I finished writing Riding Man in 2006. In a slightly different world, my agent would have sold it to some heavyweight trade publisher where the story would have been shaped by a professional editor. That would have made it better and with a marketing push it might have been a success in the vein of Into the Wild.
PREVIOUSLY ON THE SLOW “NO”
“DON’T SELL THE FILM RIGHTS TO ANYONE ELSE BEFORE TALKING TO ME.”
That was not to be; by then I’d already decided to write it for a narrow audience of people who loved motorcycles & racing, and publish it myself. That said, I still wanted it to look as if Simon & Schuster had produced it. Luckily I had one degree of separation from a brilliant graphic designer & typesetter, Christine Spindler, and two degrees of separation from a top tier commercial artist who loved motorcycles, named Doug Fraser. I gave them complete creative control with the result that–as they’d say on the Isle of Man–my book looked the business.
Art by Doug Fraser, graphic design by Christine Spindler. In the early 2000s there was still a stigma to self-publishing, but at least my book didn’t look self-published.
The first print run of 2,000 copies arrived in early 2007. I distributed review copies to other motorcycle journalists, and built a website to promote it. I sold a few dozen copies through small specialist distributors and listed it on Amazon, where it quickly racked up positive reviews.
Although there were other ways to acquire a copy, most people bought Riding Man directly from me. Every day I walked to the post office in Cardiff, California with a little stack of padded envelopes. Those first readers usually had an email address for me, and everyone had my return postal address; I got really gratifying feedback.
Peter Riddihough had an analogous experience with his documentary, One Man’s Island. His film got a rapturous reception at the Calgary International Film Festival (that was my old home town in Canada.) But he too ended up producing and self-distributing the DVD. So neither of us reached the wide audience we’d hoped for but at least we earned both the author’s and publisher’s share of revenues.
It took years for me to sell down the first 2,000 copies. Quitting my job, moving to the IoM, racing in the TT, writing Riding Man & interacting readers had been emotionally and creatively satisfying in many ways, but it was a financial disaster. By 2010 it was obvious that I needed to move past the whole I-rode-in-the-TT-and-wrote-a-book-about-it thing.
I divorced and remarried a woman I was sure was The One; we moved from SoCal to Kansas City; I tried to resurrect my ad career and I wrote a screenplay of my own, which was based on the British Army motorcycle racing team’s escape from Nazi territory (WWII was declared while they were competing in the 1939 ISDT in Salzburg.)
In the spring of 2010 Peter Riddihough phoned to say that he’d just received a cold call from some guy in Hollywood. The caller, Peter told me, wanted to know if I’d sold the feature film rights to my story.
“I don’t think so, but ask him yourself.” Peter recounted. His call was a heads up; he had given the stranger my number.
Within an hour, I got a call from a guy I’ll call... hmm... Thad Grant.
Grant had been a TV producer and currently worked in a part of the film business that I did not even know existed–at a company that cut together film trailers (I thought that the director and editor of a feature film would cut the trailer for their movie as a sort of final step, but it’s a completely separate niche with specialized directors and editors who use with the studio’s footage.)
Grant had yet to produce a feature but like most people in Los Angeles, he wanted to. The company he worked for sublet an office to a guy who was a producer–that guy had made one successful biopic and was looking to follow it up with another inspiring true-life story. Grant was not particularly friends with the producer; they were just two guys who occasionally bumped into each other in the parking garage under the building.
Grant told me that he’d seen One Man’s Island and read Riding Man; he thought my story might capture that producer’s imagination. Would I mind, he asked, if he pitched Riding Man?
“Of course not,” I told him. As it happened, I had a trip scheduled to California on motorcycle business. “Let’s do lunch,” I suggested in what I imagined was a good imitation of a writer who was routinely pestered by movie producers.
A date was made, and I called Peter Riddihough back with the news. At this point we’d only seen each other a couple of times since he left the IoM after the 2002 TT, but we’d been through so much together that he was one of my most trusted friends.
“This guy thinks he can turn Riding Man into a feature film,” I told him.
“I have to be honest Mark,” Peter said. “I just can’t see it as a feature.”
“Well,” I admitted, “that makes two of us.”