For writers hoping to sell their first books, Emma Cline represents the dream. Evanston resident Hal Schweig is more the reality check.
Cline, 25, with but a few essays and two published short stories to her credit, recently signed a three-book deal with Random House reportedly for seven figures. Schweig, 84, is the author of two books, each more than a decade of pitching in the making. The first, “nobody wanted,” he says, and the second, “What Jennifer Saw,” seemed destined to the same fate until Texas-based independent publisher Black Rose Writing published the mystery last November.
For Schweig, who is retired after more than four decades in public relations, his book did not fetch a million dollar payday nor did it generate Next Big Thing buzz on the Internet. For someone without an agent and no industry connections, just having his novel published is validating, he says. But it gets a little better.
“What Jennifer Saw” earned a laudatory review in Kirkus last April (“A fast-paced, exciting read”), and to Schweig’s surprise, last August it was featured on Huffington Post, via IndieReader, as one of “5 Twisted Thrillers for ‘Gone Girl’ Fans.”
“What Jennifer Saw” begins with the murder of Jim Harris, a pillar of his small Missouri town. For Kay Cutler, the feature reporter for the local paper, the grisly killing is the big break for which she’s been waiting. The story briskly unfolds on two tracks: revelations of “secret and sordid activities” in the Harris family and the male chauvinism Cutler endures from colleagues in reporting the story.
Schweig himself previously worked for Chicago’s famed City News Bureau.
“Every minute was a deadline,” he says of the experience.
His years in public relations also honed skills that would come in handy when writing query letters to agents and publishers. His query letter for his first novel, “The Strange Odyssey of Peter Sampson,” was good enough to get requests for pages, and in some cases, the entire book (“This is easy,” Schweig laughingly recalls of his initial thoughts on the publishing process). But ultimately, the book did not sell.
“What Jennifer Saw” was inspired by a New York Times news story about a murder case. In answer to agent critiques that his first book was not in any specific marketable genre, he set out to write a mystery. He made his principal character a reporter as a nod to his apprenticeship with the CNB, and he made her a woman because women, he observes, are the primary buyers of fiction.
Reagan Rothe, creator of Black Rose Writing, was intrigued. “Who wouldn’t be?” he said in an email. “(The book) has suspense, adultery, murder, apparitions, surprises, and more.”
After all kinds of heartbreak, Schweig feels a sense of validation having published “What Jennifer Saw.”
“I was never interested in money per se in publishing,” he says. “I’ll accept it, but even if I won $50 million in the lottery today, I would not stop pushing this book. I’m a storyteller; I want people to read it.”
Schweig has completed 130 pages for a new book. It is a thriller.
Donald Liebenson is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.
“What Jennifer Saw”
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By Hal Schweig, Black Rose Writing, 275 pages, $16.95