Success seldom comes without pain and perseverance. Take the case of author John Grisham.

Grisham is the world's most commercially successful novelist of the last decade. He has well over 100 million books in print in 31 languages. Yet Grisham was hardly an overnight success in his transition from attorney to writer.

A Time to Kill, Grisham's first novel, was rejected by 28 agents and publishers. When an agent finally did take him as a client, the book's first press run was only 5,000 copies. Grisham himself purchased 1,000 and hawked his work to bookstores from the trunk of his car.

Only after his second novel, The Firm, hit the bestseller list did he get his big break. Six of his books have now been made into movies, and the press run of his most recent volume, A Painted House, was a phenomenal 2.8 million copies.