How John Grisham Sold 400 Million Books

The Rest Is Entertainment

Richard Osman interviews bestselling author John Grisham in a question-and-answer episode focused on how Grisham built one of the most prolific careers in modern

Key takeaways

• Grisham says his first novel took three years to write because he was balancing a full-time legal career with part-time work as a Mississippi state lawmaker.
• He describes The Firm's film-rights sale in January 1990 as the turning point, saying Paramount Pictures bought the rights for $600,000—more than he had earned in ten years of practicing law.

Main topics

• Writing routine and discipline
• The Firm's breakthrough success

Notable quotes

do it every day, same place, same time, same everything, and write at least one page per day, at least one page every day with no excuses

Conclusion

The episode offers practical insight into how a major commercial novelist

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The Rest Is Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, traditionally, the entertainment gatekeepers had to find you before an audience ever could. It's Speaker 3 (0:09) been the biggest change, really, I would say, in entertainment in the last five years or so. Just that generation who grew up making their own content on YouTube, on TikTok and things like that, suddenly finding themselves right at the heart of a culture. And they say no one had to commission it from them. Speaker 1 (0:22) We talked before about Cain Parsons. He just made his incredible sort of YouTube series of shorts. And within a month, they'd gone so big that people were kind of battering down his door to direct a big movie version of it. And A24 eventually won and he created The Backrooms, which brought a huge audience online for that first weekend that was just a phenomenon. So by the time the traditional gatekeepers arrive, you may have already proved there's an audience for what you've made. You haven't inherited a routine. You have built one yourself. Speaker 3 (0:53) And Octopus came into energy with customers as the starting point. It saw they weren't being well served and built things differently from there, with each account looked after by the same small team of around 10 Octopus energy specialists. Speaker 3 (1:14) Hello, listeners. Welcome to this very special question and answer edition of The Rest is Entertainment, where I'm Richard Osman. There's no Marina Hyde today, because I am joined by one of my favourite writers of all time, John Grisham. He sold, well, we discussed during this episode how many books he sold. I will say this, if you are any sort of Grisham fan, you definitely have to listen. If you are starting to write, if you want to write, you have to listen. If you're interested in how people write, you have to listen as well. He's such an interesting guy. We talk about everything from the firm, which is the thing that absolutely made him go supernova, all the way through to his new book, which is The French Illusion, which is out on the 29th of September. But it was a real pleasure. I sat down with him in Edinburgh at the Edinburgh Festival. He could not have been more gracious. And just listening to him talk about how he writes, what happened in his career when it went so huge, and just looking back about what writing means to him, the writers that he loves. It's all your questions. You sent so many in, especially about, you know, how someone writes, you know, loads and loads of advice in here as well. I hope you can hear during it as well what an absolute privilege it was for me. But thank you for all of your questions. And here is the Restless Entertainment Questions and Answers Edition with John Grisham. Speaker 3 (2:31) John Grisham, how lovely to have you here. We're talking in Edinburgh. One of my genuine heroes. It's a pleasure to talk to you. 400 million Speaker 2 (2:40) books sold. Does that sound right? Well, last night it was 500 million. So I'm not sure what happened in the middle of the night. But that number is arbitrary. Someone, I think at Doubleday, just sits around and plays with that number. There's no way to know how many books you've sold. I've sold in 56 languages. 50 books around the world in 35 years. Nobody can, who knows, it could be 200 million. I'm hearing 600 million. Speaker 3 (3:03) Let's go for 700. Let's go 700. Three quarters of a billion copies of your novels. We've had so many questions from our listeners. I'm going to start you off with Anne Loftus, who asks you this. She says, I'm currently writing my first novel. I am determined, but I'm struggling. You've written over 40 novels, but my question is this. How on earth did you finish the first one? It Speaker 2 (3:27) took three years. I learned a lesson very early on in the process because I had no time to write. I had a busy legal career. So you Speaker 3 (3:38) still had a full-time job? Speaker 2 (3:39) Well, a full-time job and a part-time job. I was a state lawmaker in Mississippi, and that took half my time. I was also pretty busy in the law office trying to make a living in a small town. And the only way I could write was to get up very early in the morning. I got in the habit of doing it. And I learned the lesson, do it every day, same place, same time, same everything, and write at least one page per day, at least one page every day with no excuses. And until you start doing that, nothing's going to happen. And if you do a page a day, at least a page a day, before long, the pages pile up, and in a couple of years, you've written a book. It's amazing, isn't it? You don't think you're going to. It's a slow process, and you cannot get in a hurry. You don't want to get in a hurry. You want to enjoy the process. I'm not sure I enjoyed it, being up at 5 in the morning. Yeah. But I was in such a habit of doing that. The first book took three years to write, and then I went straight to the second book. So over a five-year period, I wrote those first two books. The first book was a total flop in the marketplace. It didn't work. It was a time to Speaker 3 (4:46) kill. A Speaker 2 (4:47) time to kill. The second book was The Firm. And when The Firm came out in 1991, it changed everything overnight. Speaker 3 (4:55) Well, talk about A Time to Kill. So when you started writing, where were you in your head there? What was the best case scenario for you? What prompted you to do it? I Speaker 2 (5:05) saw something in a courtroom one day, a trial. It was very dramatic. And I thought, you know, what if you take that story and make a few changes? Speaker 2 (5:16) create this powerful courtroom drama played out through the eyes of a young attorney who's dreaming of the big trial and being court, you know, his own, his home courtroom. And that's what I was living that life. I was going Speaker 3 (5:26) to say that was you, right? That was me. So the dream when you're writing is actually, I'm going to be something big in law and it turned into something completely different. I'm Speaker 2 (5:33) going to win this big Speaker 3 (5:33) case. Speaker 2 (5:33) I'm going to win this big case and it's going to just going to change my career. And I'm going to be known as a, my, at the age of 30, my goal in life was to be a great. courtroom lawyer. Speaker 3 (5:42) And Speaker 2 (5:42) so I was in trial all the time, always volunteering for court-appointed criminal cases and the stuff nobody else wanted to take. I was always in the courtroom. And I was on my way, I think, to getting there. It takes time. But I got a detour when I saw this idea, this drama. And one day, just driving down the road, I said to myself, why don't you try to write it? Just start with chapter one and write this drama and see how far you can go. And it wasn't Speaker 3 (6:10) an immediate, you sold it, but it wasn't, that was not the beginning of the John Grisham we know now, right? They Speaker 2 (6:16) printed a small unknown publisher in New York that went bankrupt the following year after they published my first novel. Didn't sell them. They printed 5,000 hardback copies and we couldn't give the books away. I bought 1,000 of the 5,000. I was going to try to sell them and make a little money on the retail. Speaker 2 (6:35) But the book didn't work. But by the time The Time to Kill was published in 89, I had finished, almost finished with the firm. And the firm was always going to be more accessible, more commercial, more dramatic. And so I was almost finished with that book. And when it came out a year later, it changed everything. Speaker 3 (6:58) Funnily enough, Christine F. says, writing The Firm must have changed your life completely. How did that feel at the time? And how do you look back on it now? So A Time to Kill, you knew you could write a book. So you'd done that. You proved that. I always think that's the most important thing is getting to the end of your first book. So to talk to Anne Loftus there, once you got to the end of the first one, you know then that you can do it. And so you write The Firm. then everything goes absolutely nuts almost immediately. One Speaker 2 (7:28) phone call on a Sunday morning in January of 1990, I was actually at church and my wife came late to church and she said, go call New York. And I said, well, it's Sunday morning. And so I went and called New York and we live right down the street in our little small town. And my agent said, I need your authority to take the highest offer for the film rights to the firm. And we had not sold the book rights. Oh, yeah. Our last conversation a month earlier before Christmas, he had said, I haven't sold the book yet. We're going to wait till the new year. Something will happen then. But the firm, the manuscript had been around New York for a few months and nobody wanted to buy it. Several publishers had said no. Speaker 2 (8:19) I was involved in a big trial. I kind of lost interest. So I was talking to my agent. I said, wait a minute. We haven't sold the book rights to the firm. Now you want to sell the movie rights? What's going on? And he said, I'll explain it later. He said, right now, these studios are sitting by the phones for the final round of bidding for the film rights. And the word bidding had a nice ring to it. Yeah, didn't it just? And I said. Speaker 2 (8:49) okay, just for the hell of it, how much money are we talking about? And he said, I'm asking half a million, hope to get $400,000. I said, you want my authority to go do that? And he said, yes, okay, you have my authority to go