Nick Mamatas (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nihilistic_kid) wrote,@ 2004-03-22 12:20:00 |
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Check out the middle of THIS list, punk
I'm sure many of you have read the Salon article about being a midlist writer. Like most Salon articles, it bobs and weaves around its subject without ever actually ever landing a knockout blow. The author, "Jane Austen Doe" (pseudonymous as to "protect" her "career") is too chockful of hubris to see her own role in the development of the problems she faces, problems which had they been described to 99.99999% of the people who have ever lived would be understood only as a fairly ridiculous utopian fairy tale.
Anyway, Doe takes $150,000 for her first novel (about five times higher than a real midlist advance) and it flops. Thus, nobody wants to make a gift of another $125,000 to her for mysterious reasons that she just can't figure out. She does recover nicely, and ghostwrites a celebrity book that becomes a bestseller, almost certainly earning her another $150,000. Oddly, she then tries to sell a collection, even though the rule of thumb is that collections will only sell to a subset of one's audience for novels. Of course, nobody acquires it. Under her own name, her second novel commands only $10,000 and she blows some dough on a publicist; eventually she manages to sell a subsequent novel for $80,000 but Doe still must face the shame and embarrassment of not being so well-known that the folks she buttonholes on airliners spontaneously orgasm just from sitting next to her.
Like many authors, she has totally contradictory ideas of how publishing works, including making the secondhand arguments that "[t]oday's editors can't afford a single flop" and "[h]ardcover publishers lose money on most of their titles and depend greatly on a few bestsellers... ." Well, which is it, sunshine? Clearly, the only one truly surprised that Doe's first novel lost money was Doe herself.
She also trots out the ancient canard that publishing is now a business but wasn't back in the Glory Days of immediately before she began to publish. Lovecraft made similar comments in his many letters to Donald Wandrei in the late 1920s, btw.
Ultimately, Doe publishes several books over a ten-year period, gets a lot of money and a lot of accolades, but must nonetheless suck it up and take on the dreaded day job in order to exist in the manner in which she has become accustomed. This is a very different reason than the ones inspiring most people's day jobs, which involves stuff like not being homeless and dying drooling blood on the bad side of town.
Doe's "confessions" are nothing of the sort. She can't conceive of taking too high an advance as a risk, or trying to sell a collection after a novel flopped as a bad move, or her books simply not connecting with many readers because of her choice of subject matter or style, her failure to turn windfalls into consistent income, or anything else she did to land her in the degraded state she's in now: getting out-of-the-blue phonecalls from potential employers in an economy with relatively high unemployment. Heavens!
Because she is convinced that you'll be aggrieved by her tale of five and six-figure advances and her inability to get on the Today show, Doe wrote a sidebar explaining what you can do to help her out. Her suggestions include "thinking" and getting politicians to do the same. Good luck with that one, Bartleby. Doe also wants us to support funding for the arts, presumably because without a handy completion grant or two she may have had to get a day job years before, leaving her open to the danger of coming across a Negro laborer and falling into a terrible swoon from the nervous shock.
I have few suggestions not for readers but for midlist writers I would like to impart:
1. Don't be a fuckaninny with money. When you get a great big check, don't do stupid shit with it. Even if you do "deserve" a vacation, most vacations are stupid and wrong. Your memories will not last a lifetime, but your arguments with your spouse about who said what to whom in Paris and whether that cafe was really in a Vienna anyway will. Further, nobody wants to see photos of you and your ugly husband squinting and showing off your peeled-potato white knees in front of the Acropolis. Never, and I mean, NEVER, buy a car you have to make payments on to afford. That would be a bad bet if cars didn't depreciate, and they do, and damn quickly. This goes double for SUVs, unless you need to transport a brace of retards to the zoo every day as part of your community service for writing a derivative novel.
2. Remember that publicity is only a barely rational economic act. If publicity worked any less well or any less often, publishers wouldn't bother. A heavily-hyped book can flop too, as Jayson Blair's thrilling nosedive teaches us all. Most authors see publicity as a black box. Poor money into it, and ten times the money pops out the other end. Nuh-uh. In a supersaturated media environment, no amount of exposure is guaranteed to work, and some qualities of exposure work better than others. The publisher of Letters To Wendy's told me once that he sold a lot of copies by hitting indie rock magazines with review copies. The glowing notice about the book in Rolling Stone, however, moved ZERO extra copies. Large audience, but the wrong audience.
3. Learn to add and subtract.
4. Look at per-word rates. Need a quick $5000? Well, you can spend months writing a 75,000 word media tie-in novel, or a few afternoons writing three feature articles that earn a buck a word.
5. Take what you do seriously. Don't write a book because you think "it would make a great movie." Don't experiment in genres you don't like and aren't familiar with because, having failed to master suggestion 3, you have decided that category romance, SF, or even more hilariously, horror, pays better than contemporary American realism and that as it is "formula" fiction it must be easy to write. The vision of being happily ensconced writing a novel every 20 months until you die is the negation of the drive and fate-daring that got you published in the first place. Does the planet really need eighteen novels about the stuff you did the day before yesterday, especially when by definition the latter seventeen of them will be about a novelist writing a novel about the stuff he did the day before yesterday? Yeah, I think we have more than enough too.
6. The following do not necessarily make you wise: getting cancer, growing up po', growing up wealthy but in a former imperial holding, having a miscarriage, marrying well, paying $275 per square foot for an apartment, extramarital affairs, being very well-read, having a blog with lots of readers, living out in the woods and peeing in a creek, worrying aloud about how authentic you are, declaring that you'll leave the country if a Republican is elected, and giving birth to an autist.
Hope that helps and happy writing!
I'm sure many of you have read the Salon article about being a midlist writer. Like most Salon articles, it bobs and weaves around its subject without ever actually ever landing a knockout blow. The author, "Jane Austen Doe" (pseudonymous as to "protect" her "career") is too chockful of hubris to see her own role in the development of the problems she faces, problems which had they been described to 99.99999% of the people who have ever lived would be understood only as a fairly ridiculous utopian fairy tale.
Anyway, Doe takes $150,000 for her first novel (about five times higher than a real midlist advance) and it flops. Thus, nobody wants to make a gift of another $125,000 to her for mysterious reasons that she just can't figure out. She does recover nicely, and ghostwrites a celebrity book that becomes a bestseller, almost certainly earning her another $150,000. Oddly, she then tries to sell a collection, even though the rule of thumb is that collections will only sell to a subset of one's audience for novels. Of course, nobody acquires it. Under her own name, her second novel commands only $10,000 and she blows some dough on a publicist; eventually she manages to sell a subsequent novel for $80,000 but Doe still must face the shame and embarrassment of not being so well-known that the folks she buttonholes on airliners spontaneously orgasm just from sitting next to her.
Like many authors, she has totally contradictory ideas of how publishing works, including making the secondhand arguments that "[t]oday's editors can't afford a single flop" and "[h]ardcover publishers lose money on most of their titles and depend greatly on a few bestsellers... ." Well, which is it, sunshine? Clearly, the only one truly surprised that Doe's first novel lost money was Doe herself.
She also trots out the ancient canard that publishing is now a business but wasn't back in the Glory Days of immediately before she began to publish. Lovecraft made similar comments in his many letters to Donald Wandrei in the late 1920s, btw.
Ultimately, Doe publishes several books over a ten-year period, gets a lot of money and a lot of accolades, but must nonetheless suck it up and take on the dreaded day job in order to exist in the manner in which she has become accustomed. This is a very different reason than the ones inspiring most people's day jobs, which involves stuff like not being homeless and dying drooling blood on the bad side of town.
Doe's "confessions" are nothing of the sort. She can't conceive of taking too high an advance as a risk, or trying to sell a collection after a novel flopped as a bad move, or her books simply not connecting with many readers because of her choice of subject matter or style, her failure to turn windfalls into consistent income, or anything else she did to land her in the degraded state she's in now: getting out-of-the-blue phonecalls from potential employers in an economy with relatively high unemployment. Heavens!
Because she is convinced that you'll be aggrieved by her tale of five and six-figure advances and her inability to get on the Today show, Doe wrote a sidebar explaining what you can do to help her out. Her suggestions include "thinking" and getting politicians to do the same. Good luck with that one, Bartleby. Doe also wants us to support funding for the arts, presumably because without a handy completion grant or two she may have had to get a day job years before, leaving her open to the danger of coming across a Negro laborer and falling into a terrible swoon from the nervous shock.
I have few suggestions not for readers but for midlist writers I would like to impart:
1. Don't be a fuckaninny with money. When you get a great big check, don't do stupid shit with it. Even if you do "deserve" a vacation, most vacations are stupid and wrong. Your memories will not last a lifetime, but your arguments with your spouse about who said what to whom in Paris and whether that cafe was really in a Vienna anyway will. Further, nobody wants to see photos of you and your ugly husband squinting and showing off your peeled-potato white knees in front of the Acropolis. Never, and I mean, NEVER, buy a car you have to make payments on to afford. That would be a bad bet if cars didn't depreciate, and they do, and damn quickly. This goes double for SUVs, unless you need to transport a brace of retards to the zoo every day as part of your community service for writing a derivative novel.
2. Remember that publicity is only a barely rational economic act. If publicity worked any less well or any less often, publishers wouldn't bother. A heavily-hyped book can flop too, as Jayson Blair's thrilling nosedive teaches us all. Most authors see publicity as a black box. Poor money into it, and ten times the money pops out the other end. Nuh-uh. In a supersaturated media environment, no amount of exposure is guaranteed to work, and some qualities of exposure work better than others. The publisher of Letters To Wendy's told me once that he sold a lot of copies by hitting indie rock magazines with review copies. The glowing notice about the book in Rolling Stone, however, moved ZERO extra copies. Large audience, but the wrong audience.
3. Learn to add and subtract.
4. Look at per-word rates. Need a quick $5000? Well, you can spend months writing a 75,000 word media tie-in novel, or a few afternoons writing three feature articles that earn a buck a word.
5. Take what you do seriously. Don't write a book because you think "it would make a great movie." Don't experiment in genres you don't like and aren't familiar with because, having failed to master suggestion 3, you have decided that category romance, SF, or even more hilariously, horror, pays better than contemporary American realism and that as it is "formula" fiction it must be easy to write. The vision of being happily ensconced writing a novel every 20 months until you die is the negation of the drive and fate-daring that got you published in the first place. Does the planet really need eighteen novels about the stuff you did the day before yesterday, especially when by definition the latter seventeen of them will be about a novelist writing a novel about the stuff he did the day before yesterday? Yeah, I think we have more than enough too.
6. The following do not necessarily make you wise: getting cancer, growing up po', growing up wealthy but in a former imperial holding, having a miscarriage, marrying well, paying $275 per square foot for an apartment, extramarital affairs, being very well-read, having a blog with lots of readers, living out in the woods and peeing in a creek, worrying aloud about how authentic you are, declaring that you'll leave the country if a Republican is elected, and giving birth to an autist.
Hope that helps and happy writing!
