Posted on 07/23/2007 5:05:12 PM PDT by SamAdams76
Taxes, weight gain, depression, loneliness—book advances are like lottery payoffs
For those who think they have a book inside them just waiting to be written—and, really, isn’t that pretty much everyone?—landing a book contract would be like winning the lottery. Dreams would come true; doors would open. Anything could happen.
“You hear about these big contracts coming in, and it whets your appetite,” said Leah McLaren, a columnist for Canada’s Globe and Mail, who landed a book contract with HarperCollins Canada in 2003 for her chick-lit novel, The Continuity Girl. “You start to think, ‘This is my lottery ticket …. It could be optioned for a movie or become a huge best-seller!’”
Indeed, securing a deal with one of the many esteemed editors at publishing houses like Knopf or Doubleday or FSG seems like fulfilling a kind of New York–specific American dream. Visions of six-figure contracts, KGB readings and TV appearances dance through writers’ heads. Even better: no more office, no more boss.
“But then, it could completely disappear and sell five copies,” added Ms. McLaren whose own book was published to little fanfare as a paperback original in the States this spring. “And you’ll never be heard from again. You’ll disappear. And that’s the real risk of writing a book.”
Slideshow My Book Deal Ruined My Life But just think for a minute, by way of comparison, if a book contract is a lottery ticket …. Evelyn Adams, who won $5.4 million in the New Jersey lottery in 1985 and 1986, now lives in a trailer. William (Bud) Post won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but now survives on food stamps and his Social Security check. Suzanne Mullins, a $4.2 million Virginia lottery winner, is now deeply in debt to a company that lent her money using the winnings as collateral.
Could such doom await lucky-seeming, envy-enspiring book writers?
Look at Jessica Cutler, a.k.a. Washingtonienne, the D.C. sex blogger who was paid a six-figure advance for her novel, based on the experiences she chronicled on her blog. Suffering under the weight of a lawsuit from an ex-boyfriend, who claims to have been humiliated by her writing, she has now filed for bankruptcy. She can’t even pay her Am-Ex bill.
Then there are the truly epic downfalls of authors like James Frey, whose fabricated memoir caused his life (and his seven-figure two-book deal with Riverhead) to shatter into a million little pieces. Now he’s writing two novels without a contract and posting on the blog and message boards on his Web site, bigjimindustries.com—the literary equivalent of living in a trailer park.
And even before the potential post-publication humiliation, there’s deadline pressure; crippling self-doubt; diets of Entenmann’s pastries and black coffee; self-made cubicles structured with piles of books, papers and unpaid bills; night-owl tendencies; failed relationships; unanswered phone calls; weight gain; poverty; and, of course, exhaustion.
So forget the American dream! Getting a book deal seems more like a nightmare.
In 2002, Daniel Smith, a former Atlantic Monthly staff editor, received the news that he’d gotten a book contract for Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination in a sweltering phone booth at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in woodsy New Hampshire. “There was no cell-phone reception at the time, so you had to get into these poorly ventilated—meaning there was no ventilation—phone booths. You sweat like a pig in there, and that’s how I got the news. And it was extremely exciting,” Mr. Smith told The Observer.
Mr. Smith’s book was inspired by the experiences of his father, an attorney who was ashamed that he heard voices in his head. He passed away in 1998. “I basically signed up to think about my father and his most painful secret every day for the next three years. I basically could sign myself up for mourning every day for three years, which is really not a fun way to spend someone’s life,” Mr. Smith said. “Thinking about insanity every day for many years also is very uncomfortable, because it’s like thinking about death—it’s one of our two greatest fears.”
At one point, said Mr. Smith, the writing was so miserable, “I thought about getting into painting houses or digging ditches, doing anything other than writing—making watches or something like that.”
Mr. Smith faced the problem that many authors struggle with: being stuck with their subjects for one, three, even 10 years at a time.
“I want this woman out of my life so much it’s ridiculous,” said Michael Anderson, 55, who has been researching and writing a book about the playwright Lorraine Hansberry for HarperCollins since 1998. “It has been, in essence, 10 years, and sometimes it seems like, ‘My God, why isn’t this thing done yet?’ But at times I think, ‘My God, it’s only been 10 years.’ I never understood why biographies took so much time; now I’m in awe that any of them get finished.”
When he received his contract, Mr. Anderson was working full-time as an editor at The New York Times Book Review, a job he had for 17 years. He figured he would try to take four years to finish the book and publish it by his 50th birthday. “But that was just naïve,” Mr. Anderson said.
He left The New York Times in 2005, sequestering himself in his Washington Heights apartment to devote himself to the book.
For months, each night, he would be startled from his slumber at 3:30 in the morning in the midst of a thought about Hansberry. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t want to be with her all the time,” Mr Anderson said.
Nathan Englander spent close to a decade on his second novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, released this April. “I was getting upset about all the articles—you know, ‘After a decade of silence … ,’” Mr. Englander, 37, said in an ominous tone during a phone interview.
“Now I look around and wonder—it’s hard to remember who I was all those years,” Mr. Englander added. “I don’t care about anything when I’m in the work; nothing else matters at all …. People I lost touch with, I’m trying to get back to. I’ll write them, ‘Thank you for your letter in 1999. Here’s what’s been going on.’ You work your way through to get familiar with normal life.”
Aside from losing touch with friends, Mr. Englander also struggled with everyday life.
“I look down and see that I’m only wearing one shoe,” Mr. Englander said in a recent interview with the blog Bookslut. “Recognizing it, I think, How can I walk around like this? Why would I walk around with only one shoe? … Why isn’t that shelf organized, or why didn’t I write that person back or … I can’t understand why the person that is me didn’t do these things. And to that question my mother responds, ‘Because you were like a tortured madman working on this book,’ and I remember and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s why.’”
“Spouses get very jealous of the biographer’s subject, because it really is what you’re thinking about all the time,” Mr. Anderson explained. “I’ve often thought that if I were married, my wife would’ve sued for divorce.”
The freedom of setting one’s own schedule, of course, is another gift of the book contract—for some, it’s the very motivation to pitch a book in the first place. Work for a few hours, go to yoga, work a little more, eat a sandwich …. It’s a fantasy of independence, without daily or weekly deadlines imposed from above, without being picked at by your nosy co-worker. But then…You miss the co-worker: the ruminations on last night’s Sopranos at the coffee machine, the bitching about deadlines over lunch. You even long for their Z100 sing-alongs and screeching renditions of “Since U Been Gone.
“I found, when I quit The Times, that the biggest problem is loneliness,” Mr. Anderson admitted.
“Basically, I was giving myself panic attacks in the beginning,” said Ms. McLaren, who took a leave of absence from her column-writing job to move to an isolated farmhouse outside Toronto and write her novel in solitude. “As a newspaper writer, people were always walking over to your desk and being like, ‘Where is it? How’s it coming?’ All that was taken away—there’s no deadline.”
And then there’s the self-loathing.
“You’re not letting people read it as you write it. Nobody has ever read what you’re doing. It could be terrible. It could be brilliant. And you start to think, ‘Oh God, this is a complete piece of shit that couldn’t be published—nobody is going to read it.’ But then you have a sandwich and go, ‘I am a genius and I’m going to win the Booker Prize.’”
Rachel Sklar, 34, the media and special-projects editor for the Huffington Post, barricaded herself her in Lower East Side apartment to work on her book, Jew-ish: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and All the Ish in Between, a humorous “guidebook on being a contemporary Jew,” according to Ms. Sklar. “It’s not like you can pack all that into a pamphlet if you’re going to do it right. You can’t just wing a chapter on the Talmud.” (Originally due in mid-February, the book’s deadline has since been pushed twice—once to May and now to mid-September.)
Ms. Sklar took six weeks off from her blogging job to uniform herself in fuzzy sweatpants, tie her hair into a bun, surround herself in books from the library and Amazon.com, guzzle Diet Coke and immerse herself in Jewry.
“The stack of books kept me where I was. I wasn’t going out, I wasn’t shopping …. I berated myself and may have had a few meltdowns. Well, I definitely had a few meltdowns. But you know, a friend of mine came over at 1:30 [after] a movie premiere with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a box of cupcakes, and it was the greatest pick-me-up ever.”
“The interesting thing is that it’s kind of freeing when you have a real good excuse to tell people no,” said Anna Holmes, 33, the current managing editor of Jezebel, a Gawker-sponsored female-centric blog, and editor of Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters from the End of the Affair. “But there was also that fear that the more I said no, at the end of the whole thing I wouldn’t have any friends left.”
Ms. Holmes stayed bundled in her apartment for about a year between 2001 and 2002, leaving her job as a writer at Glamour to cobble together the book.
“If you have an office job, at least it’s walking to and from the subway every day. When you sit in your house, you seriously gain weight,” Ms. Holmes said in a phone interview from her Long Island City apartment. “I’m eating my Greek yogurt and steamed vegetables—I’m trying to be good about what I’m eating. But I’m still like, ‘I’m getting really soft.’ My idea before the book came out was that I was going to diet, because I had gotten flabby, so that I’d look better to promote it. But that didn’t happen. I was quote unquote dieting for I think two weeks, but I just couldn’t do it.”
After all the months of writing, editing and wrangling permissions to reprint letters, Caroll & Graf released the book in August 2002. But the last thing Ms. Holmes wanted to do was celebrate the publication.
“I was really tired. I wasn’t so much physically tired, I was mentally tired. At the exact moment I was supposed to be promoting it, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I had to get all excited about this thing that I had just given birth to. It was like postpartum depression…
“I had a hard time getting myself back into my quote-unquote normal life, because I actually started enjoying my [own] company so much and the solitude of it all. I didn’t even want to go out,” Ms. Holmes continued. “I still tend to kind of want to be at home and read and, you know, [become] a cat lady, with my cats.”
And what about that holy grail—the advance? Even the smallest advance can be justified to death as the ticket out of your office job or bartending gig. But is the money that publishers pay most writers enough to make the suffering worth it?
That money, of course, isn’t just for rent and ham sandwiches and Oreos. It’s also for the sky-high freelance taxes (about 37 percent of any untaxed income will be commandeered by Uncle Sam), agent’s fees, fax and copy tabs at the library, travel for research trips and any other number of things. Think about it: $100,000 is actually more like $65,000 after taxes—not bad. But then there’s the 15 percent agent’s cut (another $15,000), leaving you about $50,000. For a year, that’s a livable salary. But once other book expenses are taken into account—like permissions, travel, copies and the like—you’re looking at a modest pile rather than a mountain. There’s really not much left to enjoy—especially if your work stretches on for years.
“When I hear a book deal, I think, ‘Oh, that person made a 100 grand.’ When I have a low-five-figure advance, I call it, like, a small gift, I suppose,” said Ms. Holmes.
She also learned that her publisher wouldn’t pay for the rights to print the breakup letters she wanted to include in the collection. “The advance I got was not money that I could live on; it was money that had to be used to pay permissions for the book,” she said.
Although Mr. Smith said he was able to survive on his advance, he admits that those six-figure deals can quickly dwindle away over the three or four years it takes to write a book. “You’re basically making 30 or 40 grand a year, and that’s not that great of a salary …. It’s really not as much as it seems. These numbers can be very deceptive.”
Yet, still, the dreamers dream. Brendan Sullivan, 25, moved to New York after studying creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.
He hasn’t landed a book deal for his novel, but is determined to find a publisher. “Writing has ruined my life and cost me many, many girlfriends,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have thrown away several careers and one college degree to spend my time working in bars, D.J.’ing in bars and drinking my rejection letters away. I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, and I’ve made many of them since I started …. I also abandoned my agent with words harsher than those I’ve saved for lost loves.”
Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery (“That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day,” Mr. Sullivan added.)
He is currently working on his second novel. His first one, well, “There are eight drafts of it—they’re in my basement right now,” he said in a phone interview from his Fort Greene apartment. He trashed the novel after he got into a public fight with his first agent and decided to start anew. “You have to learn how to suppress your gag reflex in order to get anything out. Like in love, you make a lot of mistakes and you learn from them.”
Indeed, despite the heartbreak, the loneliness, the trashed drafts, the rejected proposals, writers will continue to reach for the golden ticket, the fulfillment of their American dream.
“In terms of the most joyous life to have in the world, in terms of pleasure receptors, it might be like being a heroin addict: It’s the most pleasurable thing that you could choose, if you have that constant access,” said Mr. Englander, before hanging up to head to the coffee shop and write. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, it almost killed me,’ but I’m saying that in the most positive way, because it’s all I want to do.”
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I like action novels. Usually the author’s bio says something like, “Joe Blow and his family live in New York, Cape Cod, and Bermuda.”
Three pingie-dingies.
Wow that was the whiniest article ever.
It is, however, why if I ever got so lucky as to write a book, I would never want an advance, what would happen if I couldn’t finish the book? Argh.
I’ve written two plays that have been produced locally (Hampton Roads area of Virginia). They both played to very appreciative audiences, but were savaged by the local newspaper critic. My wife actually took the bad reviews worse than I did, since I knew that the critic was a hopeless jerk who couldn’t identify with happy endings, or the concept of a heterosexual romance.
But I digress...
It was scary putting myself out there on stage, with directors and actors interpreting my words, and audiences deciding whether or not they wanted to allow me to entertain them. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, though.
I have a novel (spiritual thriller) that I’ve started many times. My wife wants me to finish it, but I keep telling her that when I started it, I was in a different place. Now I’m married and happy, and I don’t really want to go back to where I was when I started it. Maybe someday I can compartmentalize enough to do it... but not yet.
They appear to be to be a massive waste of paper, and their narcisstic authors could just keep their thoughts to themselves. But no, they think they HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY that the world is breathlessly waiting to read and in most cases, that is not the case.
Recommend that they self-publish and distribute the dosens of copies to their friends and relatives and quit stuffing libraries with their output.
Just the humble opinion of the OldPossum.
Flame and belittle the non-literary OP if you wish; possums have tough skins. They also are known to snarl back.
Congrats and kudos!!! Woohoo!!! I long ago decided that if critics raved over something—it sucked. If they didn’t like it, it was probably great. Critics are from a different planet!
With me, it’s not so much finishing a novel as shutting up the voices. It’s the only way they’ll leave me alone!! My husband has learned not to ask me what I’m thinking—he says my brain is a scary place—he’s right!! I can’t think one thought at a time—I have a whole three ring circus with a zoo and an amusement park and who knows what else going on at the same time. The scariest part is that I can keep track of all of it. Drives my hubbie and kids nuts!
It’s not always about getting published—sometimes it’s just “me” time.
I write a local gardening column—I can’t tell you how many people come into the garden center where I work and tell me—I never understood that before—or so, that’s why that happens! The best compliment I’ve ever gotten was from a good customer—he told me, and I’m paraphrasing—I don’t like to read, but your column—it’s fun! I have so much fun writing about gardening stuff and I know so much useless trivia... Everything I read/see/hear sticks to my brain. I can come up with the most obscure facts no one had ever heard of—I call it brain lint! My kids call me encyclopedia, but I love it!
That’s what writing, and reading, is really about. Having fun, visiting a different world for a bit.
There’s a surfeit because there aren’t very many good editors, let alone many who actually read the drivel they print! On the other hand, there are innumerable truly spectacular books that never catch the limelight. It’s more a matter of right place, right time.
Despite this, our book got great reviews and tons of publicity. We were featured in Playboy, the Star and In Style and interviewed on a number of radio and TV shows, including Inside Edition. And the book still didn't sell, I think because the publisher misprinted it, miscategorized it, overpriced it, failed to publicize it and didn't even get it into stores. This was the Internet infancy days, so Amazon was no help.
I was getting letters from people who said they'd had to go to five different bookstores, even in major cities like Chicago, trying to find a copy. Naturally, the publisher put it out of print after about a month, claiming the low sales proved nobody wanted it(apparently, they expected people to fly to New Jersey and pound on the warehouse door for a copy). One magazine even named it "The Best Hard-To-Find Book of the Year," not exactly the honor I was hoping for.
We now have the rights back to it and would like to bring out an updated version, but can't find a publisher. They assume it must be a bad book because it didn't sell well the first time, even though I'm still getting fan mail from as far away as Australia, begging us for an updated edition. So we're working on creating a website to promote it and selling a better quality self-published version. That's what I did with my last book, and the best part of having to do all the work myself was that I didn't have to deal with any publishing industry morons.
The big publishers are like dinosaurs with three feet in a tar pit, and they don't even realize it. It's not surprising to me that none of them saw the potential in "Harry Potter." If they weren't mostly owned by big multinational corporations that use them as PR arms for their movie & TV branches (another Paris Hilton book, anyone?), most of them would've been gone long ago. /rant.
I'd say don't waste your time, but you know about the old saw about wise men & advice. I went through the same ups/downs, self-doubt & delusions of grandeur. The most money I made was retaining the copyright on alternative media, which paid off years later. The trick to being published is no different than all businesses: address what's currently hot.
Try marrying the right person.
I remember many years ago reading about a high school English teacher who met a woman in a bar in NYC. At the time he was living in a rent controlled apartment that was so small it was impossible to vaccuum if anyone was visiting.
The woman he met was an editor at Harper Collins or one of those publishers. They married. She encouraged the man to submit his novels to a publisher. Hers.
The result: Angela’s Ashes.
Taxes, weight gain, depression, loneliness—book advances are like lottery payoffs”
Stupid is as stupid does.
I have one children’s book written, another in outline form and sort of semi-vague plans for a whole series. The one that is written is now being illustrated. They are for little children, ages 4-7.
I also have the idea for one young adult novel in outline form and the idea for another swirling in my head.
I am afraid to share them too. I fear rejection for something that I have planned and worked at for so long.
Well, I hope you didn’t title it “The Throws (sic) of Divorce”.
lol sad but true.
Sam, you write good. Now you need to research good about getting published. I believe there are published book writers here, let’s hope one of them shows up. If not, get a leg up. From what I remember, you need to get an agent first. It’s not easy either, they get thousands of submissions, just like publishers. (Look up the sad story of John Kennedy Toole.) But some agents, I’ve heard, actually solicit submissions. I always read stories and interviews of writers in the newspaper, and what strikes me is that many of them get a leg through the door by taking writing classes or workshops and getting connections to agents through the instructors who like their work.
One of these days (he said without conviction), I’ll make some headway with the Alexandria Quartet.
I don’t know if I could drink enough bourbon to be the southern author I’d like to be...
Do what I did and self-publish it as a POD (print-on-demand) book at Lulu.com. It's absolutely free (you must handle pre-press and publicity yourself) and Lulu will print it as it's ordered, ship it and handle payment through major credit cards and Paypal. You set the price and Lulu takes a 20 percent commission; any books you order are shipped to you at cost. I recently published a special-interest book, "The Unabomber and the Zodiac," and have been one hundred percent satisfied with the results. With POD a self-publishing author need no longer pay for huge press runs; in fact, you don't need anything up front unless you wish to purchase a distribution service for about $100 that will make your book available through online retailers like Amazon.
Go for it!! Like I told SA—sometimes it’s not about getting published, at least for me, although that would be nice!
It’s more the fact that I have this whole world and all these people and characters bouncing around in my head, demanding attention. Writing them down gives them substance. (And shuts them up!) LOL
I said children’s book, but I’m thnking more along the ages of twelve or so. I have a lot of trouble making any age distinctions with books. So much of the stuff I read as a child that was written for children was soooo boring. I tended to enjoy stuff that was a little harder to read—more challenging. I still enjoy good children’s books. The ones that catch my interest the most are the ones that are written as if for adults—no talking down and assuming kids are too stupid to figure out that if the character’s in high school in one paragraph, she shouldn’t be in college in the next. Or out of character stuff—that drives me nuts.
When my daughter was in middle school she did Battle of the Books—a reading competition. I don’t know who gets to choose the books on the list, but they do a bang-up job. I read everything she brought home for BBTB. There were some great reads—The Face on the Milk Carton comes to mind, Holes, Hatchet, the list goes on and on.
The best advice I can give you is have faith and have fun! Do somethng you enjoy and the rest will come.
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