Brad Spurgeon's Blog

PARIS – Back in Paris for the next few weeks now, I did not do any open mics last night as I was flying back from Budapest. So today, nothing to report on the open mic scene in the clouds…. But that makes this a good moment to add another story from my archives to my collection of blog stories, as opposed to posts.

This time, I have selected a story about the world’s most prolific authors of books that could go into the blog stories as opposed to posts category, but it could also fit well into the Brad’s Rejected Stories area, since it was rejected at least 12 times, including from my own newspaper where I worked, before it got picked up and published at the Los Angeles Times in their Sunday Book Review as the lead essay at the bottom of the page.

It was an over-the-transom submission, I did not even have an editor’s name to address it to. Sometimes these things happen, if you get the right story to the right person at the right time. In fact, the story was spotted by the fill-in book editor of the time, Kenneth Turan, who that same year, 1991, became the Los Angeles Times’ film critic, a job he still does today. In 1993 he became the director for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.

I wrote this story about the world’s most prolific book writers by querying all the writers I could find who had written and published hundreds of books – like Isaac Asimov and Barbara Cartland. Most of those I queried kindly responded. Needless to say, I was glad not to let them down when I came through with publication after all the rejections….