On a sweltering summer afternoon in 1990, I was sweating over a hot keyboard, working in the non-air-conditioned living-room office of the little house I had at the time, and the phone rang. On the other end of the line was a woman who was an editor at Warner Books in New York City. At that time, both The Goal and Zapp were achieving sales momentum, and The Quadrant Solution was just about to be published. The editor asked if I would be intrested in writing a business novel for Warner to publish - a novel of my own, with no co-author. I said I’d think about it. I hung up the phone, looked heavenward, and shouted, “Yes!! Finally!!!”
With the previous three books, I had done okay financially. I had made a living from my writing. But the big money was not flowing to me. Hence, I was living in a crappy little two-bedroom house and driving a Honda hatchback (which also lacked air conditioning). With the Warner book, I would make pretty good money, better than what I’d been paid to date. Even more important, I had a chance to go solo, to strike out on my own and make a name for myself.
The novel I wrote under contract with Warner became The Venture, and it was about some people at a large corporation who lose their jobs in the downsizing of the early 1990’s. Rather than file for unemployment and look for other jobs, however, they join together and create their own company. The story then follows the hard lessons they learned, their romances, their betrayals, and ultimately their transformation of the business into something that could survive and grow.
The premise was a good one, but writing The Venture turned out to be a long, bad dream rather than the dream come true. Soon after signing the contract with Warner, everything got off track. By prior agreement, I was obligated to finish writing Heroz (a commitment Warner knew about), but rather than wrapping that up in a matter of months, as I expected, Heroz took years to complete as I labored over draft after draft that failed to meet with approval. To their credit, the editors at Warner were patient, and once I finally got Heroz finished, writing my own book went fairly quickly. But by then the manuscript was very late, the original editor had departed, and even after acceptance in 1995, it took until 1997 for the book finally to be published.
By 1997, times had changed. Downsizing was no longer topical, and the only entrepreneurs people wanted to read about were of the dot-com variety. Plus, as a business novel, the book turned out to have too much novel and not enough business going for it. Being solo I didn’t have marketing resources of an organization. So for these and other reasons, sales never got any traction. What had started as the chance to live my dream turned out to be a bitter and disappointing experience - so dark, so painful, so crushing that, you know, it might just be the basis of a novel at some point. Sometimes your best story is your own story.
Amazingly, you can still get a hardcover copy of The Venture at Amazon.com if you’re willing to wait a while.