Perseverance

I heard a crazy story the other day. Someone told me that J.K. Rowling pitched Harry Potter to something like 45 publishers before Scholastic finally took a flyer. After 10 publishers, you have a stiff upper lip. After 20, you’re a tough cookie. After 30, you’re a masochist. After 40, it’s borderline mental illness. And yet she persevered.

My experience in publishing was entirely different. I was recruited to write Street Freak. A friend of mine was forwarding my Bloomberg notes to another literary agent friend, and when Lehman went tits up, the literary agent approached me about writing the book. I actually turned him down—I didn’t want all the drama. Six months went by, and he reached out again, pressuring me to do it. I reluctantly agreed. Of course, that book has launched my career in ways that I could not have even imagined.

But that is not how it usually goes for authors.

Most authors have a tough time even getting an agent. They send out hundreds of queries. Most of them go unreturned. And even after you get an agent, and you submit the book proposal or whatever, there’s still no guarantee that you’re going to get published. There are 500 major books published every year by the Big 5 publishers. It is a one-in-a-million shot. And to think, I didn’t have to go through any of this. The book came to me. This never happens. And so it distorted my view on what the publishing industry is like, because when I wrote my second book, All the Evil of This World, I couldn’t find a publisher, and ended up doing this hybrid self/traditional publishing thing with my literary agency.

Success has come easy to me, in a lot of ways. But not in all ways. Certainly not in athletics. I had this conversation with one of my racquetball buddies the other day: if I am winning 13-8 or something like that, I have this voice in my head that says, lose. This guy will score seven points and come back and beat me. And then I lose, ignominiously—the guy scores seven points and comes back and beats me. I expect failure, and I get failure—I am simply not a good competitor. So I told my friend this, a successful architect who’s genetically engineered to be a racquetball player—he can scratch his knees without bending over—and he said, well, you’re a good competitor in the game of life. Which is true. My story of getting a job on Wall Street is pretty similar to J.K. Rowling’s experience trying to get Harry Potter published. I kissed a lot of frogs, and I was humiliated multiple times. Lots of doors closed before the one at Lehman finally opened. I remember being in my office at Coast Guard Intelligence, talking to Alan Augarten, head of equity derivatives at Prudential. He gave me the bullet to the brain. I pleaded with him to take me on, pulling out all the stops. He was adamant—I was not going to work at Prudential. I hung up the phone, thinking that I would never get a job on Wall Street. Anyway, Prudential Securities was gone a couple of years later—good miss. Funny how things work out.

There is a genre of American movie that is about persisting in the face of unbelievable obstacles. The best in that genre? The Pursuit of Happyness. People have one of two reactions after watching that movie: they are demoralized by it, or they are inspired by it. I was the latter. Funny—National Review recently came out with a list of the Top 10 most conservative movies of all time, and this was at the top, and not because there is an ounce of conservative politics in the movie. There isn’t. But working hard and achieving something is a conservative value, I guess, though it shouldn’t be. One thing I will say about that movie—the rich, whitebread Dean Witter guys that Will Smith was working for as an intern were all very nice. A less capable director would have made them out to be villains, and set up an adversarial relationship between the employer and the employee. Wall Street people are nice, if they think you can help them make money. A little self-absorbed, but nice. When I was looking for a job, someone went out of their way to help me, and I’ve never forgotten it. Behind every successful person in finance, there is usually someone who went out of their way to help them get hired.

So lately I’ve been working on getting short stories published at literary magazines. Success is not coming easy to me this time. I’ve done the math. There are about 200 prominent literary magazines of varying quality, and each them might publish 10-20 stories a year. So there are about 2,000-4,000 short stories published in the U.S. every year. That may sound like a lot, until you consider that there are tens of thousands of MFAs, cranking out tens of thousands of stories, and the ones who have already been published have a leg up. There might only be 500 stories published by “emerging writers” every year. If there are 50,000 submissions, then your chances are 1 in 100. So far, so good—those are not the worst odds in the world. The feedback I usually get from these places is that my writing is excellent, but not a good “fit” for the magazine. Well, shit. Nothing I am going to write is going to be a good fit for these magazines. Lots of times, I am writing about rich and successful people. I am writing about very unsympathetic characters. I am operating under the philosophy that if I keep doing what I am doing, if I turn out great stories, then someone will notice someday, and take a risk. So far, I have had about 60 rejections. I will have hundreds more. I am past the “stiff upper lip” and “tough cookie” phases, and now I am onto “masochism.” When disappointment turns into despondence and you think you’re a failure, and you have no chance, all that is left is faith.

I don’t tell many people this, but I had an English teacher in high school who you might have heard of. His name was Wally Lamb. Wally and I didn’t see eye to eye in those days, but I will tell you his story. He’d be sitting there, at the front of the class, with a checkered shirt and a knit tie, squared at the bottom, telling us about all his rejections. Back in those days, you’d get a rejection letter from a journal. He’d thumb-tack it up the to the bulletin board in the classroom. He had dozens of them. This was before he got his first book deal, and this was before his first book was one of the early selections for Oprah’s Book Club. The guy fucking went hockey stick after that. So you can say whatever you want about Wally. Right place, right time, lucky fucker, all that, but the reality is that guy paid his dues. You can’t say that he didn’t. He went through the “borderline mental illness” stage of rejections. I’ve said this before here and there—you never want it to be easy. It was easy for me, and I got a stilted view of what the real world was like. I thought I was that talented. Yes, I am talented, but shit talented out your ass. There are a lot of talented people out there. Talent is nothing without work.

Just keep writing. Or, if you are in athlete, just keep playing. Or, if you are a banker, just keep banking. Etc. Just keep putting in the work, day in and day out, and people will notice, and you will get breaks. Or, you could quit. There is a place for quitting, but not after 60 rejections. Not after 8 months. We must have hope or starve to death.

I am happy (or sad) to say that things continue to be easy for me. I spent eight months working on a book proposal for No Worries, and I was ready to go through the beauty contest of pitching it to publishers, when I got an email out of the blue from an editor at Harriman House. I had on my Twitter profile that I was working on a book, and he emailed me about it. After some back and forth, I had a book deal, the second one I’ve gotten without even trying. I love No Worries, and I think it is going to be a huge success, but it is not my ambition to be the best financial writer in the world. It is my ambition to be the best writer in the world. Like in any other industry, there are gatekeepers, and you have to get past the gatekeepers. I will say that getting published in one of the reputable lit mags is a big deal—if you get published in one of the top ones, there is a pretty good chance that it is going to lead to a book contract.

So I write. I am writing at the pool of a hotel in Miami. I write on the plane. I write in waiting rooms. I write when I get up. I write before bed. Every successful person has an unhealthy obsession with their work, which is broadly applicable to all industries. I eat, breathe, sleep writing. Someone out there eats, breathes, sleeps natural gas. Or eats, breathes, sleeps beer distribution. Or figure skating. Or cornhole. If you’re talking to me, and I zone out in the middle of a conversation, there’s a good chance I’m thinking of a story I’m working on.

I will be successful. You can timestamp me on it.

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