In early December of two thousand and five I nearly sold a novel. It was called, THE JUNE VODKA CAMPAIGN and on the surface it was about a copywriter under pressure to create a unit-moving campaign for June Vodka, a completely made up brand. In the depths, it was about the search for God. My protagonist — a Dylan-obsessed, borderline alcoholic — was tormented by what I liked to call The Big Irony. His mother had been killed by a drunk driver. This made the novel easy to write though in hindsight, I should have come up for air between chapters.
Finding an agent wasn’t that difficult. The truth is, agents love first-time novelists. They’re dying to discover the next Grisham, Patterson, Koontz, Christie, Dickens, et. al. Since I didn’t know anybody who knew anybody in publishing, I sent blind emails to the big literary agencies in New York. Sometimes I included pages from the novel in the body of the email. Sometimes I wrote bold, advertisingesque subject lines like, “This manuscript will change your life” or simply, “You found me.” Mostly I got auto-replies. All this was happening about the same time Will Clarke was doing loads of press for “Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles.” I’d never met Will but took a chance and sent him an email. He replied almost immediately, saying he was on the road but that he’d give my novel a read. After a few weeks he told me it was the novel was “off the charts cool” and that he’d forward it to his agent at Big NY Shop. The novel eventually made its way to the desk of Hip NY Agent at Big NY Shop and much to my surprise, he thought it was good enough to sell. This is the definition of a great fucking day.
Like everything else, selling a novel is about who you know and lucky for me, Hip NY Agent had relationships with editors at every major publishing house. First, he crafted a nifty pitch letter that positioned me like this, “….with an ironic, police-hose strength voice that combines Tom Perrotta and Hunter S. Thompson, THE JUNE VODKA CAMPAIGN lampoons the advertising industry and tells a moving story of God, family and what it means to sell out…” He sent the letter with the complete manuscript to these ten houses: Simon and Schuster, Doubleday, Villard, Scribner, William Morrow, Dutton, Viking, Warner Brothers, St. Martin’s Press and Henry Holt.
This was December 2. I fully expected to have the best Christmas of my life.
One of the many things this experience taught me is that time is not constant. When another day passed and HIP NY Agent didn’t call, time stretched like salt water taffy on a hot summer day. Seconds became days became months and the weekend only brought disappointment. I tried to stay focused on my agency job but it was difficult to get excited about coming up with a banner campaign when I had a novel in the hunt in the big fucking apple. Mostly I stared at my cell phone and willed Hip NY Agent to call. And then one day he did.
It was the Tuesday right before the long holiday break. I had just come from a meeting about optimizing our client’s site for seo — big fun – when my cell phone buzzed. I tried to sound cool when I answered, like the news he was about to deliver wouldn’t change my life, one way or another.
“What’s up,” I asked, feeling butterflies flutter. “I’m about to go into a meeting.”
“Are you sitting down?”
I asked him to repeat the question.
“I said, are you sitting down. Because you really need to be sitting down.”
My mind went two directions when he said this. The first, and most expected, I imagined that my manuscript was generating huge buzz in New York, that editor after editor had fallen in love, that a ferocious, back-stabbing war was about to break out. The second direction was more simple. I was dreaming and needed to wake the hell up.
Instead of sitting down, I walked out of my cubicle and straight out the front door. It was just after ten in the morning, the agency parking lot was full of cars and completely still.
“Okay, I’m sitting down,” I lied, pacing like a maniac.
“People are going nuts for this book,” he said, more confident than ever. “I’ve already heard from two editors. And I got a message from a third this morning.”
“Are you serious?”
“One hundred percent.”
I tried to breathe.
“And..holy shit I forgot…Colin from DreamWorks called about film rights.”
“Who’s Colin?”
“Colin is the shit.”
Finally, I took a breath. My pulse signaled cardiac arrest. i slapped my hand against the hood of a black BMW, setting off the car alarm.
I tried to outshout the siren. “What do we do now?”
“What the hell is going on…?
“Nothing, nothing,” I explained, sprinting away from the noise. “What do we do now? What’s the move? What’s the play?”
Hip NY Agent loved when I talked like a businessman instead of a writer.
“We wait,” he said most matter of fact.
“We do?”
“We play it cool, sit back, make zero commitments and wait for the offers to come in.”
I saw the wisdom immediately. “We up the fucking ante.”
“Yes we do.”
***
Some of you thought this story was unfolding before your eyes. That I was somehow able to blog about writing and publishing a novel while in the middle of writing and publishing a novel. Impossible, at least for me. The June Vodka Campaign remains where I left it five years ago, on my hard drive. And while it was tempting to let you believe this story was happening in real time it’s also dishonest and if I’ve learned anything from this strange new period called the digital age it’s this — don’t bullshit people. Which is another way of saying the truth shall set you free. But that’s another story for another time.
On with the show…
Not telling people at work that I not only did I have a novel under consideration at every major publishing house in New York but that a bidding war was about to break out was, as you can imagine, difficult. When a notoriously indecisive client came back with yet another round of changes on the fare sale banner campaign that had already gone to production, I laughed it off and told everyone to, “find their Zen place.” When I was invited to participate in an end-of-year pitch for a car account the agency had long lusted after, I blew it off. No consequences. I wasn’t long for the agency world. When my agent called on the Friday before the holiday break and told me everything was cool, that most of the editors were headed to the Hamptons and we wouldn’t hear anything until after the first of the year, I didn’t worry. There was no reason to worry.
That Christmas remains near the top of my list. Everything was perfect. My children were at that age where reindeers can fly, we had a little money in the bank and my dream was about to come true. When my parents, sister and family joined us for Christmas dinner, I went all out. Roasted pork tenderloin with glazed onions, garlic mashed potatoes, soy-and-balsamic asparagus and half a case of Coppola Pinot. After the meal, with the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas playing softly in the background, with candles illuminating our faces and the empty bottles, I finally came out with it. Understand that very few people knew I had written a novel. It’s not something you tell people. Mostly because they won’t take you seriously. When I told my family that I’d be publishing a novel in the New Year, there were tears, hugs and cheers.
I sent my agent sent a text later that night, it said “thanks for kicking ass” or something equally inane.
He didn’t respond.
Simon and Schuster delivered the first salvo on January 6, 2006. The email, sent to Hip NY Agent which he forwarded at once, said, among other things, “…I really enjoyed this novel, I really loved what he got down on the page. But without an obvious hook, a la Fight Club, I just think it would be too difficult for us to get the book the kind of attention it deserves. That being said, I believe Connelley is a gifted writer and I expect this novel will find a great home with a publisher better suited to promote this brand of fiction…”
Fiction had brands? Besides Joyce, Faulkner, Vonnegut and so on.
The second email, from The Penguin Group, the second largest publisher in the world, responsible for discovering writers like Stephen King and Thomas Pynchon, arrived five days later. Here are the key passages, “… I like this novel and I like what Mr. Connelley is trying to do with the genre. But despite the great writing, I don’t think the book is a likely candidate for the kind of marketing attention it would need on our huge list to make it stand out from the crowd. It’s a tough world for debut fiction these days and I really have to see an obvious potential for finding a market beyond the typical first novel audience… “
Novels had markets? And typical audiences? I pushed away from my monitor, grabbed the nearest piece of paper off my desk and sprinted through the cubicles like I was late for a meeting. The winter of 2006 was unseasonably cold and when the revolving door spit me out, I remembered I’d forgotten my coat and took shelter behind one of the steel columns that supported the pedestrian bridge. I called Hip NY Agent without thinking through the agenda, something I’d never done. He picked up on the second ring.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, charging right up that hill, “you’re thinking this is bad news, you’re thinking game over, am I right?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Okay listen,” he said, most matter of fact, “couple of things. A) only two passes, that’s it. The book is still with eight houses. And B) this is exactly the kind of pass you want to see, these guys loved the novel—”
“Then why aren’t they publishing it?”
He didn’t flinch. “It’s just a marketing thing, right? Figuring out how to sell it and all that.”
“What about the buzz and all that?”
“Still buzzing my friend,” he said, slapping my back with his voice. “I just talked to Brett at Touchstone and he’s hot to make a deal, just has to get it in front of a few more folks.”
“A few more folks?”
“Yeah like his boss and stuff.”
The cold numbed my fingers and ears. Plus, I had to present work right after lunch, a digital campaign for new service to Asia. The meeting had taken on a startling new significance. I told Hip NY Agent I needed to go. He told me to stop being such a freak, that signing a first-time novelist took time. Then he told me something that sticks with me to this day, “I believe in your writing,” he said and the way he said it, without irony, with his voice shaking the tiniest bit, convinced me he was telling the truth. Standing there in the cold I understood that he wanted this as badly as me.
***
Touchstone was my last best hope. A publishing house I’d never heard of but one that Hip NY Agent assured me had the “balls and courage” to bring The June Vodka Campaign into the world. When I pointed out that technically, there was little difference between balls and courage, that if you had one you most certainly had the other, he didn’t say anything for a few seconds then said, snapping back into professional mode, “I’ll call you when I hear something.” The silence wasn’t deafening because at that moment an account executive appeared at my cubicle, checking then rechecking her watch then reminding me that I was late for the digital branding meeting. Fuck. The digital branding meeting was the kind of meeting you wanted to avoid. It was for the agency’s biggest client, the mother ship, which meant everyone and their dog would be adding value like their careers were in the crux, which of course they were. Advertising is the most bi-polar industry in the world. Get in with a good agency, one that values ideas and people as much as the bottom line, and life is the American dream on steroids. Get in with a bad agency, one that has no values other than keeping the doors open, and life is secrets and lies and never knowing who to trust. The digital branding meeting was a metaphor for all of this, no doubt. At some point, the subtext would round that most awful of corners, the one about power and who’s got it. Ugh. Power struggles were so expected, as an agency we should’ve banned them on general principle.
The digital branding meeting was in the skybox, an open air space four stories above the agency atrium. I took the stairs, intentionally raising my pulse to prepare my body for a fight I wanted no part of. Writing would take me away from all of this. I was a novelist. I was an artist. I was also ten minutes late. Everyone ignored me as I took a seat at the far end of the conference table. Everyone being leadership from the two armies at war – traditional and digital. I opened my journal and took notes, which within minutes became a sketch of a .357 magnum with the words “shoot my face” in a thought bubble. The discussion revolved around an idea I had brought forth into the world, two digital video ads in support of the global campaign we’d just launched. At the time, nobody was doing digital video ads, not something created specifically for the medium anyway. Most agencies ran their 30-second spots online and called it a breakthrough. My approach was just the opposite. I culled through my vast collection of home video, found two moments that perfectly captured the campaign conceit of “people, places and things” and turned them into video ads. One featured my then 3-year-old son trying to navigate the delicate sensibilities of a water balloon. The other featured me dancing like a complete moron at a friend’s wedding reception many moons ago (for the record, stone cold sober.) I’d shown them to my boss who recognized their value and immediately set up a meeting with the client. Instead of presenting storyboards we presented the finished videos, a strategy that paid off big time when the client slapped the conference room table and said, “we’re doing these.” Normally this would be considered a win but since lines had been drawn in the sand I was forced to defend myself against charges that involved taking work to the client without going through “the proper channels” and creating something that while undeniably charming, effective and best of all, sold, had been labeled “off brand” because of the grainy, hand-held nature of the videos. By meeting’s end it had been decided that all work, no matter the medium, needed to be vetted by everyone with supervisor, director and officer in their titles. Good times.
The week passed without word from Touchstone. I thought about doing the unthinkable and sending them an email, a friendly, non-invasive missive to hurry the process along. When I ran the idea by Hip NY Agent he explained, patiently, that this simply wasn’t done. And besides, he added, as optimistic as ever, “Bret still wants to make that deal, it’s just a matter of time.”
In mid winter 2006, almost two months to the day when The June Vodka Campaign was first submitted to ten major publishing houses, the ending finally arrived. And though I knew it would end the way it did, I was also clinging to my own private miracle on ice because if it did end the way it did, I wasn’t sure I could write another word. For me, writing a novel meant never giving up. It was 500 words a day, no exceptions. It was green tea and Blonde on Blonde deep into the night, fighting through scenes and dialogue and hoping my protagonist would lead me toward a resolution, however strange. It was carpal tunnel so painful I saw a physical therapist who, after I told her I wrote ad copy by day and fiction by night, advised me to tap the breaks once in awhile. And most importantly, it was time away from my family. How do you reconcile a sacrifice like that? I had picked time with the words over time with my young sons and if that time had been wasted, if The June Vodka Campaign was to about to get passed over by all ten houses then just who in the fuck did I think I was?
Husband, father, digital creative. That’s how most people defined me and how people define you is who you are. I needed to get battle ready for the fight between traditional and digital that everyone assumed would escalate into a full-scale war. And though I didn’t care which side won, the whole exercise felt juvenile and breathtakingly shortsighted, I knew I couldn’t pretend like I wasn’t involved. So I amped it up. I checked the analytics of my digital video ads, discovered that click thrus were through the roof (that mattered then) and suggested we turn the videos into TV spots. Obviously people loved them and why not expose more people to that love. I was crafting an email to support my case when Hip NY Agent buzzed my cell. He was always careful not to call me at work. This couldn’t be good.
“I’ve got bad news,” he said, getting right to it.“Hold on,” I said, leaving my cubicle and following a path that led to a focus-group friendly conference room just down the hall. I sat in front of the two-way mirror and faced the other way. “Okay,” I said, feeling the oxygen exit “Give it to me straight.”
“Touchstone is passing,” he said, disappointment rising like an underthrown fastball, “I just got word.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This is just…I don’t know…fuck.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. This wasn’t his first rodeo. “Listen to me,” he said, staying on strategy “this has nothing to do with your talent.”
“I could argue that point.”
“You could but I’d win,” he countered, seeing what I couldn’t. “This has everything to do with the rules of publishing.”
“There are rules?”
“It’s a billion dollar industry. You better believe there are rules.”
“Such as…”
He sighed. “Rule number one, men don’t read literary fiction.”
“They don’t.”
“Nope. They read thrillers and history and books about baseball, shit like that.”
“I read literary fiction.”
“You’re a writer. You’re very much the exception.”
“That feels like a curse right about now.”
“It’s a gift, never forget that. Rule number two, women read literary fiction. And not only do they read it. They also shape and color and mold into it whatever moves them.”
“They own it.”
“They so fucking own it.”
There was a whiteboard easel in the corner of that conference room, a favorite tool of account executives and planners all over the globe. Scrawled in black across the middle of the board, underlined twice to drive home its importance, was this question, Who’s Our Target? It was nothing, a coincidence, a long-forgotten vestige of what was I’m sure at the time one hell of an important meeting. But at that moment, with Hip NY Agent giving it to me straight, with another Tuesday slipping into anonymous nothingness, it was an epiphany, the first of many.
“Women are the target audience for literary fiction,” I said, seeing things for the first time.
“Now you’re getting it.”
“And my book’s all about a hard-drinking, angst-ridden, sex-obsessed ad douche who can’t stop thinking about an old girlfriend. Among other issues.”
“Right.”
“Wouldn’t exactly end up as an Oprah Selection would it.”
“Probably not.”
“So what do we do?”
He didn’t hesitate. “For a literary novel to sell it needs to come from a female point of view.”
I pondered then threw a hanging slider. “Like a girl meets this guy at work and they both love The Police and end up randomly running into each other at a Sting concert and making out during Bright On The Night but they’re both married to other people and one of them ends up coming down with a nasty case of pancreatic cancer and has like six weeks to live and love conquers all. Something like that.”
“That’s actually not bad. Are you working on that? Do you have an outline?”
“I just made that up.”
“You should really be working on that.”
“I don’t write shit.”
He laughed. “Of course not. And that’s what had everyone so excited. The June Vodka Campaign is dark, funny and weird. It’s impossible to categorize.”
“I’d categorize it as unpublished.”
“I believe in your writing. And so did lots of editors. They loved your voice. They loved how true everything felt.”
“Not enough to make a deal.”
“The rules of publishing always win. These people have to see a way to make money. They worship great writing and original thinking and all those intangibles we call art, I can promise you that. But like everyone else, they’re accountable.”
“What you’re telling me is the idea has to sell product.”
“Same old story.”
“Fuck.”
“Listen,” he said, “are you listening?”
The Bahamas were calling. Or even Eagle Mountain Lake. I was anywhere but there. Hip NY Agent brought it on home. “I want you to start thinking about a second book.”
“Like right now?”
“You’ve got momentum. Editors know you. That’s half the battle.”
“My fingers hurt.”
“Nail a second book and you’ve got June Vodka on the shelf ready to go. Just like that, you’ll have two novels in the world.”
“I need to spend time with my kids.”
“You can do this.”
tconn 
Leave a comment