$150,000 Advance Backs Writer’s Choice

Newspaper feature writer Robert Ferrigno wasn’t sure he was making the right decision when he quit his job last July in order to devote full time to finishing his novel.

“I just decided it was getting too hard to do both. I wasn’t getting any sleep,” said Ferrigno, 41. “By that time I was about half way through. I figured if it worked out, it would be great, and if it didn’t I could get another job at another newspaper. But I just had a sense that things were going to happen.”

Did they ever.

In November, the Long Beach resident signed with William Morrow & Co./Avon, which is paying him an impressive $150,000 advance for the hard cover and paperback rights for his as-yet unfinished first novel, “The Horse Latitudes,” a mainstream thriller set primarily in Newport Beach and Irvine.

The sale of foreign rights to England and Italy will earn Ferrigno another $100,000 in advances. He’s also anticipating foreign sales to Germany, France and Japan and there’s talk of a movie sale.

While that’s enough to inspire struggling novelists everywhere--and send fellow journalists scurrying to their personal computers--Ferrigno learned just how fortunate he is after a reporter friend sent him a survey of authors’ incomes: The average annual income of published authors, according to the survey, is only $6,000.

“That kind of put it into perspective,” Ferrigno said. “Let’s just say I’m a grateful guy.”

Looking back on his decision to quit his job with the Orange County Register, Ferrigno said, “If I had known how little most writers make on their first books, I don’t think I’d have had the guts to quit. My wife and I had talked about it for a long time. I must say, she kept pushing me to take a shot.”

Ferrigno, who continues to teach journalism part time at Cal State Fullerton, is currently ensconced in his Belmont Shores apartment where he is completing the last 50 pages of his novel. He plans to turn in his completed manuscript within a month, and “The Horse Latitudes” is expected to be in bookstores by early 1990.

Ferrigno explained that the novel’s title refers to a part of the Atlantic Ocean where the trade winds die down, causing the old sailing ships to be stuck for weeks at a time. In order to lighten the ships, the crews would throw cargo overboard, and when they were really desperate, they would throw over the horses on board.

The title is a metaphor for the novel’s main character, Danny DiMedici, who, Ferrigno said, “has to get rid of a lot of emotional baggage to get on with his life.”

As Ferrigno explains his main character, DiMedici is in his early 30s, divorced and still in love with his ex-wife, Lauren Smith, a successful Newport Beach industrial psychologist. “His wife gets into trouble and disappears. In his attempt to find and help her, he gets drawn into a really nasty set of circumstances. The line between the good guys and bad guys gets kind of blurred.”

The novel, he said, is both a crime story and a love story. “The more (DiMedici) follows his passions, the more enmeshed he gets in murder and mayhem.”

Ferrigno had been thinking about the novel on and off for a year but did not begin writing it until shortly after his 2-year-old son, Jake, was born. That meant spending virtually every free hour he had working on the book.

Ferrigno said it made a big difference once he was able to devote all of his time to it. “It wasn’t even so much the extra time, it was just that you had nothing else to distract you: The idea that I had nothing to think about but making the rent and finishing the book.”

Ferrigno’s wife, Jody, is a speech therapist with the Ocean View School District in Huntington Beach. “I was real lucky she had a good job and was willing to take the loss of income, but like I said, she was more gutsy about it than me,” he said. “She always had a lot of confidence.”

Ferrigno’s impressive advances are also an indication of how much confidence both he and his literary agent, Sandra Dijkstra of Del Mar, had in the novel.

Ferrigno met Dijkstra at the Squaw Valley Writers Conference run by UC Irvine’s Oakley Hall in August and sent her a copy of his work-in-progress.

“It was,” Dijkstra said, “beautifully written, a dynamite read, a book you couldn’t put down.”

Knowing she had “something valuable,” Dijkstra took Ferrigno’s two-thirds completed manuscript to New York in late October.

Her first stop was at a top publishing house, where an editor Ferrigno had met at the writers conference already had read a copy of his manuscript. The editor told Dijkstra she was going to give it one more reading and make an offer.

The next day, the publishing house offered a $25,000 advance--for not one, but two books: “The Horse Latitudes” and Ferrigno’s next novel.

Dijkstra told them that she wasn’t terribly impressed with the offer but that she would talk to Ferrigno. “I spoke to Robert and told him, ‘I think we can do much better, but it’s a gamble.’ He said, ‘Let’s turn it down.’ ”

The next day the publishing house came back with a $25,000 offer, this time for only “The Horse Latitudes.” When Dijkstra turned it down, the publisher came back again with another offer of $50,000. But, they told Dijkstra, that would include world rights.

“I said, ‘No way,’ ” recalled Dijkstra. “It was an excellent house for the book and the editor was a brilliant fiction editor, but we began to feel they were nickel-and-diming us.”

Ferrigno said the offer was indeed difficult to turn down.

“It was a gamble,” he said. “Every writer is eager to have someone like his work, but I think at that point it was sort of (a question of) how much faith do you have in yourself.”

Besides, he said, “both Sandy and I are poker players.”

Dijkstra and Ferrigno were prepared to put the book up for auction to see what the market would bear, but then William Morrow & Co. came in with what Dijkstra refers to as a “preemptive bid.”

Dijkstra had given a copy of the manuscript to Douglas Stumpf, the senior editor at William Morrow who had bought Newport Beach author Michael Chabon’s first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” for $155,000.

Two days after Stumpf received the manuscript, Dijkstra received a call from his boss, Howard Kaminsky, director of the Hearst Publishing Group, which owns William Morrow & Co. and its associate soft cover company, Avon. Kaminsky asked Dijkstra not to do anything until they spoke to her.

The upshot: Morrow and Avon offered $150,000 for two Ferrigno books. Still the gambler, Dijkstra turned it down. But the gamble paid off. Morrow and Avon finally agreed to pay that amount for “The Horse Latitudes” alone.

“It was really heady,” recalled Ferrigno. “It really was a sense of like you’re walking in this gold cloud.”

Says Dijkstra: “It’s a really terrific way to begin Robert’s writing career, and there’s nowhere to go but up from here. I have great confidence in him.

“In this age of megadvances with Stephen King getting $25 million for his next four books, it’s possible this ($150,000 advance) won’t sound like much. But first fiction is a hard sell, and generally speaking first fiction usually brings in under $10,000, a fact the reading public is unaware of. Robert’s advance is a whopping big advance for an unknown author with an incomplete novel.”

While thrilled by his good fortune, Ferrigno said there’s more to it than financial security.

“It’s also good in terms of what it represents: My book will get out there,” he said. “With that kind of money, it will get a lot more press and attention from everybody. The reason you write a book is you want people to read it. That kind of money means to me that people in the publishing world think this is a book people are going to want to read.”

Ferrigno obviously needn’t worry about having to look for another newspaper job.

“Things are really good,” he said. “I couldn’t have written a better happy ending.”