The career novelist

14

CHAPTER

Collaborations

THE POWER OF TWO
I BEGAN MY CAREER AS AN AGENT AT A LARGE, WELL-KNOWN
firm. Its list was hundreds of clients long and was divided into equal
portions that were assigned to several "desks." Agents came and
went, but each desks list of clients stayed more or less the same.
That was how, at the very outset of my career, I found myself rep-
resenting one of the most successful collaborative teams of all time:
the pair of cousins who wrote under the name Ellery Queen.
I was ecstatic at first. As it turned out, though, there was little for
me to do. Only one of the cousins was still alive. My job for the
team, I discovered, was mainly to write the letters that accompanied
the checks that were cut for them almost daily. Those checks, how-
ever, proved to be an education in themselves. Some of them were
huge, but the one that impressed me the most was one of the small-
est. It was a check for the sale of "Zulu language rights" to two Ellery
Queen titles.
Zulu language rights! Can you imagine? How many authors do
you know who have sold Zulu language rights? Not too many, I will
bet. One thing I learned from those checks was that collaborations
can be highly profitable. Before you rush out to hook up with a col-
laborator, though, let me tell you another story.
This one concerns a successful nonfiction author. One day her
publisher had a bright idea: why not write a novel based on her area
of expertise? A suspenseful premise was inherent in her subject, so 167