John Grisham has sold more than three hundred million books, but few people outside his family know his career began with an avalanche of failure and rejection. The only reason I know is because I’ve long been fascinated with the origin stories of the most successful authors. Gave me hope back in the day when I was pitching my first few books.
With career pivots and second careers more popular than ever among guys over 40, you’re going to want to read this for a little inspiration, because despite Grisham currently being in the midst of a ridiculous streak of 51 consecutive New York Times bestsellers (including The Widow, which came out last week), his writing career began with a disastrous flop and if not for one single decision, you’d never have heard of him.
It all starts in 1984 with a 29-year-old Grisham sitting in a courthouse in northern Mississippi, listening to horrific testimony from a victim, a young girl.
“Every juror was crying,” he later said. “I remember staring at the defendant, wishing I had a gun.”
That moment stays with him. It haunts him. The emotion. The rage of the parents. The feeling of everyone in the courtroom.
“And with that, a story was born,” he said.
But Grisham isn’t an author. He’s a trial lawyer with a full caseload and a wife and young kids to support.
When the hell is he going to find time to write a book?
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Months pass and he’s going through his normal case work and normal life, but he can’t shake this idea for a story.
So he decides to take action.
He commits to getting up at 5AM every day to write for an hour before work. It’s slow. It’s painstaking. But he sticks with it. For three straight years those 5AM sessions continue until he has a completed manuscript.
Before we move on, think about this.
Three full years. 5 AM. Working full time. Raising a family. Writing on his own time. Keeping a dream alive. What would you wake up at 5AM to do starting right now that you may not see results from for three years? It’s wild.
Back to Grisham:
Finally, at age 32, he has a story he’s proud of.
Now comes the part every author dreads: pitching.
He sends the manuscript out to publishers. One rejects it. Then another. Then another. And another and another and another and another until he compiles twenty-seven rejections in total. Twenty-seven!
Then, after nearly two years of sending, waiting, and hoping, lucky number twenty-eight finally says “yes”. We’re now a full five years after Grisham started writing when Wynwood Press agrees to a small print run.
It should be a dream come true, right? A half-decade of work finally coming to fruition. Time to celebrate!
Nope. The book is, in no uncertain terms, a complete and total dud.
“Five thousand copies were printed and we couldn’t give them away,” Grisham said.
Desperate to get the books into readers’ hands, he stuffed boxes of books into his car and drove from library to library on the weekends trying to convince people to read it. In person!
“Hi, I’m John Grisham. I’m a new author. I’d like to tell you about my new book…”
But nobody cared.
That book, A Time to Kill was, ironically, dead on arrival.
After five years chasing his dream, with a young family and no success, Grisham, now in his mid-30s, could have easily quit. But he wasn’t ready to give up.
“I told myself, I’m going to write one more book,” he said.
The 5AM writing sessions started again. This time, the story is about a young lawyer from Kentucky who graduates third in his class at Harvard Law, but instead of joining a big-time firm in New York or Chicago, he’s wooed to a high-end firm in Memphis, Tennessee, where he quickly realizes things aren’t what they seem, and a classic thriller ensues.
That novel was called The Firm.
When he sent the draft to his agent, someone in the office made copies and sent it to Hollywood. Incredibly, the manuscript was bought by Paramount Pictures for $600,000 to be made into a movie before it even had a publisher. This, as you can imagine, almost never happens.
The Paramount deal then led to a massive contract with Doubleday and the novel spent 47 weeks on the bestseller list and became the number one book of 1991. And that’s before Tom Cruise starred in the blockbuster movie.
And here’s a fun twist.
Suddenly, that “failure” of a first novel looked very different. The original publishers relaunched A Time to Kill, reprinted the original 5,000 copies…
And then sold another 1.5 MILLION COPIES ON TOP OF THAT.
Ha! The book that a few years earlier Grisham couldn’t give away in person from the trunk of his own car was now the most-read thriller in the United States.
And it was all because at a critical moment he made a gutsy decision:
When Grisham could have quit, he decided to write one more book.
Think about that the next time you get a major setback. I think about it all the time.
And the key to John Grisham’s success since then is simple: consistency and confidence.
“Write every day. At the same time. No excuses,” he told The New York Times.
That’s how you turn rejection into a billion dollars in book sales.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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Check out my latest books at jonfinkel.com
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