In I guess 1958 I wrote an article in the NY Times magazine about the tunnels, ducts, subways underneath New York--an editor there took pity on a struggling kid and offered me the assignment. This article duly appeared, almost the first thing I had ever sold anybody. A Lippincott editor saw it and promptly contacted me asking if I would do a book on the subject for them. I haughtily rejected this idea saying I was a novelist. But whatever novel I was working on at that time got rejected, just like everything else I had sent out to that point, so I reluctantly agreed to write their book. It appeared as The World Beneath the City, and got noticed. By that time I was in Europe writing as a stringer for the Times sports section. My subjects included the grands prix and the major sports car races, which I knew about but was not at first a fan of. Such pastimes seemed entirely exotic to Americans, I assumed. They certainly did to me. Especially all the fatal crashes that no one else ever called attention to. Young men dying? Spectators killed? Who had ever heard of such things? So here comes a letter from the same Lippincott editor asking me to do a book on Grand Prix racing. You must remember that editors then and now need a stable of writers to support them, including new young ones, to replace those moving off or dying out, and after World Beneath this editor wanted to keep me, just in case I turned out to be something. So I agreed to write Cars At Speed for them, why not, I was on the scene and had all the material. The title was theirs, not mine. By then Dan Gurney had crashed, killing a spectator and had looked down at the corpse saying: "This is a cruel sport," which I now wanted as my title, but Lippincott refused me. The two early books were published very modestly, Lippincott's investment minor. I got an advance of $1000 for World Beneath The City, and $2,000 for Cars At Speed, and felt myself moving up in the world. The success that Cars did have astonished me, and surely them, about 12 printings before the sale gave out. It is still one of my biggest sellers in E-Book form. But that was in the future and I now offered Lippincott my third book, a large scale picture book, text and 160 photos by me, to be called The Cruel Sport. But they rejected the whole idea. So I went elsewhere with it, and The Cruel Sport was published in 1965 by another. Both books were republished at the start of the next century by still another publisher, The Cruel Sport in 2005, Cars at Speed in 2007. I've had a lot publishers since Lippincott.
A fellow author, George Levy, has contacted me with certain questions, among them (I'm paraphrasing him): How the devil did my book Cars at Speed, published by J.B. Lippincott & Co. in 1961, ever see the light of day? Lippincott, founded in 1836, was a staid old house. Grand Prix racing in 1961 was worse than a fringe sport, it had almost no following in America at all. And Lippincott of all houses?
In I guess 1958 I wrote an article in the NY Times magazine about the tunnels, ducts, subways underneath New York--an editor there took pity on a struggling kid and offered me the assignment. This article duly appeared, almost the first thing I had ever sold anybody. A Lippincott editor saw it and promptly contacted me asking if I would do a book on the subject for them. I haughtily rejected this idea saying I was a novelist. But whatever novel I was working on at that time got rejected, just like everything else I had sent out to that point, so I reluctantly agreed to write their book. It appeared as The World Beneath the City, and got noticed. By that time I was in Europe writing as a stringer for the Times sports section. My subjects included the grands prix and the major sports car races, which I knew about but was not at first a fan of. Such pastimes seemed entirely exotic to Americans, I assumed. They certainly did to me. Especially all the fatal crashes that no one else ever called attention to. Young men dying? Spectators killed? Who had ever heard of such things? So here comes a letter from the same Lippincott editor asking me to do a book on Grand Prix racing. You must remember that editors then and now need a stable of writers to support them, including new young ones, to replace those moving off or dying out, and after World Beneath this editor wanted to keep me, just in case I turned out to be something. So I agreed to write Cars At Speed for them, why not, I was on the scene and had all the material. The title was theirs, not mine. By then Dan Gurney had crashed, killing a spectator and had looked down at the corpse saying: "This is a cruel sport," which I now wanted as my title, but Lippincott refused me. The two early books were published very modestly, Lippincott's investment minor. I got an advance of $1000 for World Beneath The City, and $2,000 for Cars At Speed, and felt myself moving up in the world. The success that Cars did have astonished me, and surely them, about 12 printings before the sale gave out. It is still one of my biggest sellers in E-Book form. But that was in the future and I now offered Lippincott my third book, a large scale picture book, text and 160 photos by me, to be called The Cruel Sport. But they rejected the whole idea. So I went elsewhere with it, and The Cruel Sport was published in 1965 by another. Both books were republished at the start of the next century by still another publisher, The Cruel Sport in 2005, Cars at Speed in 2007. I've had a lot publishers since Lippincott.
1 Comment
7/4/2018 04:32:54 pm
You've gone through many rejections as well, that's why I can finally assume that you really know what success really means. In the world you live in, it's not easy to be at the top. You have to undergo a lot of challenges in life and be the best version of yourself before you reach the top. Since many people have been desiring to get into that position, you need to outsmart them. It requires strategy. Once you're done with it, there is a higher chance you will achieve success.
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