Book Ends

The first time I flew overseas was in high school. My mom chaperoned a school trip to England and France. We did all the tourist things, saw some cathedrals, ate strange food, walked around museums, had too much to drink for the first time. Traveling to Europe felt exotic. The only other times I’d left the country were trips to the Bahamas and a cruise that took us through Jamaica and Mexico.

When I moved onto my first boat in my early 20s, I started spending a lot more time in the Caribbean and Bahamas. My passport filled with stamps: Cuba, Columbia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Barbados, Dominican Republic, St. Barths, BVIs, and a dozen others. I spent most of my years as a yacht captain living “abroad,” but it was really the islands not that far away. To me, the rest of the world was a mystery. I’d never been to Asia or Africa. I’d only seen glimpses of London and Paris as a teenager. The entire Southern Hemisphere was beyond my knowing.

Friends and family thought I was some kind of globe-trotter because of my yachting years, and it did feel like I’d had an adventurous life. By the age of 30, I’d visited dozens of countries, living in some of them for a year at a time. I’d become a professional vagabond. But by the age of 32, I was retired from yachting and living in the remote mountains of North Carolina, working at a small independent bookshop, and writing stories as a hobby. My income at the bookstore was $300 per week, before taxes. I lived in a 850 square foot house with my girlfriend and our dog. The idea of saving up enough money to fly to Europe was bonkers to me. My money was going toward paying off my student loans, the only debt I still had in life. Very slowly, I was building up an emergency savings fund a few dollars at a time.

I’d written five books by this point — the Molly Fyde trilogy, Half Way Home, and The Hurricane. I’d also published a novelette called The Plagiarist. Each was self-published, with my own terrible cover art. The seventh thing I tossed online was another novelette called WOOL. I charged 99 cents for the ebook and $4.99 for the print-on-demand paperback, which was just 60 pages long. I then went back to writing my next novel.

Within two months, the sales of that small seventh publication was bringing in more than my bookstore job. Another month after that, and WOOL was making more in a month than I would normally make in a year.

Things got weirder, quickly. After having long given up on landing a literary agent, I suddenly started hearing from them, begging me to be their client. One stood out among the rest: Kristin Nelson of Nelson Literary Agency. Working out of Denver, she had an outsiders’ view of the publishing world, but all the insider connections and knowledge of the best in the biz. She blew me away with her honesty. “You’re doing better without a publisher than you probably would with one,” she wrote in an email. “But I can help you close foreign deals you aren’t even thinking of, and I can hook you up with a Hollywood co-agent to help you option your work.”

Signing with Kristin was one of the best professional decisions of my entire life, up there with deciding to self-publish. While I continued to write and release my own works, Kristin started bringing in foreign offers for translation. I think Brazil was one of the first deals we made. The advance I got there was more than I dreamed of getting from a US publisher. I want to say it was in the $60,000 range. Insane income for someone who was making less than half that as a bookseller. Germany also came calling, another huge book market. This time with a six-figure deal. By this time, I was making six figures every month from my Amazon sales, so most of my income was from the self-publishing side of things. But Kristin was knocking home run after home run. And then, just as she’d promised, doors in Hollywood began to open up.

“Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian are interested.”

Now, if you were a sci-fi author making a dream list of partners in Hollywood, this duo would be right up there at the top. WOOL was about to go out to auction, but Ridley and Steve wanted to prevent the price from getting too steep, so they issued an ultimatum: take their offer and don’t go to auction, or go to auction without them. There were other parties already in talks with us who assured me they would get this film made, and looking back at their track records now, I think they were right. A WOOL feature probably would’ve come out in 2014 or 2015 had I gone that route. I’m glad I didn’t.

Instead of taking a higher chance of getting something made, I went with the guarantee of having Ridely Scott’s name attached to my novel. I’d already hit the New York Times bestseller list, and now Kristin had that, plus a film deal with a living legend, to take to foreign markets. (We were getting offers from US publishers as well, but the amounts they were offering weren’t worth giving up the digital rights, and print-only deals were off the table, we were told).

After signing with Ridley and Steve, I had my first taste of corporate air travel. I’d never flown business class before, which I assume is the norm. Most people never do. I never thought I would. I was a fish-out-of-water. No idea what to do with the hot towel, no idea if the food or drinks were included, what to ask for, what to expect, how to operate the seat or the table or any of the little compartments. I watched in absolute horror as a gentleman in the first row immediately went to sleep, skipping the meal and what I soon learned were free drinks. How could you sleep through a once-in-a-lifetime experience like this, I naively thought to myself.

I was picked up at the airport by someone holding my name on a placard, like a scene from a movie. They took me to a hotel someone else had booked and paid for, and the next day I was on a real Hollywood studio lot, brushing past actors I recognized, meeting with the head of the studio, talking to producers. I never felt like I belonged there (I still don’t). I felt like a tourist. Even with all the sailing I’d done, the near-death experiences at sea, working for the rich and famous on mega-yachts, I have never lost the deep-rooted feeling of being a kid raised on a farm in North Carolina, chucking hay bales and climbing on top of grain silos. It’s my core identity, and I think it always will be.

It’s important for me to remind myself how unusual overseas travel is for most people, and should’ve been for me. Otherwise I might get inured to it. Especially as my social circle filled up with people who fly to Japan to go skiing for the weekend, or head to Ibiza every summer. That wasn’t me then, and it isn’t me now. Back in 2011, in my early 30s, I hadn’t been overseas since that high school field trip with my mom. So it was a big deal when I signed with a publisher in the UK and they wanted to fly me over for a book tour.

By now, Kristin and I had done deals with five or six foreign countries for translation. But signing with Random House in the UK was different. Besides some spelling changes and a round of suggestions from my new editor Jack Fogg, the book being published there was the one I’d written and self-published while working in a bookstore in North Carolina. I’d be able to do press without a translator. My novel was going to be not just shelved in bookstores, but featured in the windows. Tube stations were plastered with the amazing new cover art they’d created for the book, the iconic red one that would eventually grace a US edition and several other overseas editions.

That flight to London was the most pampered I’d ever felt in my life. British Airways business class. A seat that turned into a bed. Delicious food. A huge screen for watching movies. I got a little sleep, but I was too excited and didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted every course. Besides the flight home, I figured I’d never travel like this again. That’s been my attitude this entire adventure:…