Tag Archives: publishing

It doesn’t get better.

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On Sunday I had occasion to hear from two people I know who also write and they provided a couple of different takes on what it feels like to be accomplished in the craft.

The first fellow reported that he felt like he was failing at writing. He has not published, is struggling with his one and only manuscript and has almost overwhelming feelings of self-doubt. He knows the mountain he has to climb and he’s feeling discouraged. What he was surprised to learn, from me and from another published author of similar success, is that for some that feeling never goes away. With every project and every working day there comes the sense that it’s all futile, and that whatever good things that happen to have happened will be the last good things to come along.

I’m sure there are some writers who don’t think this way. They have their hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars and they know they have it made. James Patterson makes $96 million a year and he doesn’t even write his own books. That’s not the sort of guy who worries about tomorrow. For the rest of us, though, there’s the reality of swimming in a body of water fraught with whirlpools and other hazards, and just staying motivated can be a real challenge.

So this other writer and I tried to give the guy some sympathy because we’ve been there. We are there. I don’t know if we succeeded in cheering him up at all, but at least he had the comfort of knowing he’s not the only one feeling those feelings.

The second fellow I heard from was one who is likewise unpublished and had managed through sheer force of will to pare down a 130,000-word novel to 65,000 words in the course of a single, herculean editing session. He was feeling totally supercharged and spent hours afterward looking for places where he could send his newly lean piece of work. He told us all he expected the book to appear very soon. He was all confidence. Then I came along.

I don’t like rain on anyone’s parade. I really don’t. At the same time, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to tell everyone how it is. I congratulated this writer on his amazing feat, which was definitely deserving of praise, but I gently reminded him that even if he were to sell his book tomorrow, and the book required no editing, it would be at least a year before it ever saw the light of day. That’s no one’s definition of very soon.

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Takin’ care of business

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Ah, the book business. Is there any business like it? No, not really. And there’s a reason for that: it’s profoundly screwed up, and has been for time out of mind.

Years ago I used to work in book retail, and it was there that I got the first taste of the book biz’s strange model. You see, publishers sell their books to bookstores at a deep discount — which makes the high prices Barnes & Noble charges even more puzzling, but I digress — and in return the stores try to sell them… for a while. Once the stores have determined that a book isn’t going to sell, a process that could take three months or three years, they pack up the unsold books and send them back for a full refund.

This is a pretty sweet deal for bookstores. They get shiny new product on a regular basis, and except for that small amount that actually sells, they don’t have to pay for any of it. Meanwhile, publishers are on the hook for all the costs of production, from the advance paid to the author to the salary of the proofreader, and they don’t get a break any which way. Is it any wonder, then, that publishers are hurting when they’re working with such an insane business model?

I haven’t even gotten into the problems endemic to all publishers, which is the almost total lack of promotion their releases receive. If a book isn’t determined ahead of time to be a likely best-seller — or, at least, a good seller — that book gets essentially no publicity. The few copies bookstores order are dumped on shelves with zero fanfare, apparently with the hope that someone will wander by and pick up the thing, thus causing a chain reaction of enthusiasm that will eventually result in an explosion of EL James-ian proportions. To say that this is highly unlikely is being too kind.

So publishers are getting it from two directions, both basically self-inflicted. They’ve visited the horrible returns situation upon themselves and are trapped in that hell forever, thanks to the increased leverage book retailers enjoy in a shrunken market, and they are virtually guaranteeing that their releases will go absolutely nowhere sales-wise by in essence leaving them out on an ice floe to die.

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Sheer luck

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I’ve talked a lot about a lot of different things when it comes to writing. I’ve had a little success and tried to take lessons from it that I can pass on to other people so that they, too, might have a little success. I’m not a sage, nor does my Writing Wisdom™ come with any guarantees of efficacy. There are people out there who have been wildly more successful than I have, with accomplishments I can only dream about, and chances are they have advice that’s even better than anything I might ever share.

There’s one thing I haven’t ever touched on in any substantive way, though, and I want to talk about it now. It’s luck and how much you had better hope it’s on your side.

I’m an okay writer. Some have said I’m pretty good, but I consider myself fairly middling. You, on the other hand, might be an awesome writer, but for whatever reason I’ve sold what I’ve sold and you have sold nothing. What’s going on? I’d like to say it’s because I have some profound insight that you don’t have, but the truth is that I got very lucky.

I wasn’t lucky at the start. In the early to mid-’90s I toiled away on some, frankly, very bad science fiction and had precisely zero success with any of it. Much of this had to do with my writing sucking out loud, but there was a fair amount of unluckiness, too, as I never managed to make a connection with an agent or a publisher willing to try and develop the kernel of decent writer-hood that I had within me. So I quit. I quit for ten years, during which time I didn’t write a single, solitary word on anything.

The writing bug never truly leaves a writer, and if it does then you weren’t meant to write in the first place. Consequently I spent a goodly amount of time during that decade thinking about writing even as I didn’t do any of the necessary work. And when I finally, finally sat down at the keyboard to hammer out the first of what would become two unsold manuscripts, I hoped that: 1) I’d gotten better in the interim, and 2) that I’d get lucky.

The two books I wrote were decent. Like most of what I write, they had their good points, but the thing about writing okay work is that publishers and agents can easily go either way on the piece depending on what variables happen to be in play on the day they read it. I shopped around for an agent and shopped around for an agent and got nowhere. And then I got lucky.

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Where’s my water?

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I’ve talked about this before, but given the circumstances I find myself in of late, I thought it was worth readdressing for those who missed the topic the first time around. And that topic: money and when you get it.

It’s no secret to anyone who pays attention that the money situation when it comes to writing is pretty bad. I’ve done markedly better than most over the past couple of years, for which I am eternally grateful to my publisher, but the majority of folks out there will make better income begging on a street corner or busking in subway stations than they will from writing. As I’ve discussed, the average advance these days is around $5,000. If you don’t have an agent, lop approximately $1,000 off that. So you see that even a part-time job at minimum wage earns significantly more than writing, and probably involves fewer hours of effort into the bargain.

To compound the problem of payment, there is the pace at which the dollars are doled out. This is the absolutely killer part of the equation, and probably the most frustrating for anyone who has bills to pay.

The usual method by which advances are paid is half up front, half on publication. The half up front is great because, well, you get the money right away. Most likely it’s not going to be big money, as we’ve discussed, but it’s money and money is good. The half on publication bit… not so much. Just take a look at the situation with Missing and you’ll see what I mean: it was bought late last year, but isn’t scheduled to hit shelves until sometime in 2014. Which means I don’t get the final payment for about 18 months after the initial deal was made. That’s the way it works out and I can’t complain.

But if I were in a money bind right now, I’d be seriously desperate. As it is there are no crises demanding access to my bank account, so I’m clear in that regard, but there have been times over the last few years when I have urgently needed a large infusion of cash, only to find myself stuck in the nether zone between payments. This necessitated some hard decisions that I’m still paying for, but what are you gonna do? Not replace the wall in the shower that’s literally crumbling into pieces?

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