For years, the 39-year-old Winnipeg author Andrew Davidson has had a semi-regular ritual of burning all of his most awful prose. “The first time I did it, I did it in an abandoned bathtub in a back alley in Vancouver,” he says. “I didn’t do it in rage. I was kind of giving myself permission to release the hold that my writing had on me. I no longer think that my words are as precious as I used to.”

It’s a surprising admission from a writer whose words have recently been deemed very precious indeed. Davidson sold his debut novel, The Gargoyle – a centuries-spanning romance about a severe burn survivor and a possibly schizophrenic sculptress who insists that they were lovers in a previous life – to Doubleday U.S. last summer for $1.25-million, an almost unheard-of figure for an untested author (especially a Canadian one). 

“This is certainly the most we’ve paid for a first novel in quite a few years,” admits Doubleday acquiring editor Gerry Howard. “But nobody here has had a single moment of buyer’s remorse.”

Howard first heard of the book from Davidson’s New York agent, Eric Simonoff, who talked it up to him and several other prospective buyers over a series of industry lunches. “By the time [the manuscript] arrived here, everybody was well primed for it,” says Howard. “It didn’t sit on anybody’s floor before it started to get read.”

After Doubleday beat out the competition in the ensuing bidding frenzy, they immediately got to work planning how to capitalize on their investment. According to Howard, the strategy has been to get word of mouth going by unleashing a flood of several thousand advance reading copies – far more than most novels get. “Our belief is that once people read it, they won’t want to shut up about it,” Howard says. “So we want as many people to have read the book by pub date as we can manage.” 

Over the past year, Davidson has been under strict instructions by Doubleday to refuse all media requests, in the hope of avoiding early overexposure. But now, with the August release of The Gargoyle just around the corner, Davidson is tentatively stepping into the spotlight. “This is one of my first interviews,” the soft-spoken author explains at the outset of our conversation. “So please be very kind and gentle.”

Davidson has been writing for most of his life but he had never before tried to get anything published. He started working on The Gargoyle in 2000, in the middle of a five-year stint working as a technical writer in Japan. He completed an initial draft – one that ran about double the length of its current 465 pages – in 2005, after returning to Winnipeg. Still attuned to Japanese time, he adopted a bizarre yet productive schedule in which he slept through the day and began writing only at about 11 p.m. “I tend to prefer working in the night,” Davidson explains. “I really like the silence and the lack of disturbance.”

After Davidson sent the manuscript off to Simonoff, he quickly got word back that the agent liked it but felt it was far too long, with too many digressive tangents. “The sheer girth of this thing has defeated me,” Simonoff wrote. So Davidson spent the next six months “brutally excising” anything that didn’t push the plot forward. Simonoff then agreed to represent him, and not only did he convince Doubleday to pay the $1.25-million, he also retained foreign rights. To date, The Gargoyle has been sold in 20 other markets – including here at home to Random House Canada – more than doubling Davidson’s initial advance. (Simonoff actually made a point of closing the Canada deal first, to preclude any U.S. publisher’s request for full North American rights.)

In the weeks and months ahead, Davidson will be working overtime on the publicity circuit – including tours in the U.S. and Canada – and both he and Howard will likely have to field many questions about the astounding advance. “I don’t think Andrew’s novel represents some high-water mark of irrational exuberance,” Howard says. “[Deals like this] will happen again, and soon, because we’re always looking forward, not backward. When something like The Gargoyle comes your way, your first instinct is to pounce on it… and sometimes that takes a lot of money.”