LEADING A DOUBLE LIFE_003

Leading A Double Life

Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode 3 of my podcast Leading A Double Life. I’m Kwei Quartey, a physician and author of the Inspector Darko Dawson novels. On my podcast, what it’s like to be a medical doctor and a writer. This episode, How I Got Published. One of the top most exciting times of my life was the day in 2008 that I learned Random House had accepted my first novel, WIFE OF THE GODS, for publication. My phone was buzzing with messages back and forth to and from my agent as she negotiated the deal. But I have to go back in time, because it was a decades-long road to that hallowed major publisher destination, and Random House is huge. After graduating from my Internal Medicine residency, I had returned to my old love of fiction writing. As a pre-teen, I’d written several adventure and mystery novels and won a few fiction-writing contests. My parents were very supportive and encouraging of my efforts, but at no point did they ever force me to write. I did it at urgings from within. I believe wanting or needing to write is something indigenous. It’s a part of me as much as the necessity to eat and sleep. I had been working as a newly employed Los Angeles physician for about a year when I began my first novel. At that time, I’d joined a writing group run by a former editor at one of the large publishers, and the literary world was buzzing about a steamy new novel called Destiny by Sally Beauman. It had been only half completed when it got a million-dollar advance from Bantam Books. It debuted at number six on the bestseller list a week before it was even published. It was 848 pages long, and one of those stories described with adjectives such as “sprawling” and “sweeping.” It was Danielle Steele-ish but was more explicit in its description of romantic exchanges, to put it delicately, particularly one jaw-dropping scene that everyone who read it remembers. I certainly do. I was quite taken with Beauman’s tome, and nothing preaches success like success, so I wrote my first novel called A Fateful Place along the lines of Destiny. Mine had an international flavor, taking place in England and the United States, with elements of the fashion world and British aristocracy. Essentially, Fiona, a young American woman visiting England mistakenly believes she has lost her baby boy, Julian, during a tragic ferry accident. In fact, the child has survived and been sold to a rather dodgy upper class British couple unable to have their own child. The lives of Fiona and Julian are separate until by happenstance they cross, and with devastating results. There were holes in the plot of this story large enough to drive a truck through. The question I have now is how I managed to fill some 750 pages with this story. I doubt I could do that now. I don’t recall how many literary agents I sent the manuscript to, but I could have built a paper house with all those rejection letters. Apart from the plot being grossly flawed, who was going to give any standing to a black author writing about the British and American white upper class? I should explain that most publishers don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts; that is ones that haven’t passed through a literary agent, who is, I suppose you might say, a gatekeeper. While I was waiting—in vain as it turns out—for an agent to snap up In A Fateful Place, I embarked on a new work of fiction based on the independent movie, Battle Of Algiers, about the war from 1954 to 1962 between Algeria and her French colonizers. I don’t remember which came first—the movie, or my interest in the war, but at any rate I personalized the historical events with a fictional character, Kamila, which was also the book’s title. Kamila, a young Algerian woman working in the French Quarter of Algiers, is caught up between the rival attentions of an Arab nationalist and a wealthy Frenchman. This novel I wrote very quickly—in about three months. I farmed it out to several agents without success. The rejection letters—sometimes no more than the word, “no--” kept pouring in. At some point I got disgusted and decided I was going to get Kamila published by whatever means possible. I turned to a so-called vanity press; that is, a publishing house that edits and prints your book at your cost. I chose Vantage Press, not to be confused with Vintage. Vantage is out of business now. I don’t remember how much they charged me, but it was a lot. To make things worse, I insisted on designing and printing the jacket covers myself and then shipping them to Vantage, all of which raised my expenses several-fold. The reason I did the covers was that Vantage had some of the dullest, most uninspiring jackets I’d ever seen. To their credit however, the line editors and proofreaders were excellent. Of course, right now we have a very large vanity press. It’s called Amazon.com. You can upload whatever you like to Kindle Direct Publishing. Barnes & Noble with their Nook, and Smashwords are other examples of that kind of platform. Back before the year 2000 when I was roaming the streets trying to hawk Kamila to bookstores, there was little chance of the novel getting anywhere because self-published books were regarded with great disdain at the time. They often still are, but online publishing has changed the landscape, and now a major publisher may chase after an author who has had phenomenal success with online self-publishing—case in point: Vintage (V-I-N) paying a massive advance to EL James for her Fifty Shades novels. With Kamila, I still had not found my footing as an author. People say, “Write what you know,” but more to the point is “Write what engages you,” and that wasn’t what I was doing. I had been ignoring what I innately knew about myself: one, that I’ve always loved murder mysteries; and two, that I grew up in Ghana, a culturally complicated West African country. It was time to combine those properties. In my first novel, WIFE OF THE GODS, at last I was writing about themes in which I was engaged: Ghanaian customs and traditionalism and their clash with modern thought, and how deeply ingrained indigenous beliefs could tie into a murder. When the first draft of WIFE OF THE GODS was done, I once again embarked on the painful process of looking for a literary agent. One said she wished she could represent me, but she wasn’t sure how she would market a book set in Africa. What she was saying was she would be swimming against the tide of American parochialism. Another agent, this time in the UK, put it more bluntly. “Two places in the world no one before the bestselling novels of Alexander McCall Smith, whose famous series with an African female protagonist is set in Botswana, in Southern Africa; and Khaled Hosseini whose bestselling books are set in Afghanista n. If the UK agent turned down those two as well, I’m sure he’s still kicking himself. Searching for an agent, it took me a while to realize I was doing it all wrong. True, I was picking literary agents who, according to different listings, handled fiction and mysteries or adventure, but the listings were too generic and didn’t drill deep enough. What kind of fiction, what kind of mysteries? I was randomly throwing darts and praying they’d hit the bull’s eye. I came across an online service called Agent Research and Evaluation, which has been around for about eighteen years and is run by Beverly Swerling, who is a novelist herself. She matches agents with the authors’ needs and provides highly detailed information about recent deals by literary agents. That way, the author can write a knowledgeable query letter to the agent saying something like, “I note with admiration that you recently sold X book by Y author to Z publisher.” Beverly taught me that it never hurts to flatter, praise or otherwise stroke an agent’s ego. They’re human too and they bruise and bleed just like the rest of us. Beverly guided me to an amazing agent Marly Rusoff, a former publishing executive at Houghton Mifflin, Doubleday and William Morrow. Based in Bronxville, New York, Marly was excited about WIFE OF THE GODS. It so happens that she tried to reach me on my landline, which I rarely picked up, and so all the while I thought she wasn’t interested, she was. Finally of course, we managed to get together. The elation I felt when I was finally told, “Yes,” after years and scores of “no” is indescribable. Marly’s pitching and negotiation skills were formidable evidently, because she got both Penguin and Random House in a bidding war for WIFE OF THE GODS. To make a decision about which to sign with, we set up two separate conference calls. As scheduled, I first called the VP of Penguin, but there was some kind of glitch in which she couldn’t be reached, and I had to leave a message. On the other hand, at Random House, the VP and one of its senior editors, Judy Sternlight, were ready and waiting for me and picked up on the first ring. I was bowled over by their warm reception, and even though Penguin did get back to me, the VP there did not sound as enthusiastic as the folks at Random. My experience with senior editor Judy Sternlight was outstanding. I learned invaluable lessons from her. Judy has the remarkable ability to draw out your best writing. She puts forward ideas, yes, but more than that, she stimulates them. Now, almost ten years later, Penguin and Random have merged, but Judy and I are with neither of thos e publishers. In 2012, I moved to a smaller house, Soho Press, which has been a terrific publisher for me; and Judy too has moved on, establishing Judy Sternlight Literary Services for authors in need of editorial assistance and book development of the highest standard. In the end, with the exception of a blessed very few, getting published isn’t easy. It never has been. But remember this: James Baldwin, JK Rowling, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker, are just a handful of the many famous and successful authors who received at least one, and in many cases, several, rejection letters before acceptance. So keep on sending in those manuscripts!