John B. Thompson - Book Wars

J. B. T., Cambridge

Andy Weir couldn’t believe his luck. He always wanted to be a writer and he started writing fanfiction when he was 9. But, being a sensible young man, he doubted he could make a living as a writer, so he trained to be a software engineer and became a computer programmer instead. As a resident of Silicon Valley, this turned out to be a wise decision, and he had a successful career as a programmer for twenty-five years. But he never gave up his dream of being a writer and he continued to write stories in his spare time. He even had a go in the late 1980s at writing a book and trying to get it published, but no one was interested: ‘It was the standard struggling author’s story, couldn’t get any interest – publishers weren’t interested, no agent wanted to represent me, it just wasn’t meant to be.’ Undeterred, Andy continued to write in his spare time – writing was his hobby. As the internet became more prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he set up a website and began posting his stories online. He had a mailing list that people could sign up to, and he sent them an email whenever he posted a new story. Over a period of ten years, he gradually built up a list of some 3,000 email addresses. Then he started writing serial fiction, posting a chapter at a time on his website and letting his readers know. One of these stories was about a manned space mission to Mars. Being a software engineer, Andy was interested in problem-solving, and he began to think, ‘OK, what if something goes wrong, how do we make sure the crew survives? What if two things go wrong, what do we do then? And suddenly I realized I had a story.’ He wrote in the evenings and at weekends, whenever he had spare time and felt the urge, and when he finished a chapter he posted it on his website. His readers became very engaged in the story and picked him up on some of the technical details about the physics or the chemistry or the maths of a manned mission to Mars, and he would go back and fix it. This active engagement with his readers spurred him on. Chapter by chapter, the story unfolded of an unfortunate astronaut, Mark Watney, who had been knocked unconscious by a violent dust storm shortly after arriving on Mars and woke up to discover that his crewmates had taken him for dead and made an emergency escape without him, leaving Mark alone to survive indefinitely on a remote planet with limited supplies of food and water and no way to communicate with Earth.

After the last chapter of The Martian had been posted on his website, Andy was ready to move on to another project, but he started getting emails from some of his readers saying, ‘Hey, I really love The Martian but I hate reading it in a web browser. Can you make an e-reader version?’ So Andy figured out how to do that – it wasn’t too hard for a software engineer – and he posted an ePub and a Mobi file on his website so that people could download it for free. Then he started getting emails from people saying, ‘Thanks, I really appreciate that you put up e-reader formats, but I’m not very technically savvy and I don’t know how to download a file from the internet and put it on my e-reader. Can you just put it up as a Kindle?’ So Andy did that too – filled in the form on Amazon, uploaded the file and, presto, there it was on the Amazon site, now available as a Kindle ebook. Andy wanted to give it away for free but Amazon require you to put a price on your ebook, so he chose the lowest price that Amazon allowed, 99¢. He sent an email out to his readers and said, ‘There you are everybody, you can read it for free on my website, you can download the free ePub or Mobi version from my website or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you’, and to his surprise more people bought it from Amazon than downloaded it for free. The ebook swiftly moved up Amazon’s bestseller list, reaching number one in the sci-fi category and staying there for quite some time. Pretty soon the book was selling about 300 copies a day, but, having never published a book before, Andy had no idea whether this was good, bad or indifferent. He was just pleased that it was getting good customer reviews and lingering in the number one spot for sci-fi on Kindle.

Then something happened that he never expected. One day he got an email from an agent who said, ‘I think we could get your book into print and if you don’t have an agent, I’d like to represent you.’ Andy couldn’t believe it. Some years earlier, he had written to agents all over the country, begging them to represent him, and no one wanted to know. Now he gets an email out of the blue from an agent who is offering to represent him, and he didn’t even have to ask. ‘I’m like, wow.’

What Andy didn’t know at the time is that, 3,000 miles away in New York, a science-fiction editor at Crown, an imprint of Random House, had been browsing around some of his favourite internet sci-fi sites, as he did from time to time when things were a little slow, and he had come across several mentions of The Martian , so he decided to check it out. He noticed it was number one on the Kindle sci-fi bestseller list and it had lots of good customer reviews, so he bought a copy, dipped into it and liked what he read, though he wasn’t sure what to make of all the hard science. He had a phone call lined up with an agent friend of his and, in the course of the conversation, he mentioned the book to him, told him he’d been tracking it on Amazon and suggested he take a look and let him know what he thought. He did, loved it (‘I was just blown away by it’ – the hard science appealed to his geeky nature), got in touch with Andy and signed him up. This was an agent who was accustomed to finding new authors online, sometimes by reading an interesting article on the internet and getting in touch with the author, sometimes by coming across a self-published book on Amazon that looked interesting, so he knew how to navigate this terrain. Out of courtesy to the editor who had called this book to his attention, the agent got back in touch with him and gave him a little time to consider it as an exclusive. The editor sent it around to a few of his colleagues at Crown and asked them to look at it over the weekend; they liked it too, and on Monday they made a generous offer to pre-empt the book and take it off the table. Andy was thrilled and the deal was done. ‘It was a no-brainer’, said Andy; ‘it was more money than I make in a year in my current job, and that was just the advance.’

At around the same time, a small film production company had also spotted The Martian on the Kindle bestseller list and got in touch with Andy, who put them in touch with his new agent. The agent contacted his film co-agent and they used the interest of the small production company to pique the interest of Fox, who snapped up the film rights and announced that the movie would be directed by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon in the lead. With publishing rights now sold to Random House and a Hollywood blockbuster in the works, the scouts began to work their magic with foreign publishers. The buzz machine was spinning and it ramped up quickly. Before long, rights were sold in thirty-one international territories and Andy’s substantial advance was earned out before the book was even published.

To Andy, who was oblivious to these distant conversations, the sudden interest in his book seemed somewhat unreal. He was at work the week that the deals with Random House and Fox were done, in his programming cubicle as usual, and he had to go to a conference room to take a call about the movie deal. ‘It’s like, hey, out of nowhere, all of your dreams are going to come true. It was so unbelievable that I literally didn’t believe it. I hadn’t actually met any of these people, it was all just emails and phone calls, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “This might just be a scam.”’ It only hit home when the contract finally arrived and the return address was Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY, and then the cheque for the advance arrived. ‘I thought, “If this is a scam, they’re very bad at it.”’