Page 10 of You Had Me at Chateau
Tom pulls a face at the page.
I sigh and roll my eyes.
‘That’s not…’
‘A man wrote that,’ I tell him, reading his mind.
‘Well, that makes sense,’ he says. ‘I assumed L. E. Price was a woman.’
‘I think it’s on purpose,’ I reply. ‘There was thriller writer, Dickie Woodrup.’
‘That’s never his real name,’ Tom practically cackles.
‘Well, Dickie Woodrup by name, Dickie Woodrup by nature,’ I joke. ‘It was sort of an open secret in publishing that he was kind of a sleaze – he grabbed my arse at the summer party a couple of years ago. Anyway, I guess one day he grabbed the wrong arse, people started sharing their stories about him, no one wanted to read his thrillers any more – and suddenly, as people were rereading them, it was becoming apparent exactly how creepy he really was – so that was that for Dickie. But you can’t keep a bad man down, can you, so now the new open secret is that he’s quietly writing romance novels to pay his bills.’
‘Well, he’s not very good,’ Tom points out.
‘Well, that rarely stops men who want to succeed,’ I joke.
‘And there’s me thinking publishing was boring,’ he says as he sips his coffee.
‘No, no, we have our sex pests too,’ I tell him. ‘It keeps us on our toes.’
‘I wanted to become a lawyer to counter blokes like him,’ Tom says, his tone shifting from laughing at whatever was about to be flicked to something more serious.
‘And yet all you seem to do is argue to make millionaires billionaires,’ I tease him. ‘But that’s what I need from you, I need ruthless Tom, I need you to tell me what to say, to get what I want.’
‘Okay, well, let’s start by deciding what you do want,’ he tells me, snapping into professional mode. ‘I take it you don’t want to write flicking and sucking and whatever a duck buster is?’
‘I think you might have misread that last one but, no, that’s not what I want to do,’ I tell him. ‘I want to write funny, twisty murder mysteries with romance arcs running through them.’
‘Okay, so what you need to do is march back in there, keep your head high, and remind yourself that you’re hot shit, you’re the professional, you’ve been successful before and you’ll be successful again because you know what you’re doing. And then you sit your editor down and you tell her that you believe in your idea, that you’ll do a good job, and that you would really appreciate it if she would read what you had written so far so that the two of you can find a way to make it work for both of you.’
God, that sounds good.
‘But what if she still says no?’ I ask, because obviously I’m already thinking about what I’ll do when it all goes wrong, before it’s even happened.
‘Then you tell her, right, okay, then I think perhaps I need to take a step back, to take a break, and think about what I’m doing, and what I want to do moving forward,’ he replies.
‘Yeah?’ I say, unsure I can pull that off.
‘Yeah, make her sweat,’ he says. ‘You have more power than you realise. If she thinks you’re backing off then she’ll panic. She needs you to write this book too, you know?’
‘I’m in contract, obviously, so I can’t not do it,’ I remind him.
‘But what you’re forgetting is that it’s a contract that goes two ways,’ he says. ‘Do you think your editor can afford to humouryou indefinitely? She has other authors to read the work of, meet, email with and so on. You don’t make the publisher a penny until you give them a book they can sell. It doesn’t make her look good, to be wasting time with an author who isn’t being productive.’
‘Okay, I see what you’re saying,’ I reply, draining the last of my latte. ‘So, basically, if I make it seem like I’m going to be a pain in her arse, who isn’t making the publisher any money, she’ll try harder to meet me in the middle, to create something we can both be happy with?’
‘That’s the plan,’ Tom replies. ‘But, Amber, listen to me, you have to believe in yourself. I don’t mean this in a corny way, it’s business. Anything that can be interpreted as any kind of weakness puts people off, and it doesn’t make them want to give you what you want. Go in there with confidence, and be clear about what you want, but at the same time try to say as few words as possible.’
‘Wait, you want me to be confident, but quiet?’ I check.
‘People who are nervous, anxious, scared – things that aren’t viewed as positive traits – tend to talk more,’ he explains. ‘They say too much, they show their hand, and that weakens their position. So say only what you have to, but mean it.’
I puff air from my cheeks.
‘Wow, okay, I get what you mean, and I definitely do all of that stuff, so that’s good to know,’ I reply.
