Walking the Magdalene Line
Not too many million-dollar major deals (in PM parlance) have the kind of backstory that Kathleen McGowan’s MAGDALENE LINE trilogy does. After spending 2 decades researching her books and gathering source material not previously seen, McGowan shopped the book around to publishers with little luck — and so, decided to self-publish. In an interview with the Irish news last year, she explained why:
Because everyone I approached in traditional publishing had a tunnel vision perspective based on The Da Vinci Code. One agent told me to add action sequences to make it more like Dan Brown’s book, one asked me to take out the art history references to make it less like it. I wasn’t going to make those concessions because they were damaging to the integrity of the story I needed to tell. So after a year of beating my head against the wall, I realized I had to circumvent the system in order to publish my pure vision of this story. And I’ve been working on this book since 1995, so any similarities to Dan Brown’s are a simple coincidence of the subject matter. Yes, my book has an important scene in the Louvre and so does The Da Vinci Code. I have a scene in the Church of San Sulpice, and so does Dan Brown. But the comparisons end there. It’s like saying “Go write a book about the French Revolution but don’t mention the guillotine, the Bastille, Marie Antoinette or Robespierre because that’s already been done.” You can’t leave out elements and settings that are organic to the story.”
Fast forward a year and the story’s quite different. Not only did the self-published first volume (THE EXPECTED ONE) get some press and some buzz, it landed in the hands of film agent Michael Grais — who showed it to Larry Kirshbaum. As Kirshbaum explained in email, “[Grais] saw a real opportunity to create a bestseller first. I instantly agreed after a feverish couple of nights reading the book and talking to [McGowan].”
Things moved quite quickly after that. “I was having lunch with Trish Todd the day after I finished the book and going through her catalog I saw she has been very successful with historical fiction. I pitched her [THE MAGDALENE LINE] and she was all over it…within 24 hours she was calling to say how much she loved it. We had to wait over a weekend while Carolyn Reidy and others at S&S weighed in, but the enthusiasm among all parties was infectious and away we went.”
So enthusiastic that first volume will be republished by Touchstone/Fireside this August, while foreign rights have been sold to Bruna in Holland (in a pre-empt), Editions XO in France, Piemme in Italy, and Damm in Sweden.
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