Don’t Buy the Wrong Book Now…
When I was a kid the first novel I ever wrote was an epic six part (might have been seven – it’s so long ago I don’t even remember) science fiction saga called Galaxy, an autobiographical wish fulfilment fantasy about a teenager who gets to go into space, meet strange new creatures and life forms, travel to advanced civilisations, be the hero and even get the girl. The girl was based on a model from a clothing catalogue who’s face I can still see vividly in my mind over three decades later.
Quick pivot (but related). Remember the flap years back when disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and Warner Bros started a fight over Lee Daniels’ movie The Butler, starring Forest Whitaker as a butler who worked at the White House for successive presidents. Warner Bros claimed it owned the rights to the name because of a 1919 silent comedy and thus forbade Weinstein from using it for Daniel’s film (it was eventually released as ‘Lee Daniels’ The Butler‘ a solution as stupid as the dispute was).
Well, at the time that episode reminded me of how paranoid I used to be that some other TV show, book or movie called Galaxy would come out and steal my thunder. It was my word, I’d made it up and it encapsulated everything I’d worked so hard to build in my story. I clutched it to my chest jealously like it was a security blanket.
I was reminded of all that this past week when the publishing press started chattering about a new book by an author named T J Newman, a 36 year old former flight attendant. In it, the pilot flying a passenger jet from Los Angeles to New York is told after the flight leaves that his family has been kidnapped and will be murdered unless he crashes his flight, killing everyone on board. The author is excitedly telling everyone in the media who interviews her how it was rejected 40 times, they’ve sold the rights to Hollywood, there’s a sequel in planning, etc, and good luck to her. We all wish we were in that position.
It’s name, if you can’t already guess? Falling.
Maybe there are enough stupid people on the internet who go straight to Amazon and buy the a copy of the first Falling they land on without realising it’s mine and not the one they thought they were after. At this point I’ll take success by book buyers not being careful enough if that’s all I’ll ever get (I can’t remember the band but there was an incident where some Christian group made a big media show of running a bulldozer over huge piles of a CD they thought was too permissive or some such rubbish. Later some interviewer asked one of the band members what he thought of it and he was overjoyed because that church group had to have bought those hundreds of copies).
And the real irony in this story is that there are about 15 other authors sitting around the world feeling the same thing I am right now. If you search for ‘falling’ in books on Amazon I certainly don’t have a monopoly on the word nearly as much as I wanted.