Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison
Books on horse racing subjects have never done well, and I am told that publishers had come to think of them as the literary version of box office poison.
I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.
I am not entirely against horse racing. I even had a share in a horse syndicate with a few mates.
Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary.
I have never had the problem of finding a producer for my films. I think I am just lucky because my first film didn't do great box office business.
As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.
Box office success has never meant anything. I couldn't get a film made if I paid for it myself. So I'm not 'box office' and never have been, and that's never entered into my kind of mind set.
I went to work in an office and learned, among other lessons, to do things I did not care for, and to do them well. Before I left this office, two of my books had already been published.
I didn't know box office was a thing you could possess but I don't have it. I go up for lovely roles and people with this nebulous thing called box office get them so there isn't much I can do about that unless you know where I can get some box-office myself!
In this box are all the words I know… Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.
Prior to 'Pirates of the Caribbean' - the first one in 2003 - I had been essentially known within the confines of Hollywood as box office poison, you know what I'm saying? You know, I basically had built a career on 20 years of failures.
We were never the cool band to like. They tried to put us into a hair-metal thing, but we weren't really Warrant or Poison. We were always outside the box. I think we had a little niche that nobody had - maybe the funkiness had something to do with it.
I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
But everything written has style. The list of ingredients on the side of a cornflakes box has style. And everything literary has literary style. And style is integral to a work. How something is told correlates with - more - makes what's being told. A story is its style.
The time to be upset is during the race, when you can actually do something about it. Nothing could be done now. A thousand times I'd told them: the key to racing is to come off the water regretting nothing.
People can criticise all day long, I think I've proven myself, I think I deliver. And I agree, box office does not mean a movie's good, but I feel like I'm making good movies and I'm delivering in box office.