All David Baldacci Wanted to do was the Electric Slide
Hearing his novel, Absolute Power, sold for a record price, his wife went upstairs and threw up.
A friend who had studied screenwriting in Los Angeles got David Baldacci, a young lawyer and aspiring writer, interested in writing for the movies. For the next four years he labored in his spare time writing screenplays.
He found an agent who circulated his work and created a buzz. As he returned to his hotel during a business trip in Islip, New York, his agent called to tell him Warner Brothers had taken a pass. The herd mentality quickly set in.
“After that it meant no one was interested.”
Baldacci stood dejected looking out his hotel room window wondering could he ever make it as a writer?
“At that point I could have said screw it.” Instead, he returned home to Virginia and started considering a novel. He had always been interested in Camelot—the John F. Kennedy version—which after his assassination had been tainted by years of sordid stories of infidelity. Baldacci had an idea. Why not base a novel on an episode of infidelity involving the president of the United States?
“What if the good guys became the bad guys and the bad guy was good?” he asked himself.
He spent the next three years writing Absolute Power, a tale of a burglar witnessing the President of the United States involved in the murder of his mistress and the subsequent coverup.
“I went down to my cubby in the basement around 11 o’clock after work every night, excited because I could get this done.”
When he finally emerged, he wrote seven agents to rep him. To grab their attention, he challenged each saying if they read his first chapter all the way through, they would read the entire manuscript. Six of seven bit.
“Half read it to prove me wrong,” he says. “But I had to be confident in my work.”
His logic? If he wasn’t confident, who would be? “If you do things by half measure, that’s the result you’re going to get.”
After getting six positive responses from agents, he traveled to New York and made the rounds and chose Aaron Priest. “He was the only one who said, ‘yeah, I can sell this book…But I don’t represent clients, I represent careers. So, I hope you have other books you want to write.’”
Baldacci was sold.
After Baldacci finished polishing his manuscript for Absolute Power, Priest began shopping it around, which took all of two days. On Nov. 8, 1994, Priest called Baldacci at his law office. “He said the book sold overnight for an extraordinary amount of money,” Baldacci said. “First thing I thought was my agent was a psychopath.” A few minutes later, a Time Warner Publishing executive called and assured him Priest was not.
Baldacci immediately called his wife, Michelle. “She was home, making some edits on something I had been working on. I told her it’s really good news, the book sold.”
“Oh my God,” she said, “that’s terrific. How much do we have to pay?”
“No, no, no. It’s even better, they’re going to pay us.”
He told her how much and that it had tied a record for the most money paid for a first novel. She went upstairs and threw up.
“She threw up and I wanted to do the Electric Slide.”
Later, he called some buddies and said he had news and wanted to meet. “Half thought I was getting a divorce. The other half thought we were having a baby…We were having another baby, but I’m the one delivering.”
Less than a month later, more good news. The movie and foreign book rights were sold for even more money. And his novel had yet to be published.
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Former investigative reporter Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. He’s also a magazine columnist and feature writer.
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