I started out with myself (who else?). Andy and I wrote a textbook proposal for a publisher who requested it, and when they turned it down, our advisor said, “It’s a good proposal; you should go out with it.” So we did. This was before email. Before we knew it we had two publishers bidding on it and I was handling the back and forth with advice from my trade agent that didn’t make any sense to follow (something about sealed bids, I think), because this was a textbook not a real book. By the end, the initial bid had tripled, and the editor I declined said to me, “There is something wrong with you,” and slammed down the phone in my ear.

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