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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Thanks for the tip. I self-published a book that was distributed by Biblo a few years back, but I haven’t started researching the latest developments yet for the new one. Lulu sounds pretty interesting.
I like true crime stories. I’ve never published anything but I did a website about one:
http://home.earthlink.net/~chicago1946/
Yep, whiny article, but really good stories in this thread...
Kudos to you published and trying-to-get-published types!
Called that one right. He has yet to see any royalties, and the advance got me a new computer and helped me pay down some debt. Don't worry about him, though. He's an engineer, I'm a writer. Guess who doesn't need the moeny.
moeny = money
Dammit, Jim! I’m a writer, not a proofreader!
Definitely check it out. As I noted, I’ve been 100 percent satisfied with the results and the production is very, very nice. A full-color cover is included in the per-book cost.
I’ve been writing a fantasy story for the past few years. I’ve finished the draft of the first book and charged headlong into the next one. I admit I’ve been afraid to try to get anything published until everything is written, as I have a full-time job and I don’t know how long it will take. Aside from finding time to write, for me the struggle has been getting anyone to read it for the sake of getting some feedback. I hate writing in a vacuum. How do the other writers on the board deal with this?
Congrats! Don’t know if I could write a textbook! I tend to write the way I talk—not sure the two are compatible! I do get lots of compliments on my gardening column and I can’t tell you how nice it is. One older gentleman wanted to know what school of journalism I attended—he was flabbergasted when I told him I didn’t even go to college.
Your textbook sounds infinitely more interesting than some of the ones I had in school! Most textbooks are guaranteed to turn kids off reading. I grew up on an isolated farm. I’m the oldest, so I spent a lot of time by myself. I’ve always had an overactive imagination, have gotten in a lot of trouble for it on occasion. OTOH, I’m never bored!
Sam, I am a writer also. I belong to a writers group (a must for a writer) and we recently had a speaker who has a (relatively) famous book out and he said the most fun you will EVER have with your writing is not getting the agent, not getting published, but doing the writing.
Another friend in this group has a novel coming out in September and she is totally anxious about publicizing it, getting book signings, the whole business bit.
So just write on and enjoy what you’re doing. I’ve written a ton of stuff, 7 books, 8 screenplays, a lot of short plays, columns (published in a big daily paper for a year or two).
My problem is marketing my stuff. A couple of rejection letters and I blow it off for a long time.
Gardengirl, you sound like so much fun! I myself am known as the Master, make that Mistress, of mostly useless trivia.
My husband cannot fathom how much I enjoy reading books and spending time here at FR. He’s a creative director so he’s a very visual, graphic person. Though he’s a conservative, he thinks FR is boring and contains “just words.” That’s why I love it!
Luckily, he doesn’t begrudge my freeping since he enjoys watching television. It works very well. LOL
I’m a longtime gardener and would love to read your column if it’s available online. I also wanted to share a wonderfully witty site by a local gardener/landscaper. For some reason, I’m unable to post a link, but it’s renegadegardener.com. Check out the “Don’t Do That” section of his site. The part about alien tree circles is hilarious.
My first book, “Humanity’s Edge”, was through a small publisher. I used a cost sharing arrangement. They paid for printing, distribution, etc. After they broke even on their costs, I began to receive royalties.
I’ve also worked on several anthologies through lulu.com (my work one of 10-20 in the collection). Lulu is very professional, and have decent shipping. Advertising for their books, though, is mediocre.
Indie Press (worked on one anthology with them) is OK on shipping, but needs work on their prices.
Amazon.com Shorts (I have two with them) are wonderful. The links you can get in and out are great. If you link from your site to the amazon.com Short, you get paid for the referral PLUS your commission. But it’s all electronic eBook distribution, that has limited appeal.
Small press (but not self publishing) is a great way to go. Non-traditional publishing where you pay for it is a business that makes its money off of you.
Good venues to get published on include:
Amazon.com Shorts - no cost to you, amazon.com distrbution, and 40% commission. (I have two of these published). Downside - all electronic.
Traditional publishing - 1 book, “Humanity’s Edge”
Upside - no cost to me
Downside - low royalties.
Lulu.com = upside, 4 anthologies, low price
downside, cost if you don’t break even
When I was in high school and my father was encouraging me to write, he said he’d pay me a dollar for every rejection slip I got.
I though that was a clever way to get me to submit ideas and articles without putting too much pressure on me, especially considering how fickle the publishing world is.
Me, too! Have three in a fantasy series done. My brother likes them, but... LOL
Maybe we could start an informal “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” club. LOLOLOLOL
Thanks for the compliment—back at you!
My hubbie just shakes his head. I usually have several books going at a time—reading and writing. Mine loves the boob tube as well—maybe we should get together?
What part of the world do you garden in? I’m in eastern NC, right on the coast. We’re in such a micro-climate...gardening is interesting to say the least!
Thanks again, but I write for a small, local paper—not on line! At least not yet! Josie’s been publishing for about three years and my column is one of the features. No money but at least I can truthfully say I’ve had my work published!!! LOL
I”ll check it out tom-getting past my bedtime!
G’night gardengirl!
I garden in the frozen north, Minnesota specifically. That would probably preclude our getting together while the hubbies watch the tube. LOL
North Carolina on the coast must be a wonderful place to live. You can grow so many interesting plants in your zone, though I imagine you have some salt issues. I’d be willing to deal with that if I could expand beyond zone 4 or 5 plants.
I admire you, and all of the writers on this thread, that have the creativity and dedication to ‘put the pen to paper.’ Yes, I can be a bit quaint. :)
Fascinating thread about book writing.
Worth a perusal and a bookmark to see who all the writers that FR can claim.
But stories like hers give life a richness and magic that self-help books, if they worked, would not.
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