How John Grisham Sold 400 Million Books

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2:14Richard Osman:hello listeners welcome to this very special question and answer edition of the wrestlers Entertainment where I'm Richard Osman there's no Marina High today because I am joined by one of my favorite writers of all time John Grisham he sold well we discussed during this episode how many books he sold I will say this if you are any sort of Grisham fan you definitely have to listen if you are starting to write if you want to write you have to listen if you're interested in how people write you have to listen as well he's such an interesting guy we talk about everything from The Firm, which is the thing that absolutely made him go supernova, all the way through to his new book, which is The French Illusion, which is out on the 29th of September.

2:53Richard Osman:But it was a real pleasure. I sat down with him in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Festival. He could not have been more gracious. And just listening to him talk about how he writes, what happened in his career when it went so huge, and just looking back about what writing means to him, the writers that he loves, it's all your questions. you sent so many in, especially about, you know, how someone writes, you know, loads and loads of advice in here as well. I hope you can hear during it as well, what an absolute privilege it was for me. But thank you for all of your questions. And here is the rest is entertainment questions and answers edition with John Grisham.

3:32Richard Osman:John Grisham, how lovely to have you here. We're talking in Edinburgh, one of my genuine heroes. So it's a pleasure to talk to you 400 million books sold? Does that sound right? Well, last night it was 500 million. So I'm not sure what happened in the middle of the night, but that number is arbitrary. Someone, I think at Doubleday just sits around and plays with that number. There's no way to know how many books you've sold. I've sold in 56 languages and 50 books around the world in 35 years. Nobody can, who knows? It could be 200 million. I'm hearing 600 million. Let's go for 700. Let's go for 700.

4:05Richard Osman:Three quarters of a billion copies of your novels. We've had so many questions from our listeners. I'm going to start you off with Anne Loftus, who asks you this. She says, I'm currently writing my first novel. I am determined, but I'm struggling. You've written over 40 novels, but my question is this. How on earth did you finish the first one? It took three years. I learned a lesson very early on in the process because I had no time to write. I had a busy legal career. So you still had a full-time job? Well, too, a full-time job and a part-time job. I was a state lawmaker in Mississippi, and that took half my time.

4:45I was also pretty busy in the law office trying to make a living in a small town. And the only way I could write was to get up very early in the morning. I got in the habit of doing it.

4:57Richard Osman:And I learned the lesson, do it every day, same place, same time, same everything, and write at least one page per day, at least one page, every day with no excuses. And until you start doing that, nothing's going to happen. And if you do a page a day, at least a page a day, before long, the pages pile up, and in a couple of years, you've written a book. It's amazing, isn't it? You don't think you're going to. It's a slow process, and you cannot get in a hurry. You don't want to get in a hurry. You want to enjoy the process. I'm not sure I enjoyed it being up at 5 in the morning. Yeah. But I was in such a habit of doing that.

5:33The first book took three years to write and then I went straight to the second book. So over a five-year period, I wrote those first two books. The first book was a total flop in the marketplace. It didn't work.

5:46Richard Osman:That was A Time to Kill. A Time to Kill. The second book was The Firm. And when The Firm came out in 1991, it changed everything overnight. We'll talk about A Time to Kill. So when you started writing, where were you in your head there? What was the best case scenario for you? What prompted you to do it? I saw something in a courtroom one day, a trial. It was very dramatic. And I thought, you know, what if you take that story and make a few changes and create this powerful courtroom drama played out through the eyes of a young attorney who's dreaming of the big trial, the big courtroom. It's a home courtroom.

6:25And that's what I was living that life.

6:26Richard Osman:I was going to say that was you, right? That was me. So the dream when you're writing is actually, I'm going to be something big in law, and it turned into something completely different. I'm going to win this big case. And it's going to change my career, and I'm going to be known as a – at the age of 30, my goal in life was to be a great courtroom lawyer. Yeah. And so I was in trial all the time, always volunteering for court-appointed criminal cases and the stuff nobody else wanted to take. I was always in the courtroom. And I was on my way, I think, to getting there. It takes time. But I got a detour when I saw this idea, this drama.

7:00And one day, just driving down the road, I said to myself, why don't you try to write it? Just start with chapter one and write this drama and see how far you can go.

7:09Richard Osman:And it wasn't an immediate. You sold it, but that was not the beginning of the John Grisham we know now, right? They printed a small unknown publisher in New York that went bankrupt the following year after they published my first novel. They didn't sell them. They printed 5 ,000 hardback copies, and we couldn't give the books away. I bought 1 ,000 of the 5 ,000. I was going to try to sell and make a little money on the retail. But the book didn't work. But by the time The Time to Kill was published in 89, I had finished, almost finished with the firm. And the firm was always going to be more accessible, more commercial, more dramatic.

7:51and so I was almost finished with that book and when it came out a year later, it changed everything.

7:59Richard Osman:Funnily enough, Christine F. says, writing The Fur must have changed your life completely. How did that feel at the time and how do you look back on it now? So A Time to Kill, you knew you could write a book. So you'd done that, you've pre-done it. I always think that's the most important thing is getting to the end of your first book. So to talk to Anne Loftus there, once you got to the end of the first one, you know then that you can do it and so you write the firm then everything goes absolutely nuts almost immediately one phone call on a Sunday morning in January of 1990 I was actually at church and my wife came late to church and she said go call New York and I said well it's Sunday morning and so I went and called New York and we lived right down the street in our little small town and my agent said, I need your authority to take the highest offer for the film rights to the firm.

8:58And we had not sold the book rights. Oh, yeah. Our last conversation a month earlier before Christmas, he had said, I haven't sold the book yet. We're going to wait till the new year. Something will happen then. But the firm, the manuscript had been around New York for a few months and nobody wanted to buy it. Several publishers had said no. I was involved in a big trial. I'd kind of lost interest. So I was talking to my agent. I said, wait a minute. We haven't sold the book rights to the firm. Now you want to sell the movie rights? What's going on? And he said, I'll explain it later. He said, right now, these studios are sitting by the phones for the final round of bidding for the film rights.

9:43And the word bidding had a nice ring to it. Yeah, didn't they just? And I said, okay, just for the hell of it, how much money are we talking about? And he said, I'm asking half a million, hope to get$400 ,000. I said, you want my authority to go do that? And he said, yes, okay, you have my authority to go do that. Hung up and went back to church, and we sat through the church just dying. and finally raced home with the kids and the phone was ringing. And it was my age. He'd been calling. Oh, wow. He said, we just sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures for the firm. And so, and I said, okay.

10:29He told me how he had negotiated and all his heroic negotiations and stuff. And I said, fine, okay. Just for the hell of it, how much money am I going to get? He said$600 ,000, which was more than I had earned in 10 years of practicing law. Yeah. Gross receipts. And I said, okay, nice job. Yeah. And that was the phone call that turned the world upside down.

10:55Richard Osman:When you start writing, there is a dream in various heads. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and go, oh, my God, this could sell for everything. This could be a huge movie with Tom Cruise. This could be a bestseller for years and years and years. And it actually happened to you. Do you think there's something behind that? Do you think, I think you always wanted to write commercial fiction, right? Do you think you put yourself in that position or do you think there was an element of luck? Huge element of luck. Yeah. You have to have a stroke of luck somewhere. But you have to be ready when luck hits, okay?

11:27You got to kind of make the luck happen. And that's what happened to me. I've always said, I had a very fortunate thing happen to me. I got lucky. But at the same time, I was able to – the next decision I made when the firm came out, it was an instant bestseller. It came out in March of 91. And I was back in New York taking a victory lap, doing interviews and all this kind of stuff. And a young executive with a book chain made a comment that I had never thought about before. And he said, oh, the big guys come out every year. Yeah. And I thought, yeah. He said, yeah, look, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Robert Ludlam.

12:13They come out every year. The big boys come out every year. And I thought, I want to be a big boy. Yeah. I want to. So I raced back home and I finished the Pelican Brief and just, I mean, I'd been working on it slowly. I finished it in a matter of months to get it back in New York to publish the following year.

12:32Richard Osman:Well, funnily enough, we've got a question from Cormac Jensen on exactly that. He says you've somehow managed to write a book a year, sometimes more than one book a year. Firstly, he says, thank you. That's how you get your question read out on this show. He says, thank you. But he says, I've got two questions. How do you write a book a year? And we've sort of touched on this. Why do you write a book a year? So the why is because that's the business. You know, you're building a loyalty. You're building a brand. Yeah, it's why. Why do I still do it? I mean, I could have quit years ago. First of all, I still enjoy it.

13:02I mean, this is fun, okay? Yes. I'd be home in Virginia doing nothing right now.

13:06Richard Osman:Which is also fun, by the way. It's always fun. I get plenty of that. Yeah. It's still enjoyable. And also, I write stories about lawyers and issues and politics and things like that, and the material is just endless. I still think of it as a lawyer. I don't practice anymore, thank God. But I still understand the law, and I'm fascinated by the law, by lawyers, law firms, courts, trials, appeals, judges, crime itself, and the actions of lawyers. Big law firms blow up. Lawyers steal money. These great stories that we have all the time, and I'm just taking notes. I'm clipping headlines, and I have tons of files of stories, of potential stories.

13:49And when you follow lawyers and judges the way I do, always with an eye for a story, the material is just endless, okay? And I'm just addicted to them. I would write all of them if I could. So the how I do it every year is just the material is there. Why is just that's what I've done for 40 years, and I still do it, and I still enjoy it, and the books are still popular.

14:14Richard Osman:That's the thing. I think the other question of how that lots of people are interested in, and you were told this a million times before, but people are endlessly fascinated, is how do you actually write? How do you get 90 ,000 words, roughly 100 ,000 for one of your novels? How do you get that done across the year? What does your day look like? What does your year look like in order to do that? Well, it takes a lot. It takes discipline, but it's not, you know, it's not marine style, physical discipline. I start a book every year on January the 1st, and I have for years. I start the book on January the 1st, and the goal is to finish by July the 1st.

14:53That's six months. 1 ,000 words a day is 5 ,000 words a week. That's 20 ,000 a month. That's 100 ,000. That's the goal every time. I don't want to write a 500-page book. I don't want to read one. I'm getting lazier. My books are getting thinner. I'm getting lazy. I hope I'm getting more economical with words. But it's not a formula. You do it. This is my goal today is a thousand words. With no excuses. No days off for the flu. No days off for this or that. If we travel, I never write on the road. I write in one place. One spot.

15:27Richard Osman:In your house. In my little office behind the house. The same desk, same chair, same coffee, same no phones, no fax, no internet, no music, no interruptions. Yeah. Very quiet from 7 to 10 every morning. and it's very productive. And so at 10, you're done for the day. Usually by 11, I'll take a break around 10. I'm back and forth to get coffee and check the internet for emails, things like that. Make a phone call or two, take a break. But it's from 7 to 10, 30 or 11. When you write nonstop for four hours, your brain is pretty well mush. Oh my God, yeah. I can do like two and a half and I'm done.

16:03Yeah, if you really write good hard stuff for two and a half, three, four hours, I have to do something physical. I leave and go work out or go for a hike or something. And that's the morning. In the afternoon, I go to an office in town in the city of Charlottesville where I live to get away from the farm, to get away from all that and do the administrative stuff, the business end of it, check in with New York every day. That's enjoyable. But it's a matter of discipline. And I love stories of writers who wrote their first novels at work or at break or at midnight or on the train or on whatever they did.

16:46Their daily routines, they found 30 minutes somewhere. And we can all find 30 minutes somewhere to write at least a page a day. But you've got to do it every day.

16:56Richard Osman:Yeah, I always think if you've got young kids or if you've got a demanding job, if you can do 200 words a day, you'd be amazed how quickly you get up to 20 ,000. And I always think 20 ,000 is the point where you think, I have to finish this book now. There's no way this is getting shut away. And so you just keep at it. But that's the thing, isn't it? It's just day by day and sooner or later. I mean, you think this time it's going to be impossible. This time I'm never going to finish. Eventually you do finish, right? Yeah, it's like a lot of things in life. If you look at the monumental challenge of doing anything, it looks overwhelming.

17:27But you don't look at it. You don't start that way. You start, you take a small baby step, 200 words a day, one page, whatever. Do that for several days, a week, several weeks, and before you know it. And you don't want to get in a hurry. You don't want to write in a hurry. You want to write slowly and thoughtfully and reflectively. And that's, again, if you write a book every two years, that's pretty fast for publishing, for popular writers.

17:56Richard Osman:How are you at rewriting? I think the thing that stops a lot of people from writing is they go back again and again and again to their first sentence or their first paragraph or their first chapter and constantly try and polish it instead of moving forwards. I do it every day. When I start each morning, I read what I wrote the day before and do a fair amount of editing. It also gets you back into the flow of the story. You know where you are. And, yeah, the first 30 minutes I'm redoing the day before, then I'm not going to touch it again until the end. That's the key, right? Yeah, I keep going.

18:28Keep going. But because you always have time to fix it later. You know, it's important to get the first draft down, but make sure it's a pretty good draft.

18:36Richard Osman:Yeah. And then once you finish the book, once I finish the book, I go back through it and make a million changes. And then my wife reads it, and she's got some opinions. I usually listen to her. Then it goes to my agent, who was my editor for years. He's been my agent for 30 years. and he goes through with a very page by page, line by line edit that drives me crazy every year. But I listen to him. I still listen to people. And if something is not working, my wife says, I really hate this character. I'll listen to that. Or if she says, this part is really boring here. I can't take that, okay? She says, this drags.

19:22I'm writing suspense, okay?

19:24Richard Osman:I have an American editor. too the only she's so good the just very occasionally so in brackets you just write bored and I'm like oh god good editor never gives you solutions but they just say and she's always right it's always oh yeah because of course I don't need to be back with this character at the moment and actually I've I've done a bit too much of that repetitious this is repetition you already said this three times well when you write stuff when you're writing every day you don't realize that you're repeating things you just can't remember all the stuff you've written six months ago also you're constantly telling yourself the story yeah aren't you that's the that's the thing and you forget that you've already said it.

19:57But the key is being edited, to agree to be edited and working with your editor because a lot of big writers, I won't name any names, but they finish the manuscript, they ship it off to New York and they say, don't touch it. I'm done. I'm writing something else. And you can tell it. They need an editing, and we all do.