The Holy Grail - Part One

With Gridlock (the third in the Ryan Lock thriller series) about to be released in hardback, now seemed like a good time to talk a little bit about the sale of the first book in the series, Lockdown. Lockdown was that near mythical creature, a debut novel (the very first novel I'd written in fact) which sold at auction. An auction is where more than one publishing house bid against each other to secure the rights to a book.


Selling a book at auction is an exciting, often surreal process, and one that usually only happens once in a writer's career, and only then if they are very, very lucky. Note how I said lucky rather than massively talented, because an auction is most frequently about having the right book at the right time. So for those who have often wondered what it's like to be in the eye of the storm, here is an eyewitness account.


1. You write the book, or in my case you write it twice. I spent six months writing a first draft, which I then threw out. I knew at around the halfway mark (40,000 words) that I wasn't going to use any of it but I persisted because a. I'd started a few novels but never finished one, and b. the only way to learn how to write a novel is to write one.


2. Once I was close to a finished second draft, I started emailing agents. UK agents are very approachable and I had three offers to represent me within a short period of time. American agents are another story entirely. They have all sorts of rules about how you can query them. It has to be a full moon close to the Equinox. Your query email or letter should be double-spaced, and written in Sanskrit. It helps if you sacrifice a goat in their name. (BTW, I now have an American agent, who I like a lot, and who hasn't as yet asked me to sacrifice a goat).


3. I signed with Luigi Bonomi, who is renowned for his ability to sell books at auction for a lot of money. This was good because I was broke. He had just sold Matt Hilton's debut for (brace yourself) £800,000.00, so it was a bit of a no-brainer to go with him.


4. Luigi made some suggestions, and I spent the summer tightening the book while he started speaking to editors about the book. This was, I would imagine, a crucial part of the process and there's no one better at this kind of viral marketing. The idea is to create what's called heat around the project.


5. At the start of September, the manuscript went out to all the main publishing houses (8 or 9 if memory serves). This is what Alex Ferguson the football manager refers to as 'squeaky bum time'. It was extremely squeaky for me because I was by now paying my mortgage with a credit card (don't try that at home, kids).


6. Silence. Squeak. Squeak. BTW, silence beats instant rejections. It means the manuscript is being read, and then discussed. The decision to buy a book is taken by a committee at a weekly editorial meeting.


7. Rejections. Not many but enough to make me nervous (or in one case make me laugh because the reasoning was so utterly off-the-wall). 


8. A request from an editor for a picture of me. Luigi's comment: "And you thought it was about the book, didn't you?"


9. Much sweating. Very few pictures of me exist because I hate having my picture taken. Finally, I photoshop a picture of Gerard Butler and send it off, hoping no one will notice.


10. A phone call. A publisher wants to meet me in London to talk about the book. This is usually the prelude to an offer. Thank you, Gerard!


In part two, a nervous breakdown in Lidl, Lehman Brothers do their best to screw me over, and things start to get really squeaky...