Relationship cultivating

I’m about halfway through reading Brian Freeman’s debut thriller IMMORAL (which will be out in a few weeks from St. Martin’s and has been heavily hyped since BEA) and wondered how and why it was getting so much attention. The former marketing director for a prestigious Minnesota law firm offers up some ideas in this recent piece for Upsize Magazine:

After spending years as marketing director, convincing attorneys at Faegre & Benson about the best ways to sell, Brian Freeman wrote a thriller. Then he turned his skills to his own product.

“It’s been encouraging that all the things that I was telling the lawyers that work — they in fact do work,” Freeman says. He left the Minneapolis law firm April 1 when sales of Immoral abroad reached a decent level.

“I shared the belief of many writers, if you write a great book it will sell itself, and that’s just wrong,” he says. “The selling process is based on personal relationships and connections.”

His first connection to an agent came by luck. He had hired a person in London to work at the Faegre office there, and she said she wanted to send out weekly spreadsheets listing everyone whom each staff member was contacting.

The first spreadsheet included the fact that a Faegre intellectual property lawyer in London was having dinner with one of the biggest literary agents there. Freeman asked the lawyer to make the introduction, and he did.

“I thought that trying to get in the front door was not likely to be productive. Agents receive thousands of queries every year,” Freeman says.

That agent — Ali Gunn of Curtis Brown — rose to the bait and signed on to represent him, and quickly garnered him several international deals.