The Green Mile

Steve finished his new novel a few months later, so I faxed him a short note asking if he’d be interested in writing a serial novel à la Dickens. I figured he’d get the note and we’d discuss it in a couple of weeks. I’d sent the letter in late September and I left New York a few days later for the Frankfurt Book Fair, the most important and largest publishing convention held annually in Frankfurt, Germany. The fair is probably the busiest time for an agent. Appointments run at half-hour intervals from the early morning well into the night, and I was just about to turn in after the first of these exhausting days, when I noticed a message under my hotel room door saying that Stephen King had called and would like to hear from me as soon as possible. It was very unusual for Steve to call me at Frankfurt. He knew how hectic those days could get. I returned the call at once and it turned out that Steve was interested in doing a serial novel. In fact, he was very excited about the idea and he thought he had a story in mind that might work. But he wanted a better notion of how we saw the logistics.

So what would this serial look like? I figured that publishing over the course of a year or more would be drawing it out, but a shorter period with monthly installments could work very well. I thought this could happen sometime in ’97. Malcolm was also at the fair and we spoke at length the next evening. We thought six to eight installments would be feasible and we thought they should run between 15,000 to 20,000 words each. I called Steve later that night and we discussed our strategy. Steve didn’t want to run it for eight months and he was leaning toward four but I still thought that we needed more time to build momentum. Six made sense to both of us. He also thought that since the idea had been proposed by Malcolm, we would allow it to be published in the United Kingdom only and we would give Malcolm’s company the exclusive shot at British rights.

Steve started writing and I discussed the rights situation with Malcolm. Of course, Malcolm was delighted with the prospect of publishing this project. We left Frankfurt full of anticipation of what might develop in the next few weeks. I returned to New York and awaited Malcolm’s offer for what certainly seemed like the prize of his career. In the meantime Steve’s enthusiasm heightened. He called and said that he thought the project was becoming too important to confine to the United Kingdom, so he asked me to offer the book to Signet for U.S. publication.

As an agent who built my company on the sale of international rights, I suggested to Steve that we seriously consider making the release of The Green Mile an international publishing event and offering the project to all of his major publishers throughout the world. He was not opposed to this idea. Suddenly the scope of the experiment widened and I knew I was sitting on a unique opportunity.

Days passed and I wondered why I hadn’t heard from Malcolm. HarperCollinsUK, where Malcolm now worked, had never published King, and Malcolm would be delivering Steve’s new book in this groundbreaking format. Unfortunately, corporate politicos were playing their hands and things would not turn out well for Malcolm. He finally called me on a Friday evening in late October ’95. He explained there would be no offer for The Green Mile. HarperCollins would not participate. Malcolm was devastated.

It was possible that this would kill the project. After all, if it was such a great idea, why wouldn’t Malcolm’s company offer on it? I was afraid that if Steve had any doubts whatsoever, this decision would confirm and magnify them. But one of the reasons why Steve and I have worked so well together for so long is that parts of us are still boys who want to have fun despite what the “grown-ups” say. We were going to do it! We had something special and we knew it. So I offered the rights to publish the serial in the United States and the United Kingdom to Penguin, Signet’s parent company. With HarperCollins no longer in play, it made sense to reverse the deal and start with Steve’s U.S. publisher. The Penguin people were in a tizzy. They knew that HarperCollins had gotten a shot at this even before they were aware of it. It was the only time Stephen King had allowed that to happen during his more than fifteen-year exclusive relationship with Signet. As anxious as they were to make a deal, they didn’t have a clue as to what they were buying. We had already established that there would be no hardcover. The novel was not only unfinished, but it would be published as it was being written. It was difficult for them to assess the value of this project. I made it as simple as possible so in the event of a failure, we could all pull back the rights and lick our wounds. We accepted less than the usual advance Penguin paid for a King novel, but we retained more than the usual rights; we exercised control in many areas normally reserved by the publisher; and we licensed them the rights only for a short period of time. This would be an experiment in publishing and I wanted to protect my client as well as I could.

The negotiation was done, the contract drafted and the deal closed in two weeks. Publishing deals can take months to negotiate. From my first discussion with Steve during the book fair to the execution of the contract, four weeks had passed. It was early November. No one was sure how this serial format would be received by the public. We hoped it would inject a badly needed dose of adrenaline into the tired mass-market business. But no one was sure. Though Signet moved quickly to secure the rights, their uncertainty was being communicated to Steve in a variety of ways. Steve was getting nervous, and he asked that the schedule be accelerated so the first installment would be released in January. He didn’t want the publisher’s cold feet to lead to second-guessing.

Steve was well into the first installment and promised a December 1 delivery. Signet were now in a frenzy. They would publish in late February, early March at the latest. I had several meetings with all the people who would be involved with the project—promotion, advertising, sales, editorial. Things were rolling on a power of their own. The meetings generated excitement and enthusiasm. I had faith that this was going to work and I communicated it in the best evangelical style.

Signet felt that they were still hitting some walls. Account managers were nervous about returns. They were afraid that their mass-market accounts would buy lots of copies of the first installment as a novelty and return the unsold copies before the release of the other installments. That fear can be haunting when you consider that publishers sell mass-market books on a returnable basis. The retailer can get full credit simply by tearing off the front cover and mailing it back to the publisher; the rest of the book is thrown away. Our idea was that new readers would come to the series as the excitement grew over the months, but if accounts returned the copies of the first couple of installments before the series was completed, it just wouldn’t work. In such a case, the publisher would have to reprint earlier volumes as the series caught on. It would be a publisher’s nightmare, large returns and then more demand. But there could be no room for fear here. I was certain that the dynamic that followed King throughout his career would create such a groundswell of excitement that these concerns would evaporate.

The next key issue was pricing and that’s one that both Steve and I were sensitive to. An important point of the serial was to sell large numbers of each installment at a relatively inexpensive price. We figured that the cost of the set should run less than what a new King novel would have cost in hardcover. The difference between the total cost and a normal paperback would be offset by this exciting new format, so we wanted the total price to fall between that of a paperback and a hardcover. Price point is an extremely difficult figure to gauge and it’s an especially delicate issue to authors like King, who have a devoted readership. Initially, we thought about a $1.99 paperback, but the figures just didn’t work. The cost of printing and manufacturing and shipping the books didn’t make economic sense. We were being pressed into a $6.99 price per volume and neither Steve nor I liked this at all. We resisted and settled at $2.99 with the longer sixth volume at $3.99. Even then, Elaine Koster, the publisher of Signet, called to run through the figures, pointing out to me that because of Steve’s high royalty and the low price point, Signet’s profit margin would be so low that, if this experiment didn’t work, they’d suffer large losses. I’ve felt it’s important in business ventures for both parties to make a handsome profit and enjoy the mutual benefits of their relationship. The figures spoke for themselves, so we agreed to lower Steve’s royalty on the assumption that the lower price would result in more sales, and a lesser percentage of more would exceed a greater percentage of less . . . funny how percentages work that way.

While all of this work was going on with Signet, I also had my office busy selling the international rights in The Green Mile. Some foreign publishers like Rolf Schmitz of Bastei in Germany got it instantly . . . others didn’t get it at all. Regardless, the project moved forward on its own steam. The excitement was real and everywhere. By January ’96 we were ready for a simultaneous release in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Holland, Spain, and Italy, with the other markets joining in soon after.

The promotion and advertising for The Green Mile was a blitz. All the print media were covered. Steve (and the mouse, Mr. Jingles) agreed to do TV advertising spots to promote the book. The first title in the series, The Two Dead Girls, went on sale at the end of March . . . and within days we knew it was a hit. It zoomed to the number one position on the New York Times best-seller list. Sales were heavy in all locations. We were pleased with the general reaction. While some critics seem to be able to find the cloud in every blue sky, the industry was thankful for the success. Of course, we were far from home free, with five more installments to publish. Would the momentum continue? But from there on, it was about writing rather than publishing. Readers were hooked by the story. Stephen King is an absolutely brilliant writer and this was clearly evident in The Green Mile.

The serial format wasn’t just about slicing up a novel and publishing it in pieces. Steve devoted a great deal of time and thought to the format. He delivered six separate stories, each with a satisfying ending, as well as an overall story that unifies them and brings the tale of Coffey and Edgecomb to a conclusion. Each installment works by itself but also recaps the previous work and hints at more to come. Few writers have the talent and vision to write like this and tackle a new format so successfully that the casual reader might not be aware that it was a challenge at all.

In the end, The Green Mile was an enormous success. Roughly 18 million of those little chapbooks were sold. Afterward, Plume, the trade paperback imprint of Penguin, offered the book in a single volume that sold more than 500,000 copies. And then the novel became the basis for the Frank Darabont movie, which is one of my all-time favorite movies based on Steve’s work. In 1999 Pocket Books did a single-volume mass-market edition to tie in with the movie and sold over 2 million copies. The book has now been published all over the world in thirty different languages.

Malcolm Edwards left HarperCollins eventually and took a key position at Orion Books, where he published the single-volume U.K. trade paperback edition of the book. It was a huge best-seller. And here it is, The Green Mile in hardcover. Now that the movie will soon be released in video and DVD formats, we thought you might like to have a more permanent edition for your shelves. This is just my version of the story of how it got there.

Ralph Vicinanza

May 24, 2000

Foreword: A Letter

October 27, 1995

Dear Constant Reader,

Life is a capricious business. The story which begins in this little book exists in this form because of a chance remark made by a realtor I have never met. This happened a year ago, on Long Island. Ralph Vicinanza, a longtime friend and business associate of mine (what he does mostly is to sell foreign publishing rights for books and stories), had just rented a house there. The realtor remarked that the house “looked like something out of a story by Charles Dickens.”

The remark was still on Ralph’s mind when he welcomed his first houseguest, British publisher Malcolm Edwards. He repeated it to Edwards, and they began chatting about Dickens. Edwards mentioned that Dickens had published many of his novels in installments, either folded into magazines or by themselves as chapbooks (I don’t know the origin of this word, meaning a smaller-than-average book, but have always loved its air of intimacy and friendliness). Some of the novels, Edwards added, were actually written and revised in the shadow of publication; Charles Dickens was one novelist apparently not afraid of a deadline.

Dickens’s serialized novels were immensely popular; so popular, in fact, that one of them precipitated a tragedy in Baltimore. A large group of Dickens fans crowded onto a waterfront dock, anticipating the arrival of an English ship with copies of the final installment of The Old Curiosity Shop on board. According to the story, several would-be readers were jostled into the water and drowned.

I don’t think either Malcolm or Ralph wanted anyone drowned, but they were curious as to what would happen if serial publication were tried again today. Neither was immediately aware that it has happened (there really is nothing new under the sun) on at least two occasions. Tom Wolfe published the first draft of his novel Bonfire of the Vanities serially in Rolling Stone magazine, and Michael McDowell (The Amulet, Gilded Needles, The Elementals, and the screenplay Beetlejuice) published a novel called Blackwater in paperback installments. That novel—a horror story about a Southern family with the unpleasant familial trait of turning into alligators—was not McDowell’s best, but enjoyed good success for Avon Books, all the same.

The two men further speculated about what might happen if a writer of popular fiction were to try issuing a novel in chapbook editions today—little paperbacks that might sell for a pound or two in Britain, or perhaps three dollars in America (where most paperbacks now sell for $6.99 or $7.99). Someone like Stephen King might make an interesting go of such an experiment, Malcolm said, and from there the conversation moved on to other topics.

Ralph more or less forgot the idea, but it recurred to him in the fall of 1995, following his return from the Frankfurt Book Fair, a kind of international trade show where every day is a showdown for foreign agents like Ralph. He broached the serialization/chapbook idea to me along with a number of other matters, most of which were automatic turndowns.

The chapbook idea was not an automatic turndown, though; unlike the interview in the Japanese Playboy or the all-expenses-paid tour of the Baltic Republics, it struck a bright spark in my imagination. I don’t think that I am a modern Dickens—if such a person exists, it is probably John Irving or Salman Rushdie—but I have always loved stories told in episodes. It is a format I first encountered in The Saturday Evening Post, and I liked it because the end of each episode made the reader an almost equal participant with the writer—you had a whole week to try to figure out the next twist of the snake. Also, one read and experienced these stories more intensely, it seemed to me, because they were rationed. You couldn’t gulp, even if you wanted to (and if the story was good, you did).

Best of all, in my house we often read them aloud—my brother, David, one night, myself the next, my mother taking a turn on the third, then back to my brother again. It was a rare chance to enjoy a written work as we enjoyed the movies we went to and the TV programs (Rawhide, Bonanza, Route 66) that we watched together; they were a family event. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered Dickens’s novels had been enjoyed by families of his day in much the same fashion, only their fireside agonizings over the fate of Pip and Oliver and David Copperfield went on for years instead of a couple of months (even the longest of the Post serials rarely ran much more than eight installments).

There was one other thing that I liked about the idea, an appeal that I suspect only the writer of suspense tales and spooky stories can fully appreciate: in a story which is published in installments, the writer gains an ascendancy over the reader which he or she cannot otherwise enjoy—simply put, Constant Reader, you cannot flip ahead and see how matters turn out.

I still remember walking into our living room once when I was twelve or so and seeing my mother in her favorite rocker, peeking at the end of an Agatha Christie paperback while her finger held her actual place around page 50. I was appalled, and told her so (I was twelve, remember, an age at which boys first dimly begin to realize that they know everything), suggesting that reading the end of a mystery novel before you actually get there was on a par with eating the white stuff out of the middle of Oreo cookies and then throwing the cookies themselves away. She laughed her wonderful unembarrassed laugh and said perhaps that was so, but sometimes she just couldn’t resist the temptation. Giving in to temptation was a concept I could understand; I had plenty of my own, even at twelve. But here, at last, is an amusing cure for that temptation. Until the final episode arrives in bookstores, no one is going to know how The Green Mile turns out . . . and that may include me.

Although there was no way he could have known it, Ralph Vicinanza mentioned the idea of a novel in installments at what was, for me, the perfect psychological moment. I had been playing with a story idea on a subject I had always suspected I would get around to sooner or later: the electric chair. “Old Sparky” has fascinated me ever since my first James Cagney movie, and the first Death Row tales I ever read (in a book called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, written by Warden Lewis E. Lawes) fired the darker side of my imagination. What, I wondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric chair, knowing you were going to die there? What, for that matter, would it be like to be the man who had to strap the condemned in . . . or pull the switch? What would such a job take out of you? Even creepier, what might it add?

I had tried these basic ideas, always tentatively, on a number of different frameworks over the last twenty or thirty years. I had written one successful novella set in prison (Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption), and had sort of come to the conclusion that that was probably it for me, when this take on the idea came along There were lots of things I liked about it, but nothing more than the narrator’s essentially decent voice; low-key, honest, perhaps a little wide-eyed, he is a Stephen King narrator if ever there was one. So I got to work, but in a tentative, stop-and-start way. Most of the second chapter was written during a rain delay at Fenway Park!

When Ralph called, I had filled a notebook with scribbled pages of The Green Mile, and realized I was building a novel when I should have been spending my time clearing my desk for revisions on a book already written (Desperation—you’ll see it soon, Constant Reader). At the point I had come to on Mile, there are usually just two choices: put it away (probably never to be picked up again) or cast everything else aside and chase.

Ralph suggested a possible third alternative, a story that could be written the same way it would be read—in installments. And I liked the high-wire aspect of it, too: fall down on the job, fail to carry through, and all at once about a million readers are howling for your blood. No one knows this any better than me, unless it’s my secretary, Juliann Eugley; we get dozens of angry letters each week, demanding the next book in the Dark Tower cycle (patience, followers of Roland; another year or so and your wait will end, I promise). One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy-bear in chains, with a message cut out of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT DARK TOWER BOOK AT ONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care—a little—about the creatures of one’s imagination.

In any case, I’ve decided to publish The Green Mile in a series of small paperbacks, in the nineteenth-century manner, and I hope you’ll write and tell me (a) if you liked the story, and (b) if you liked the seldom-used but rather amusing delivery system. It has certainly energized the writing of the story, although at this moment (a rainy evening in October of 1995) it is still far from done, even in rough draft, and the outcome remains in some doubt. That is part of the excitement of the whole thing, though—at this point I’m driving through thick fog with the pedal all the way to the metal.

Most of all, I want to say that if you have even half as much fun reading this as I did writing it, we’ll both be well off. Enjoy . . . and why not read this aloud, with a friend? If nothing else, it will shorten the time until the next installment appears on your newsstand or in your local bookstore.

In the meantime, take care, and be good to one another.

—Stephen King

1

THIS HAPPENED in 1932, when the state penitentiary was still at Cold Mountain. And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

The inmates made jokes about the chair, the way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can’t be gotten away from. They called it Old Sparky, or the Big Juicy. They made cracks about the power bill, and how Warden Moores would cook his Thanksgiving dinner that fall, with his wife, Melinda, too sick to cook.

But for the ones who actually had to sit down in that chair, the humor went out of the situation in a hurry. I presided over seventy-eight executions during my time at Cold Mountain (that’s one figure I’ve never been confused about; I’ll remember it on my deathbed), and I think that, for most of those men, the truth of what was happening to them finally hit all the way home when their ankles were being clamped to the stout oak of “Old Sparky’s” legs. The realization came then (you would see it rising in their eyes, a kind of cold dismay) that their own legs had finished their careers. The blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising. Old Sparky’s clients came to a knowledge of their deaths from the ankles up. There was a black silk bag that went over their heads after they had finished their rambling and mostly disjointed last remarks. It was supposed to be for them, but I always thought it was really for us, to keep us from seeing the awful tide of dismay in their eyes as they realized they were going to die with their knees bent.