Douglas Anderson Professional Portfolio: Scholarship: Fiction

Medaille College
Douglas Anderson
Professional Portfolio

I spent fifteen years of my life writing fiction. I wrote enough to get into the M.F.A. program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I continued to write, well enough to get the degree. Of the nine students who started that program with me, only two of us graduated from it. It was rigorous and arduous and it turned out that most of us didn't have the perseverance.

My thesis novel, The Lion's Jaw (left), was accepted by an agent, Mitch Douglas at International Creative Management (ICM), in 1983. In the next five years, I finished three other novels -- Snitch, set in a prison, Fleshtones, set at a circus, and Tortilla Junction, set in a terror cell in South Texas -- and most of a fourth, Noo Running, about an Olympic athlete from Liberia.

Read Gypsy Blue, the first three chapters of Fleshtones.

Sitting at a computer and writing

fiction was my passion and the rest of my life had to fit around it. Mitch felt as though every new novel was stronger than the earlier ones, and he stopped sending around the earlier ones.

Finally, in 1988, Mitch said that he didn't want to be my agent any longer. He felt as though my novels were publishable, but he didn't seem to be able to get the job done. He gave me a list of other agents who he thought might do better by me. I shopped around and found lots of interest, but I wasn't convinced that any of them could do better than Mitch.

Meanwhile, in 1987, the N.F.L. players went on strike and the owners hired scabs. A Buffalo News article about Jim Kelly taunting a scab triggered my imagination. I dropped the Olympic runner novel and started one about the players' strike. Having grown up in a family where all the males -- grandparents and uncles and cousins -- and some of the females were in labor unions and had struck often, I had some insight into the hugely positive role that labor unions have played in our society in the past century.

First and Ten

By 1989,

I had a novel called First and Ten that I was sure was better than any I had written to that point. Having been discouraged by the huge multi-field talent factory that ICM was then and still is now, I made a list of the top three small book-only agencies and sent my manuscript to the Virginia Barber Agency. It was accepted immediately, though the agent who took me on wanted me to do another draft to edit out a subplot and to emphasize the humor.

In the summer of 1991, the manuscript was taken on by Richard Marek at Random House. He was late in his career, having made his name at the Dial Press as Editor-in-Chief, at Putnam's and St. Martin's Press as a publisher of his own imprint (Richard Marek Publishers and St. Martin's/Marek), at E.P. Dutton as its President and Publisher, and at Crown, a division of Random House, as an editor-at large. Over a thirty-year career, Dick published the first nine books by Robert Ludlum, the last five books by James Baldwin, and Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs. He taught me a lot.

I signed a contract for four novels and an option for a fifth, tentatively in a series with the same hero and football setting. For two years, I corresponded with and visited with Dick while he helped me shape the book. I spent time in NY City, where I worked with my agent and publicists and we put together a marketing strategy. The agent sold First and Ten to a film production company in California.

The negotiations and preliminary screenplay work with the production company took me to a world that I wasn't prepared for and didn't like. They wanted me to get the manuscript "ready" for their professionals to start it through the production blender AKA development. I had a manuscript about a professional football player in Buffalo and they told me to think outside the box, perhaps to make it about an amateur female baseball player in Biloxi.

What happened next is a little murky because I heard about it second-hand. The William Morris Agency obtained a copy of the page proofs from someone at Random House, and William Morris did an internal assessment of the book that suggested it would be better for a TV episode than a feature film. That William Morris document got out and caused the production company to back off, to wait until the book was published to see how it was received. The agent started entertaining offers from TV production companies that wanted to option it for one of their episodes.

I found the whole process instructive, humorous and, to put it mildly, not to my liking.

Marketing

The novel was published in September 1993. For the next twelve months, I did intensive publicity. The book was about the Bills, and the Bills lost their fourth Super Bowl in January 1994. The momentum carried me and book sales into the beginning of the 1994 football season, when media attention turned to the next new thing.

Once again, I found myself in the world of marketing, where I had been before I sent to graduate school. In my early 20's, I attended the University of Texas's MBA program, free-lanced as a writer and translator, started a primary-school foreign-language newsletter publishing business, and worked with some entrepreneurs on various other projects. I learned accounting and marketing and a fair amount of money passed through my hands. The entrepreneurial efforts all crashed and burned, and I was very happy to go to graduate school and be poor again.

Fifteen years later, when it was time to peddle First and Ten, I got back into marketing. I was still good at publicity, especially off-the-book-page publicity spurred by the Bills and professional football in general. Once I started doing book signings, I got passed around the chains from store manager to store manager. Once I started doing radio shows, I got passed around among the program directors, who were calling me. The same thing happened with TV and the lecture circuit. The first Rotary lunch talk led to many others. Both my national publicist at Random House and my local publicist, Mary Ann Lauricella, said I was easy to place because I had a good reputation. Of course, the Bills' success on the football field helped a lot.

All told in support of First and Ten, I did four dozen book signings in six states (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Washington), dozens of radio shows from San Diego to Boston, especially the stations that are part of the Bills Radio Network and the regional networks of other NFL teams, and about a dozen TV shows, mostly local. I was interviewed by AP, UPI, and a dozen newspapers and had photo shoots with many of them. (See examples in boxes on this page.) I spoke to about two dozen WNY service organizations, mostly Rotary. I signed well over a thousand books, half of them at Borders and Barnes and Noble, who kept close track. I note with a chuckle that these signed copies still sell at the online used book sites.

One of the struggles was placement of First and Ten in the stores. My agent and editor wanted it to be marketed as a literary novel. Borders agreed, but Barnes and Noble put me in the mystery and suspense section, where the book sold much better. I made a fateful decision to go with the mystery community.

In retrospect, I can make this process more coherent than it was while I was living it. While the book sold well, it didn't get anywhere near being a best-seller. It suffered from comparison with Ruffians, another first novel about football, by Tim Green, a former Syracuse University and Altanta Falcon player. Ruffians was published the same week as mine by Tim's employer, Turner Books, owned by Falcons owner Ted Turner. Then in short order, Dick Marek left Random House to run Kirkus Reviews, where he later published my reviews. The editor I was assigned at Random House didn't like football or authors he had inherited, so he delayed publication of the second book in the series and let my agent know that Random House was no longer supporting me as it had when Dick was my editor. Then the production company pulled out of the contract with me, as it was their right to do. My agent then had trouble trying to peddle First and Ten let alone the rest of the series in Hollywood. She still wanted me to go the literary route.

Writers' conferences

note | This section on the two Buffcon conferences would probably fall under Boyer's scholarship of application rather than the scholarship of discovery.

I found the mystery writing community to be more congenial and defined than the larger literary community. It had professional organizations, specialty book stores, and conferences. As the Random House publicity effort for First and Ten faded, I increased my participation in the mystery community. From 1994 to 1996, I attended six national and international mystery conferences where I signed hundreds of books. Now eligible, I joined the Writers Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, and the American Crime Writers League (ACWL). The ACWL had the youngest and hippest membership -- already using email -- so I could participate.

However, at the time, I still saw myself as publishing more books. It was important to pay my dues, so I became membership secretary of the ACWL and served in that role for three years, expanding and putting online the membership directory, and helping to increase membership. In addition, I organized two mystery writers' conferences, dubbed Buffcon. The first was the very first event held in Medaille's new Campus Center, and the program and report are available in Appendix: Documents.

Lawrence Block (on the left in picture below) was the guest of honor, and the conference was held to coincide with commencement so that Block could also be Medaille's commencement speaker in May 1995. Learning from the first conference, the second was held at the Holiday Valley ski resort in Ellicottville, NY, with Anne Perry (picture above right) as the guest of honor. I was the sole organizer and staff, doing all the leg work and all the publicity for both conferences.

More importantly, I was accepted into that community of writers and I spent a lot of time with some best-selling authors: Lawrence Block, Anne Perry, Sue Grafton, Joan Hess (on right in picture below), and others. From them, I learned a major lesson, that I would not want to trade my life with theirs. If that was success, I did not want any part of it. This is a portfolio, not an autobiography, so I'll let it sit at that.

Career Transitions

By the time that the second Buffcon conference ended in May 1996, I was done with both book publishing and fiction writing. Whereas ten years previously, I had thought that the best thing that could happen to me professionally would be to get a novel published by a New York publisher, by 1996 it would have been one of the worst things.

It took some time to fully understand my problem. It wasn't the writing, which I loved. It wasn't the publishing, which I found tolerable. It was the marketing, which I detested. It made me very uncomfortable to be the center of attention. I was good at it, but I didn't like it. It was embarrassing, and I found it extremely stressful.

Like leaving behind a bad marriage, I have not written fiction since. In fact, I stopped reading it, too, as well as going to movies or watching dramas on TV. Just as it had taken me years to learn to think like a fiction writer, it took several years for those habits of thinking to fade, though they have not faded completely.

By the mid-1990's then, I had the time and the head-space for a new fascination: the Internet. With the help of a sabbatical and my dedication to lifelong learning, over the next three years, I made the transition to the next phase of my scholarly life: teaching webs.

Now, ten years later about to embark on another sabbatical, perhaps I am about to make another transition.

This web, offered in fulfillment
of the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

web established: February 2007
page last modified: October 2007
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/scholarship/discoveryfiction.htm