Fighting the Industry's Sleight of Hand

Even after much success, Tess Gerritsen had to fight for her rights.

You think it’s difficult to become a doctor? Try getting your thriller novel published.

New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen knows. Getting through med school is not easy but getting published is no bed of roses either. Gerritsen has been a success in both fields. Her work has been turned into televisions shows, including the series “Rizzoli and Ailes” and the movie “Gravity” (although that is in dispute), and we haven’t mentioned all of her bestselling novels.

She quit medicine to write fulltime and has run into some major speedbumps along the way.

Her first romantic suspense novel, Call After Midnight, was published in 1987. But she found the financial rewards slim. She received a $10,000 advance and quickly came to understand that was about all she would earn.

“You couldn’t make a living like that,” she says.

She couldn’t understand why her royalties had dried up so quickly seeing that her book continued to sell. Did she not pay out her advance? So, she started to investigate and found her agent, Jay Garon, wasn’t forwarding her any of her royalty checks. After a letter from her lawyer, who was also her cousin, the royalties arrived, and she fired Garon.

Years later she ran into the Hollywood machine. Hollywood was all abuzz about her manuscript for her future novel Gravity. Years later, the film “Gravity” starring Sandra Bullock, was based on Gerritsen’s novel. But was it? Yes it was. No, it wasn’t.

Well, which is it?

If it was based on Gerritsen’s novel, Hollywood would owe her money for copyright. If not, Hollywood could ignore Gerritsen. So, she sued in Federal District Court in California and lost (even though some of the movie’s dialogue was verbatim from her novel). How did this happen?

The story involves the late columnist for the Washington Post, Art Buchwald, and even actor Eddie Murphy. After all, Gerritsen had reached Hollywood. To get into the nitty gritty, read Gerritsen’s account here.

NOTE TO AUTHORS: Never sue Hollywood in federal court in California.

So even when you’re as successful as Tess Gerritsen, life as a novelist is not always a straight line, but more like a rollercoaster. (Or maybe it’s a circus with scary clowns.)

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Rick Pullen is the author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice.

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