Reporter Becomes Millionaire

[Guest Tim]

REPORTER BECOMES MILLIONAIRE

 

British author Ken Follett, now on a promotional tour of Australia, has sold a book to CBS Television for a record $1,400,000. Unaffected by the windfall, he now finds time for a chuckle about how terrible his unsold books were...

 

It was 1973, when Follett joined the London Evening News, and he had troubles. He faced a hefty mortgage, his daughter had just been born; his car had broken down and he didn’t have the money to get it fixed.

 

Today, a youthful-looking 47-year-old, with black eyebrows and a contrasting mane of grey hair, Follett is now seriously wealthy; hailed in his publicity handouts as "a master thriller writer of our times". And a visitor might perhaps have been expected him to be rather grand.

 

Instead, he sat in his 16th.floor, $650-a-night suite at the Gold Coast Marriott, with a breathtaking view of the ocean below, enthusiastically wanting to talk newspapers. (But also delighted to admit he didn’t miss working on them); seemingly unconcerned that it was count-down time for a $45-a-head dinner of admirers paying to hear him speak downstairs, all eager to buy his autographed books.

 

‘When I joined the Evening News another reporter told me he’d just written a book and sold it for an advance of 200 pounds! I decided I would get down to it and do the same. I wrote a book, sent it off to my friend’s publisher. And got paid 200 pounds!’

 

Working four 10-hour days a week, he had three days free to bash out more fiction on his portable at home. He laughs: ‘I then wrote 10 unsuccessful books. Nobody wanted them!’ It might well be funny now, with publishers and television producers waving cheque-books at him, but surely unfunny then - in a humble London house, a car that was a wreck, and a crying baby to accompany the clacking typewriter keys?

 

 

‘True’, he admits. ‘But there was a clear reason the books were no good. They were unplanned. I would just start...and keep going to where the story would take me. The sentences were very short and brisk; bang, bang, bang; one-two-three. I hadn’t shaken off the newspaper reporting form. I had to learn to get away from the snappy tabloid style of writing; I had to write longer sentences and paragraphs that gave the book a mood. Freddie Forsyth did use the journalistic style, but he got away with it. His Day of the Jackal was one of the greatest thrillers ever written; it was original then because he made everything so real, using a wealth of factual detail. It hadn’t been done before, and afterwards was much imitated. Fictional authors couldn’t make up background any more...’

 

Ken decided to leave Fleet-st. to join a small publishing house as an editor. ‘I was there for three years and became Deputy Managing Director, which sounds rather fancy; but there were only six people working in the office. After my publishing experience, I came away realising that the bottom line about a good book is its quality. Publishers think and talk a lot of about advertising and publicity and the jacket being good; but the ultimate test is how well it has been written.’

 

Ken Follett’s day - either in his Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, apartment, or the house he and Barbara have at Stevenage, Herts. - is to be at his laptop at 9 am. He works through until 4 pm with a 10-minute break for lunch. No business phone calls are allowed to interrupt the flow. ‘At 4pm I take care of correspondence, business calls and interviews. I try and make sure I play tennis, or table-tennis, which I love, every day. If, rarely, I find a book a bit wearying, I wonder why I’m not on a yacht in the Caribbean. But most times I wake up in the morning and I want to write the next bit of the story.’

 

Follett was born in Cardiff, the son of a tax inspector. He graduated from University College London with an honours degree in philosophy. To relax he plays bass guitar in a band called ‘Damn Right I Got the Blues’.

 

After his run of flops in the late 70s, he wrote Eye of the Needle, which later became a film starring Kate Nelligan and Donald Sutherland. He went on to write Triple, The Key To Rebecca, The Man from St. Petersberg and Lie Down With Lions. Then he wrote his only non-fiction book, On Wings of Eagles, the true story of how two employees of Presidential candidate Ross Perot were rescued from Iran during the 1979 revolution.

 

He returned to fiction and wrote The Pillars of the Earth which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 18 weeks. It went to No.1 in Britain and stayed on the German bestseller list for four years. CBS’s massive cheque for his latest book, The Third Twin, is a record price paid for four hours of television.