When your unpublished manuscript is about to be made into a movie, surely publishers will snap it up, right?
Not necessarily. On the Huffington Post, Rex Pickett, author of Sideways, tells the entertaining if, for him, harrowing, story of the progress of his novel. It starts:
“In my last blog I left you with the following: my Sideways novel had been turned down by the publishing industry through my indefatigable Curtis Brown, LTD agent, on a second round of submissions -- even, shockingly, after Alexander Payne had optioned it and it was major entertainment daily news that Artisan Ent. had greenlit it as a $10 million film.”
I can’t resist quoting one of the first rejection letters Pickett got from a senior editor at a major publishing house: “Sideways is nothing more than a glorified screenplay, and if it was made into a film it would stink to high heaven with the rot of Pickett's writing.”
Unfortunately for Pickett, Payne then decided to do another film, About Schmidt, first. After that, Payne and his writing partner adapted the book and Pickett’s new agent submitted the novel again, to 20 top publishers (bringing the submission total to 100). Instead of the hoped-for bidding war, they got 20 rejections.
The agent persisted and they got an offer: $5000 from St. Martin’s Press…who immediately told Pickett he should hire a line editor to go over the manuscript…
I won’t continue, you really should read Pickett’s fuller version of his adventure, but if there ever as evidence that William Goldman’s line, “Nobody knows anything,” applies to book publishing as much as it does to film production, this is it!
As Pickett points out, the novel was faithfully adapted into a film and won every single screenwriting award that a writer could win, including the Oscar, and is now enshrined in the WGA Theater as one of the 101 Greatest Scripts of All Time.”
You can read the full story starting here. It continues here.
(Interested in writing screenplays? See my other blog, www.ScreenwritingSuccess.com)
