paperback editions with online retailers. This way, he could get some of his investment back.

“What does that mean . . . soft launch?” he asked.

“It means I just put it up for sale and we’ll see what happens. I’ll take care of the production, etc., and if we ever make a penny, we can split it 50/50 like the old days.”

“Okay, sounds like fun. Let’s do it…but we have to come up with a name and logo for our company for the book spine don’t we?  We don’t want people to see this book and think it’s a joke or unprofessional, right?”

How can you argue with that?

Steve then put his thinking cap on and he came up the name of a publishing house that we both loved. It refers to a phrase in the very first post that Steve did introducing What It Takes, something about a Black Irish Wildman (“What It Takes“).

I’ll let Steve explain. This from our evolving future website . . .

ABOUT BLACK IRISH BOOKS

Black Irish Books is named in honor of our partner, Shawn Coyne. When you think of the Irish, what usually comes to mind is the fair-haired, blue- or green-eyed physical type (think Denis Leary or Meg Ryan). But there’s another brand of Irishman (George Clooney comes to mind), dark-haired, dark-eyed, perhaps a tad unstable, even dangerous. Legend has it that this DNA entered the Irish bloodstream around 1588 via the shipwrecked mariners of the Spanish Armada.

Black Irishmen are famous for being pugnacious and confrontational. Great barroom brawlers. Boxing champs of the early 20th Century (Jim Fitzsimmons, Gene Tunney) were often black Irish. Hence our boxing glove logo. (We originally had a shot glass on a bar with a tear tracking down one side, but we decided that was a tad melodramatic.)

The motto of Black Irish Books (yes, we have one) is “Get in the ring.” The titles we intend to bring out will be steak-and-potatoes types, whose aim is to inspire, encourage and fortify those artists, entrepreneurs and athletes whose ambition is not to stand on the sidelines, waiting for permission from others, but to take their destiny in their own fists–to pursue their heart’s calling and make it work.

Not only did my pal, Steve, honor me by naming our company Black Irish Books, he asked me to tell the www.stevenpressfield.com community about it.

We have lots of stuff in the works for Black Irish Books—so many projects and dreams we find hard to keep track of them all—but one thing is for sure…we’ll share what we’re up against and what surprises us all the way with you.  Callie and Jeff and Timothy and other friends are throwing in what they got too.

Get in the ring with us…we’re gonna have some fun.

More to come in the New Year!

The Artist’s Journey, #5

As we continue this serialization, we’re hard at work on putting together the actual book—as an eBook, a physical paperback, and an audiobook. We’re in copy-editing and cover design right now. I’ll keep you apprised, for sure, as we progress …

Now back to the book (we were in the section called “Characteristics of the Artist’s Journey”):

13. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS MENTAL

The sculptor may shape marble or manipulate bronze. The architect may work in steel and stone. But these materials are merely the physical embodiment of an image that the artist sees inside her mind.

The artist’s medium is thought.

Her product is the fruit of the imagination.

14. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS AN EVOLUTION

We call it a journey because it moves, because it advances from one place to another.

We set forth as artists, you and I, from a Portsmouth of the mind and sail for an imaginary Indies. Storms arise along the way. We encounter monsters (and allies as well). Growth occurs. Progress is recorded.

The artist changes on this journey.

She is not the person at the end that she was at the beginning.

15. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS A CONSTANT

And yet, no matter how profoundly or dramatically the artist’s work evolves over her lifetime, her subject remains the same.

She may dive into it more deeply, she may come at it from wildly different directions, but her obsession remains unaltered throughout her life.

16. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS ABOUT SELF-DISCOVERY

I’ve read many times that art is self-expression. I don’t believe it.

I don’t believe the artist knows what he or she wishes to express.

The artist is being driven from a far deeper and more primal source than the conscious intellect. It is not an overstatement, in my view, to declare that the artist has no idea what he’s doing.

As Socrates famously declared in Plato’s Phaedrus:

… if a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.

The artist is not expressing himself, he is discovering himself.

17. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS ABOUT THE ART, NOT THE ARTIST

Whom exactly is the artist discovering?

Is Dostoyevsky discovering Dostoyevsky?

Which Dostoyevsky?

Is Dostoyevsky discovering “Dostoyevsky?”

Or is “Dostoyevsky” discovering Dostoyevsky?

My answer is #4.

The artificial ego-entity that the world (and Dostoyevsky himself perhaps) believes to be Dostoevsky is discovering a deeper, wider, smarter, braver personage that has traveled across leagues and eons to reach this present moment and will continue its passage long after “Dostoyevsky” is gone.

The artist himself is disposable.

What endures is the Self he is seeking, which is not “himself” but himself.

18. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS DANGEROUS

The artist, like the mystic and the renunciant, does her work within an altered sphere of consciousness.

Seeking herself, her voice, her source, she enters the dark forest. She is alone. No friend or lover knows where her path has taken her.

Rules are different within this wilderness. Hatters are mad and principles inverted.

The artist has entered this sphere of her own free will. She has deliberately unmoored herself from conventional consciousness. This is her calling. This is what she was born to do.

Will she come out safely?

19. ON THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY, ALL ENEMIES ARE MENTAL.

Fear of failure.

Fear of success.

Fear of the new, fear of pain, of loneliness, of exertion, of intensity.

Need for external (third-party) validation.

Self-doubt.

Arrogance.

Impatience.

Inability to defer gratification.

Predisposition to distraction.

Shallowness of thought and purpose.

Conventionality.

Insularity.

The need to cling to the known.

None of these enemies is real in the sense that, say, a lion is real, or a man with a gun.

All are products of the mind.

20. ON THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY, ALL ENEMIES ARE SELF-GENERATED

The artist on her journey confronts no foes that are not of her own creation.

Her fear is her own. Her vanity. Her need for adulation, for the attention of others, for titillation, for distraction.

Like Walter Pidgeon dueling the monsters of the Id in Forbidden Planet, the artist possesses within herself the capacity to overcome these enemies.

She has created them mentally.

She can defeat them the same way.

It’s a Kick in the Ass

I will write the Great American Novel by the time I’m 18.

I will write the Great American Novel.

I will write a novel.

I will write.

Between ages 14 and 40, my goals changed dramatically, from starting with the heavy weights to lifting manageable weights every day.

I was reminded of this when I read Steve’s post “Thinking in Blocks of Time,” which is among the articles included as additional reading in part three of The War of Art Mini-Course.

In the article, Steve talks about returning from a vacation and gearing up to get back to work. The first thing he says he’ll do is “stop myself from thinking in terms of immediate gratification.” Instead, he’ll make himself think in blocks of time, and gradually build into writing. He’ll “not use the big muscles yet.” Instead, he’ll stick to “the little ones.”

Steve’s process for returning from vacation is similar to the process of building a career.

My 14 year old thinking should have started with “the little ones” first.

I will write.

I will write an article.

I will write a short story.

I will write a novel.

I will write a novel someone other than my dad wants to read.

I will write a novel that will sell.

This past week, a few of you e-mailed to ask about the just launched The War of Art Mini-Course.

The theme of many of the questions? Is it worth the time for long-time readers of “Writing Wednesdays” and Steve’s books? Is there something new? Will it offer specific steps that will take me to a higher level?

It’s hard to answer these questions with a one-size-fits-all answer just like it’s hard to obtain one description of a flame from individuals looking at it through different panes of a multi-colored lantern.

Here’s what the mini-course did for me:

I know Steve’s work and have reread his articles and books numerous times. When Shawn asked Steve questions within the mini-course, I had a gauge on how Steve would answer in advance of him answering. I went into the course with a heavy load of background knowledge. At the end of the fifth episode, though . . . He still kicked my ass into gear. Why?

After listening to the mini-course, I started thinking about the five steps Steve and Shawn pulled out within the five-part mini-course.

Identify Resistance
Study and learn Resistance’s playbook
Fight to overcome Resistance
Understand the Hero’s Journey and Resistance’s role in the journey
Embark on the Artist’s Journey and employ the tools forged during the Hero’s Journey (and keep fighting Resistance).

I’ve known the first four steps, and the fifth is one I’ve just recently give more thought to, via Steve’s recent “Artist Journey” posts via “Writing Wednesdays,” but the progression isn’t something I’ve spent time on in the past. Something about hearing Steve and Shawn talking vs. me reading the words. The rhythm of their voices. Steve breaking in on Shawn. Stream of consciousness. I wasn’t surprised  by what they said, but I was surprised by what I took away.

Then I started going through all the linked articles in the additional reading sections. It was a bit like being reintroduced to an old friend. I hadn’t forgotten them, but I hadn’t thought of them in such a long time, that they weren’t at the top. I’d stopped considering the lessons shared. They reminded me of things I could be doing better myself. One example? Thinking in blocks of time.

I’ve struggled with blocks of time these past few years. Actually . . . If I’m being honest . . . I’ve struggled with blocks of time for about 15 years, ever since I added “Mom” to my list of titles. My dream work slipped. That stuff that comes as I’m slipping off to sleep each night, and swirls around inside my head? Shelved. I waited for a better time. Maybe when the kids aren’t babies I’ll do it. Maybe when the kids don’t have so many activities. Maybe when work settles down. Maybe after I take care of the roof damage caused by the hail storm. Maybe after I get that new computer or that innovative program. Maybe after I take that class. The Maybe list is long.

Going through the mini-course and all the additional reading was kin to turning a mirror on myself. I know there’s always self improvement work in need of doing, but it forced me to be honest with myself.

It also forced me to revisit my 14 year old self and realize that I had slipped into the heavy weights thinking again, which leads to absolutely nothing getting done.

Maybe the course will be a reminder for you, too.

Maybe you’ll be like that guy who wrote in and said he thought it was awful.

Maybe you’ll be like the other guy who wrote in with thanks.

I don’t know what the mini-course will do for you.

The only thing I can tell you for certain is this: If you are looking for a course that will provide you answers to all of your questions, this ain’t it. Steve can’t answer all your questions, nor can Shawn. This mini-course isn’t a magic bullet. Finishing it won’t put you on the bestseller list.

Maybe you’ll find instead that it is that thing you pull out whenever you’re struggling, and then when you do pull it out again, maybe it will remind you that you aren’t alone and prove to be the kick in the ass that it was to me.

The Artist’s Journey, #4

We’re a week into the launch of the new site and The War of Art Mini-Course. The course is on the house, so check it out and let us know what you think.

And now back to our regularly-scheduled programming . . . 

Herewith, the ongoing serialization of The Artist’s Journey (if you missed any previous installments, scroll down through the previous posts immediately below):

 

7. A GIFT FOR THE PEOPLE

In the mythology of the hero’s journey, the hero at the conclusion of her ordeal returns home safely from her wanderings. But she does not arrive empty-handed. She returns with an “elixir,” a “gift for the people.”

This gift is the product of the hero’s solitary suffering. It may be wisdom or queenly command. It may come with fire or the sword, driving out the evil forces that have infested the kingdom. Or it may come gently, as poetry or music that heals and restores harmony to the land.

You, the seeker, have at last returned home.

You are an artist now, as you have always wished to be.

What gift do you bring for the people?

You will learn that, now, on your artist’s journey.

8. WHAT IS THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY?

The thesis of this book is that the artist’s journey, which follows the hero’s journey chronologically, comprises the true work, the actual production, of the artist’s life.

From that moment, the hero is no longer a free-range individual.

She has become an artist.

As Rosanne Cash declared in her memoir, Composed:

I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

 Everything in her life that is not-artist now falls away.

On the surface her new life may look ordinary, even boring. No more catastrophic romances. No more self-destructive binges. No more squandering or disrespecting her gift, her voice, her talent.

She is on a mission now.

Her life has acquired a purpose.

What is the artist’s life about now?

It’s about following the Muse.

It’s about finding her true voice.

It’s about becoming who she really is.

On her artist’s journey, she will produce the works she was born to bring into being.

She will be on that journey for the rest of her life.

What, then, are the characteristics of the Artist’s Journey?

 

B         O         O         K             T         W         O
 
C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S   O F
T H E   A  R T I S T’ S     J O U R N E Y

 

9. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS INTERNAL

I used to write at a desk that faced a wall. My friends would ask, “Why don’t you turn the desk around so you have a view outside?”

I don’t care about the view outside.

My focus is interior.

The book or movie I’m writing is playing inside my head.

Dalton Trumbo wrote in the bathtub.

Marcel Proust never got out of bed.

Why should they?

The journey they were on was inside themselves.

10. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS PERSONAL

The novels of Philip Roth are completely different from those of Jonathan Franzen.

Neither author, gifted as he may be, can do what the other does.

In fact, neither can write anything except what his own gift authorizes, that which is unique to him alone.

11. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS UNIVERSAL

And yet millions of people can read Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen and be touched and moved and illuminated.

What is personal to the artist is universal to the rest of us.

12. THE ARTIST’S JOURNEY IS SOLITARY

 Yes, artists collaborate. And yeah, there is such a thing as “the writers’ room.”

But the work of the artist takes place not on the page or in conversation or debate, but inside her head.

You, the artist, are alone in that space.

There is no one in there but you.

 

 

Four Thousand Words for Seven Figures

As I continue my series from www.storygrid.com in which I storygrid The Tipping Point, I’m pleased to report that the man himself, Malcolm Gladwell, is teaching a course at Master Class.  I’ll definitely be checking it out to see how his process compares to The Story Grid methodology.  My choice from the start of this series was to demonstrate how one can learn from a master without having access to the master.  So here’s more of my take as an obsessive fan piecing together this masterwork from afar.

The title of this post is the kind of industry news headline that makes book-publishing people extremely uncomfortable. Bi-polar even.

Because while perhaps factually accurate, the “Book Sells for Big Money” report is all sizzle. There is a certain exultation for writers and agents and editors and publishers that comes with high profile recognition. But with no acknowledgement of the care and feeding of the intellectual animal that had to be slaughtered and grilled to provide that sizzle, despair often follows.

There is nothing headier and ego boosting than having your name all over a BIG DEAL! Knowing that all of your friends, but more importantly your frienemies, are reading about how awesome you are to have snake-charmed more than a million dollars from a multinational corporation just by suggesting that an article could simply be expanded into a book is a rush.

But what these sorts of deadline.com, thewrap.com, publishersmarketplace.com, publishersweekly.com, gawker.com, etc. bits of information also do is perpetuate what a politician would call an “untruth.”

It’s the lie that writing is simply a matter of pulling together some sort of critical mass of words and simply arranging them in the right order. That given the right idea, anyone can do it.

Like amateur spec screenwriters in the 1990s, many believe that their idea requires just a good three-day weekend’s worth of intense effort. These intellectual Shane Black’s will conjure up a killer piece akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s 4,000-word burst in the June 3, 1996 edition of The New Yorker.

The facts that,

The first iteration of The Tipping Point took more than a decade to come together and that;


Gladwell had to find a talented literary agent capable of massaging the piece so that a book editor would be convinced that it was more than just a magazine article;

are the stuff that gets cut from industry news bits. If investigated at all.

After dissecting the evolution of The Tipping Point piece, here, here, here, here, here, and here about what it took Gladwell to do what he did should be pretty clear to us all by now. It certainly required more work than a three day weekend.

But what of the agent?

How did Gladwell manage the business of converting his 4,000 words into the aforementioned seven-figure deal?

Gladwell didn’t get a “name” agent when he decided to put together a proposal for an expansion of The Tipping Point into a book. Not that he didn’t want a big macher of an agent. I’m sure if one had approached him, he would have been over the moon and probably would have signed up straightaway.

But I suspect no one called Gladwell. Few agents back in 1996 even had email…

The reason why is that big agents don’t “chase” clients.  They wait for referrals.  Chasing clients sucks because it puts the agent in an inferior position from the writer from the very start of the relationship.  And trust me.  No one wants agents who believe that they are “lesser than” their clients.  They want an agent who is “out of their league” and to hold them in a certain benign contempt (like a parent/child relationship). Our lesser selves want Sauron to be our agent, not Frodo.

But what’s more interesting I think is that I seriously doubt that Gladwell ran around town with seven extra copies of the June 3, 1996 New Yorker in his messenger bag pursuing Andrew Wylie or Esther Newberg.

That is, it seems to me that he didn’t want to write a book length treatment of The Tipping Point just to get a Big Deal! He actually wanted to write the book because he was interested in exploring the idea some more. The work is what drove him, not the potential benefits from the work.  That’s not to say that he doesn’t enjoy the benefits today.  It’s just that I think he still would have written the rest of his stuff even if The Tipping Point never tipped.

Sounds like a small thing, but it’s not. Gladwell was in love with the work, so he did what pros do when they need an agent. He found someone through a personal relationship (most likely a friend or acquaintance of Jacob Weisberg) who introduced him to someone he liked and respected.

[A bit of a disclaimer here: I’m fuzzy on the chain of people that led him to her and I had to stop myself from contacting Gladwell or his agent Tina Bennett to get the origin story. Part of the challenge I took on with this project was to write about Gladwell and The Tipping Point by using only the resources afforded any other person—the Internet. It’s more fun to puzzle it all together and admit some missing pieces than to get the “right answers” sometimes. More fun for me anyway.]

So Malcolm Gladwell created a proposal (either a written or verbal pitch with The New Yorker piece as his writing sample) with an inexperienced agent at the Janklow and Nesbit Agency named Tina Bennett. (Tina Bennett now works at William Morris Endeavor)

The heads of the agency, Mort Janklow and Lynn Nesbit, are titans in book publishing. They were then and still are now.

But Bennett at the time, in 1996, was a self described “lapsed academic” transitioning into a new career. She had some highfalutin schools on her resume with post-graduate degrees, but little “real world” experience. What she did know (and still does) was how to recognize a great idea and a charismatic writer. And obviously Gladwell is comfortable with academics (his father being one), so the two of them probably talked about a whole bunch of stuff that was all the rage in wonky academic circles at the time and hit if off.

Then together, a writer in search of his first book deal and his newbie agent put together an irresistible pitch. It probably went something like this:

The Tipping Point isn’t just something that explains broken windows criminology theory or how people contract colds…it’s also a driving force behind what makes something “cool” and wildly appealing to a mass audience.

The New Yorker piece is just one element of a book that will explore the “tipping” phenomenon in the commercial marketplace. And in entertainment too, like what makes Sesame Street so popular with kids…or even what makes a bestselling book. The book length version is going to be about how the tipping point phenomenon transforms a product like Hush Puppies from shoe brand in its last gasp to the cool thing to wear at the Short Hills Mall.

And Gladwell’s just the guy to do it. He was a working journalist at The Washington Post for over ten years (clips available) and he’s now a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Pretty good pitch.

Okay, so here’s the thing about book publishing (and Hollywood and Washington D.C. and Silicon Valley and any other human hierarchy for that matter). It doesn’t matter if you are Joe Schmoe from Kokomo or the sleaziest person on the planet…buyers of ideas will do a deal as long as you have two things.

One of them might be enough to get a small deal, but you need two if you really want the big bucks.

Here are the two things:

A perfect idea that is brilliantly executed…this is the actually work on the page or the pitch on the lips…the story or the concept or the proposal or whatever. If it’s great, it will find a receptive audience. And chances are it will find at least one of the major players in your chosen industry to take it on.

But in order for you to get a big deal, and that usually requires far more than one player of the Big Five publishing companies to go nuts for it to generate a bidding war, you need:

Credentials, or platform, or backstory as the personality behind the idea that will be irresistible fodder for publicity and marketing. You need to have gone to Harvard (instant third party validation that you are a special kind of star-bellied Sneetch) or any of those other big deal schools. Or you need to be on staff at The New Yorker or worked at Goldman Sachs or Ralph Lauren or Julliard or the Nick Bollettieri Academy or Carnegie Hall.

Or even better, if you dropped out of Harvard or quit The New Yorker or Goldman Sachs because you weren’t being “challenged” enough…but not a departure in too public of a way so that your reputation as a genius is overwhelmed by your other reputation as a megalomaniac.  You are a “reasonable genius” at least until you hit some product or idea out of the ballpark…in Steve Jobs’ case it took a whole slew of product grand slams to eclipse his cranky reputation.

Or you were “almost homeless” and now you’re a billionaire. Or you were a drug addict who ends up as a U.S. Senator… You get it.

As Stephen Sondheim wrote…”You gotta get a gimmick.” It’s an old song.  Thousands of years old even though it was written in the 1950s.

So Gladwell has both requirements (great idea and The New Yorker and Washington Post on his resume) and while he doesn’t have Mort Janklow representing him, he has someone Mort Janklow tapped as brilliant (and she is too, which is nice) representing him.

Now what?

What does the agent literally do to convert 4,000 words into seven figures?

That’s up next.

The Artist’s Journey, Cont’d

Friends and members, welcome to our re-designed site! Explore a little and you’ll discover a free five-part War of Art mini-series. This is brand-new, read by me. Each section is about five minutes long. The audio is a sort of intro to the principles of Resistance and the idea of Turning Pro. Click here to sign up and we’ll shoot it straight to your Inbox.

Don’t be scared of the new site. It’s made for ease of access to all the resources we’ve been putting in place over the past few years. And now … back to our ongoing serialization of “The Artist’s Journey” (I’ve decided that’s the title).

Thanks, you guys …

Steve

 

4. HERO’S JOURNEY AND ARTIST’S JOURNEY, PART TWO

The hero’s journey is a myth that, according to Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung and others, is common to all human cultures. It’s a template that exists in our psyches from birth, like an operating system or, perhaps more exactly, a piece of software within the operating system.

Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac on their mid-20th Century “hero’s journey”

There are two aspects of the hero’s journey that are, in my view, often overlooked or not taken into account.

The template is a fill-in-the-blanks proposition. It lays out a pattern and a sequence but it leaves the details specific to the individual TK (to come.)
The hero’s journey template exerts a powerful, almost irresistible pressure on the individual to live it out in real life.

As a young childless woman experiences the ticking of her biological clock, so you and I feel the pull of our as-yet-unlived hero’s journey.

What makes us leave our small town and head to the big city? Why do we enlist in the Special Forces? What is happening to us when we meet a stranger on a plane and follow her (or him) to Argentina?

The software in our heads demands to be lived out.

The blanks insist on being filled in.

The hero (­­­­­­__________) receives the Call when (__________) walks into his/her life and does/says (__________).

The hero returns to (­­­­___________) by means of a (__________), bringing for the people the gift of (___________), hard-won from his/her experiences.

If you’re an artist, I can fill in the final blank for you right now.

The gift you bring is the works you will produce.

 

5. THE CONTENTS OF OUR HERO’S JOURNEY

My own hero’s journey lasted about two and a half years, from age twenty-six to twenty-nine. It hit every beat in the myth, by the numbers and in sequence.

I had no idea, of course, that what I was experiencing might be called a hero’s journey. I had never heard of the hero’s journey.

What was clear to me was that something was happening, and that something was a train I couldn’t stop or slow down or get off.

What was clear too was when it ended. I knew the exact moment. I could feel it.

Even then, in that hour, I understood that the experience was of supreme value and importance. I didn’t need hindsight. I knew in the moment.

My family may have been repelled, even appalled by where I had been and what I had done; my friends may have feared for my sanity; others who cared for me may have shaken their heads at the waste and folly and futility. Even I understood it would take me years to recover. I didn’t care. The trip was worth it.

Why?

Because I now had a history that was mine alone. I had an ordeal that I had survived and a passage that I had paid for with my own blood. Nobody knew about this passage but me. Nobody would ever know, nor did I feel the slightest urge to communicate it. This was mine, and nobody could ever take it away from me.

I had punched my ticket.

I had filled in the blanks.

 

6. THE ARTIST IS DIFFERENT FROM THE HERO

The artist lives out his or her real-life hero’s journey differently from the hero-as-man-or-woman-of-action.

I reached out for something to attach myself to [wrote Henry Miller in Tropic of Capricorn]—and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for—myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live—if what others are doing is called living—but to express myself. I realized that I had never had the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it. What is true interests me scarcely at all, nor even what is real; only that interests me which I imagine to be, that which I had stifled every day in order to live.

The hero’s journey for the artist is preparation only for her real journey, her passage and career in the imagination.