Transcript
Introduction
"As soon as I took the phone call, I regretted it. All of my authors had a lot of personality. But Jim was never happy about anything. 'I just read about your latest real estate deal in the newspaper,' he said. 'I'm not sure how you can be doing your job for me when you're busy buying up this city.' I didn't appreciate Jim's questioning my competence as his agent when I not only worked hard on his behalf, but had also discovered him from the slush pile." "Not long after my father died, I had taken over the agency. I put a small notice in the New York Times calling for authors to send in their work in an effort to drum up some new clients. Accepting unsolicited manuscripts was very unconventional for an agent. I was deluged with all manners of books. Most were not worthwhile, but I did find a good, highly-stylized, fast-paced thriller built around a political assassination. I like the book and contacted the author to take on the challenge of selling his first novel.
A challenge is exactly what it became. I went through 27 rejections until I found an editor who didn't say no immediately. If the author would rewrite it, the editor would consider publishing it. Jim agreed and rewrote the book, which I resubmitted to the editor, who, nonetheless, declined it. Most agents would have certainly given up at this point, but I can be extremely stubborn when I have a hunch about something." "On the 38th submission, not only did the editor buy it, he paid $10,000, a very generous advance for any first novel and especially one that had been rejected 37 times. Jim's first book, published in 1976, won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery. It was a nice little success story and a parable on the merit of dogged determination, but it hardly warranted him calling the shots in my career." 'Look', he said, 'You have to decide whether you're buying buildings or you're selling books because I can't have an agent who does both. If you want to keep me as a client, you have to give up your real estate business.' I didn't even need 2 seconds to think about my answer. There was no contest. I wasn't going to let any author, not even James Patterson, who would go on to sell over 350 million books, put an end to my real estate ventures."
That's an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur and is the autobiography of Francis J. Greenburger. So this book has been recommended to me probably 5 or 6 different times. I bought it a while back. It's been sitting in a pile of unread books. A few days ago, my friend, Mitchell, recommended it to me again. And I said, okay, there's got to be a reason why so many different people have recommended reading this book. Let me pick it up and see what's going on. And I was less than halfway through the book when I realized that this book is nuts, and it's totally not what I expected when I picked it up. And I'll expound on that idea as we move through the book. I have no idea where this podcast is going to go. You'll see what I mean. This is a very odd character. And he doesn't try to hide that fact at all.