Even more on THE RULE OF FOUR

Jeez, every which way you go, there’s another profile of Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, the two guys who have co-written what looks to be the biggest success this summer. This time, the Globe and Mail takes a gander at what pushed THE RULE OF FOUR ahead of so many other fiction books. But this one delves a little further into the writing process that produced the novel:

Caldwell says that he and Thomason learned how to fix each other’s shortcomings. “Neither of us knew what we were doing that summer we started to rewrite our first draft. My presentation of a scene would be pedestrian: These characters are here, they have a conversation and lay out such and such plot points. And Dusty would say, hey, can there be a twist here, a way to develop this character?”

The narrator, Tom, is the son of a Hypnerotomachia scholar who died in a car accident. His obsession with finishing his father’s work wrecks his relationship with his true love, not to mention his health. But who should write his dialogue, one of the authors or both of them?

Caldwell says that he naturally wanted to write the scenes that happen in 1497, while Thomason was comfortable with the Princeton storyline. But they decided to “split things evenly, with Dusty having to write historical material that I would be more comfortable with, and I’d have to write present-day scenes that didn’t come naturally to me.” This struggle went on for three years before each was equally comfortable with all the facets of the story.

The most interesting, albeit somewhat erroneous, statement comes from their editor at Dial Press, Susan Kamil:

Did she anticipate the book’s great success? She did not anticipate the phenomenon, she admits. But she says she knew it would succeed “because it has a great story and James Michener taught us that people are fascinated by history if it has a great story.”

When she bought The Rule of Four in the summer of 2002, the publication of The Da Vinci Code was still nine months away. It was an instant phenomenon, and that made her think that The Rule of Four would be bigger than expected when it appeared the following year. “There’s a hunger for rich historical tapestry, the way the past washes over the present,” she says, “and there’s a particular romanticism about code-breaking right now.”

Sorry, but I don’t believe her, for a number of reasons. She bought THE RULE OF FOUR on June 14, 2002, when it was under a different title (THE BEST AND LAST). This would have been a full month and a half after Book Expo America, which took place in New York from May 1-5. BEA is where the buzz for THE DA VINCI CODE really started building, and the first of the now-infamous 10,000 ARCs were handed out. So even though I have no problem with Caldwell and Thomason’s assertions that they weren’t influenced by the book–lead times and all that–would Susan Kamil and Dial Press have shelled out half a million dollars if they didn’t at least have some inkling that it might sell really, really well? And as there were already indications that THE DA VINCI CODE might do well (though nobody predicted just how successful it would turn out to be) it wouldn’t surprise me if the trend had already been set.

But that was two years ago; anyone trying to sell DA VINCI “clones” (or at least something familiar) would have far less success because the backlash has set in, and something new might come along. The point being is that lead time is an important consideration, and what’s “hot” now probably won’t be by the time a given book actually hits the bookstores….