Grisham Sold A Time to Kill From His Car Trunk
Quick answer: John Grisham's A Time to Kill was rejected 28 times, printed in a run of 5,000 and sold from his car trunk. The true story behind his slow, stubborn start.
In the summer of 1989, a Mississippi lawyer stood behind a folding table at a garden club meeting with cardboard boxes of his first novel stacked beside him. He had carried them in from the trunk of his car, where more boxes waited. The novel was A Time to Kill. The lawyer was John Grisham. Attendance was polite and sales were thin. Some afternoons he moved a handful of copies. Some afternoons he moved fewer than that, then packed the boxes back into the trunk and drove home to prepare for court the next morning.
Nothing about that scene predicted what came next. Within three years the same man would be the bestselling novelist in America, and the book nobody wanted would eventually sell millions of copies and become a film. The distance between the folding table and the bestseller list was not crossed by luck alone. It was crossed by a man who had already started writing his second book before anyone had rejected his first, and who never treated the market's silence as a verdict on the work.
A courtroom, a question, and a 5 a.m. alarm
The book began in a courtroom. In 1984, Grisham was a young lawyer in Southaven, Mississippi, and one day at the DeSoto County courthouse he heard the testimony of a young girl who had survived a brutal assault. He has said many times that he could not stop thinking about what he heard, and about a question the trial never asked: what would happen if the child's father took the law into his own hands? That question became the seed of A Time to Kill.
Answering it took three years. Grisham was not a man with free time. He was running a busy small-town law practice and, from 1983, serving in the Mississippi House of Representatives. So he wrote the way overloaded people write: he got up at five in the morning and put in an hour or two at the office before the day's real work began. Page by page, in the margins of two demanding jobs, the manuscript grew. He has described the routine as unglamorous and slow, which is exactly what made it survivable.
Twenty-eight rejections
When the manuscript was finished, the publishing industry was unmoved. The widely reported count is 28 rejections, usually described as a mix of literary agents and publishing houses, more than a dozen of each. The letters said what rejection letters usually say: not right for our list, not commercial enough, good luck placing it elsewhere. A first novel about race, justice and vengeance in small-town Mississippi, written by an unknown state legislator, was an easy pass for New York.
Eventually a small independent publisher, Wynwood Press, said yes. The deal was modest and the print run was 5,000 copies, released in June 1989. There was no tour, no review coverage worth the name, no marketing budget to speak of. If the book was going to find readers, its author was going to have to find them himself.
The car trunk tour
So he did. Grisham bought around a thousand copies of his own print run and set out to sell them by hand across Mississippi. The venues were garden clubs, public libraries, drugstores and coffee mornings, anywhere that would let a local lawyer set up a table. It is one of the most repeated images in modern publishing lore, and unlike many such images it is true: the future bestseller, boxes in the trunk, pitching his novel one polite stranger at a time.
The tour did not make the book a hit. Sales stayed small, and plenty of those 5,000 first-edition copies took years to leave the warehouse. What the experience did do, by his own account, was teach him that readers who actually picked the book up tended to like it. The problem was reach, not quality. That distinction matters enormously to any writer sitting on a stack of rejections, because the two problems have completely different solutions.
The turn: he was already writing the next one
Here is the detail that separates this story from a simple tale of persistence rewarded. Grisham did not wait to see how A Time to Kill performed before deciding whether to continue. The day after he finished it, by his own telling, he began work on a second novel about a hotshot law graduate recruited by a Memphis firm that turns out to be owned by the mob. That book was The Firm.
The Firm changed everything, and it changed it sideways. A photocopy of the unpublished manuscript circulated in Hollywood, and in 1990 Paramount reportedly paid 600,000 dollars for the film rights before any publisher had bought the book. The film deal made the publishing deal inevitable: Doubleday acquired the novel, published it in 1991, and watched it spend the better part of a year on the bestseller lists as the top-selling novel in America. Suddenly everyone wanted the earlier book too. A Time to Kill was reissued, became a bestseller in its own right, and those unloved Wynwood first editions now change hands among collectors for serious money.
What a working writer can take from it
The first lesson is about sequencing. Grisham's breakthrough was possible because rejection never interrupted production. He treated the 28 letters as information about the market, not information about himself, and kept his writing hours ring-fenced while the first book failed in public. Most writers do the reverse: they stop producing while they wait for a verdict, which means one cold season can cost them years.
The second lesson is about the difference between a quality problem and a reach problem. His first novel was good; it simply had not reached enough readers to prove it. Poets face the same confusion constantly. A poem that gets no response has not necessarily been judged; often it has simply not been read. The only cure is circulation. Writory's monthly contest exists partly for this reason: every entry is read and scored on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, so the work gets a reading rather than a silence, which is more than those first 5,000 copies got.
Where to start reading him
Start with A Time to Kill, precisely because it is the book the industry passed on. It is looser and angrier than his later thrillers, closer to the courtroom he actually knew, and you can feel the 5 a.m. hours in its patience with small-town texture. Then read The Firm to see what he learned about velocity: short chapters, escalating pressure, an ordinary protagonist in a trap that keeps tightening.
Read the two together and you can watch a writer discover his own commercial instincts in real time. For any writer, in any form, that is a rare and useful thing to witness: the same voice, one book apart, learning exactly which of its strengths the widest audience wanted.
What poets can take from this
- Start the next piece before the current one has been accepted or rejected; production should never pause for verdicts.
- Track your rejections as data about fit, and remember 28 letters told Grisham nothing true about his book's future.
- Protect a small, fixed writing window that survives your busiest season, even if it has to start at 5 a.m.
- When a piece gets no response, ask whether it has a quality problem or a reach problem before you rewrite it.
- Hand-sell your work without shame: readers won one at a time still count, and they compound.
- Keep your early unsold work; the market often circles back once anything of yours succeeds.
Try it yourself
Write a poem set at a folding table where someone is selling a thing they made to an audience of three. Let the poem take the maker's ambition seriously without mocking or pitying them, and end on the drive home.
Questions
How many times was A Time to Kill rejected?
The widely reported figure is 28 rejections before Wynwood Press accepted it, usually described as a mix of more than a dozen literary agents and around a dozen publishing houses. Grisham himself has told the story in interviews many times, and the number has stayed consistent across decades of retelling.
Did John Grisham really sell his book from his car?
Yes. After Wynwood Press printed just 5,000 copies in 1989, Grisham bought roughly a thousand of them himself and sold copies at garden clubs, libraries and small events around Mississippi, carrying stock in his car trunk. Sales stayed modest until The Firm became a hit in 1991 and readers rediscovered the earlier book.
When did Grisham quit law to write full time?
He kept practising law while writing his first two novels and only left the profession after The Firm succeeded in 1991. Until then, writing happened around his caseload and his term in the Mississippi legislature, mostly in early morning sessions before work.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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