F. Paul Wilson@fpaulwilson
ALBERT ZUCKERMAN – RiP. Al Zuckerman was my literary agent for fifty-plus years. I sold my first novel ("Healer") on my own and, shortly thereafter, I got a call from the head of someplace called Writers House who wanted to know if I’d be interested in meeting at his New York office. Well, why not?
When we met he said he was handling foreign subrights for Doubleday (the publisher of "Healer") and said he liked my narrative momentum. If I didn’t have an agent, he’d like to represent me. I wasn’t sure what he meant by narrative momentum, and wasn’t sure what an agent could do for me, but I said sure. We shook hands and that was it: We were bonded. (He showed me what he could do when he gutted the next Doubleday contract.)
After my third novel, he said I needed to expand my horizons: Send him three ideas I’d like to work on, and we’ll choose. We settled on one set in WWII with a Romanian castle and a strange, malignant occupant. I wrote it in about six months. Al was impressed, but said it needed work. So he got to work. His notes and edits shed new light on the book and I wrote the second draft with them in mind. The book was transformed. But Al wasn’t through yet. He decided to approach Hollywood before the publishers. It worked: We had a movie deal before he put the book up for auction. It landed on the NY Times bestseller list. And that is why "The Keep" is dedicated to Al Zuckerman.
Things ran along smoothly until the early 90s when the horror genre went into a slump. I decided on a change of course—out of horror and into a medical thriller. But I didn’t want the publishers to treat the new book as just another Wilson horror, so I told Al I wanted to publish under a different name: Colin Andrews. Al was on board, but he wanted to introduce the “new author” at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The result was an international feeding frenzy. When he returned to the States, everybody was salivating for the book by this new author. Thanks to Al’s strategy, "The Select" ushered me into publishing's Seven Figure Club.
So many stories to tell...but I'll keep them for a later day. Right now I’ve got a glass of Jameson’s waiting: Here’s to the man who changed my writing life, who took me from hack to bestsellerdom, and became a lifelong friend.
