How I Made a Million Dollars From My First Published Novel (and changed my life)

It must be every aspiring novelists dream to be offered a contract worth a million dollars for their first published novel. It actually happened to me back in 1999, and although this and successive posts will tell the story of how that happened, it’s actually about much more than the money. In fact the money is the least important part, but it does make a nice attention grabbing headline.

The difficulty here is where to start. Arguably the story begins with some background to explain why I wanted to write a novel in the first place, and why my overnight success actually took about twenty years to happen, give or take a few. The day I signed my first publishing contract I was thirty nine years old, but I made my first serious attempt at writing a novel when I was about twenty. During the intervening years I left England and moved to New Zealand, got married (twice) and divorced (once), spent a year travelling around Europe in a Volkswagen combi, had a lot of jobs, most of which I talked myself into by slightly bending the truth about my university education (I actually left school when I was 16 , so never went to university) did well enough to eventually become a senior manager in a sales and marketing role in a mid-size New Zealand manufacturing and marketing company, bought a house with my girlfriend, struck out on my own to start a mail-order business, went broke, sold the house to pay off debts, married my girlfriend, and finally, we had a baby and with virtually no money we left New Zealand to return to England so that I could write a novel.

Okay, that’s the short version, but I think the story really begins in earnest around the time of those last few events; going broke, selling the house, married, baby, flying to England, all that. I think I need to explain a couple of things, like why I thought going to England to write a novel in those circumstances was a good idea. Actually, until I sat down to write this, I had forgotten why I did think it was a good idea. The answer is that from a strictly common-sense, paying-the-rent-and-putting-food-on-the-table point of view, I’m pretty sure I never claimed it was a smart move, even to myself. There were other considerations though, like having a powerful need to escape the scene of my dramatic and spectacular failure. To understand that, you have to understand the context.

I had spent my working life clawing my way up the ladder to a well-paid managerial role and along the way I met Dale (the girlfriend who became my second wife), and between us we had used the money we had individually accumulated to take a big risk on a booming house market. We secured a huge mortgage and bought a house in a highly desirable seaside suburb in Auckland, and then we leveraged the equity to raise the start-up capital for the business I started. When it all went tits-up, the entire house of cards crumbled and we were left virtually broke, and to cap it off Dale had quit her job as she was pregnant. How could I start again under those circumstances? It was bad enough that I’d have to add such a massive failure to my resume, bad enough that I’d have to explain it all over and over to recruitment agents and possible employers, reliving the grinding, painful humiliation every time, bad enough I’d have to face former colleagues and acquaintances who’d offer insincere commiserations while they were secretly rejoicing that it was me in the crap and not them. I don’t blame them. It’s human nature. I’d have done the same myself. But there was something worse than all of that. Far, far worse. It was simply this; I had always hated my career with a terrible soul-destroying passion.

This was the real reason I wanted to move to England. It was to escape. Partly from the failure, but more importantly from the prospect of having to go back to a life I didn’t want, a life that was eating me up from the inside out. I had always wanted to write a novel. I think I was fifteen or so when the idea first took hold, and it never went away. There had been various stabs at it over the years, but things got in the way – mostly lack of time, money, and the fact that I had no clue what I wanted to write about. In later years, on the occasions when I had thought wistfully about having another go at writing, what stopped me more than anything else, was fear of losing what I had: The company car, the salary, the expense account, the great house by the sea, all of that stuff. True, I put it all at risk to start a business, but I believed at the time that the business was a sure-fire-winner. Who would say that about taking a chance on writing a novel? Nobody. Certainly not me. But now I had nothing to lose, because I’d already conveniently lost it. Ironically, here was my chance. It was something of an epiphany.

The biggest stumbling block to my plan, was persuading Dale to see things the way I did. I was aware that it sounded hopelessly optimistic. What did I know about writing novels? And then there was question about why we had to move to England to accomplish it anyway, which I knew would come up. I had persuaded myself that I needed to return to my roots to tap into my own latent creativity. Something like that. Nothing to do with running away though. I prepared a persuasive speech. I even had an ace up my sleeve, because out of despair or desperation or who knows what, I went to see a clairvoyant who told me that I would be successful in my chosen field (as opposed to charging me $50 to tell me I would be an abject failure, for example). I had made a recording of the session so Dale could hear it for herself. The real clincher was the part where the clairvoyant asked for Dale’s date of birth. I told her and she then explained in convincing fashion why this meant that we were ideally suited, especially in times of adversity. I think she actually picked that we would have a baby soon too (yeah, yeah - cynics can say what they like about the likelihood of a young couple having a family, but you had to be there). It was all going well. I made my speech, I laid out my plan, I played the recording. It might have worked, only I had given the clairvoyant the wrong date of birth. I gave her my first wife’s birthday by mistake, which Dale pointed out. That sort of took the wind out of my sails.

Luckily though, as I now understand, pregnant women have weird hormonal stuff going on. It seems that they are prepared to place huge amounts of mostly unwarranted trust in their partner. It’s an evolutionary thing, because otherwise they’d have to admit to themselves that they had made a big, big mistake. They had let the wrong guy get them pregnant, which would be a bad idea because pregnant women are not in the best position to find a new mate. Or maybe Dale just loved me a lot. Anyway, she said, sure, why not? Who’d have thought it?

So, our first son was born in November and a few weeks later Dale and I got married at the registry office. A week after that we were on a plane to England. I’m trying to remember if I was optimistic. I mean really. Did I actually think I could write and, more importantly, sell a novel? And do you know what, I think I did. It didn’t really matter though. What I knew for certain was that until the money ran out, I was going to try to be a novelist. Maybe even more important than that though, was what I wasn’t going to be; which was somebody who got up dreading going to work every day. I don’t think I’ve even felt quite so happily relieved as I did then. I didn’t even hear the baby cry all the way to Heathrow.