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.”
It really is like the lottery now. Good luck finding a new home for your book :)
A dollar a rejection? Damn. I could've retired years ago :)
I would certainly keep reading.
I laughed and was curious about what would come next.
MMMiinnneessootttaaaa??? BBBrrrr!!
There is not enough money in the world!
NC is great, even with the occassional hurricane, and I’d much rather deal with them than snow and cold. Esp cold. I need 75 year round—that’s the temp where I function best! Course, I take it when I can get it!
We have many of the same problems here with things not growing. Too hot, though. Lilacs won’t do here, and peonies struggle. Lavender is an annual, and you’re right about salt. It’s a whole different world.
The soil here is either an ancient swamp, an ancient sand dune, or an ancient peat bog. The first thing northeners do when they get here is buy a big bag of peat moss and add it to everything. Not good. Our soil is very acidic. Then they get all the lime they can tote and start dumping it out. The native plants here like acidic soil. Then they wonder why everything they plant dies!
And weeds? Y’all have no idea. We have three seasons here—almost summer, summer, still summer, and Christmas. Weeds grow like, well, weeds. We have some doosies.
I had a thought this am about writers—it’s like spandex. The ones who should wear it won’t, because they’ve seen too many people who shouldn’t wear it out in public. LOL
Have a great day! Gotta go to work here shortly—I’ll check back later.
Writing anything is just like a real job.
I recently finished reading "The Broker" by John Grisham and, I swear, I wanted to overdose on heroin by the time I reached the end. It was horrible.
Yesterday I completed Marcus Lattrell's "Lone Survivor" (non-fiction) and hated that it ended. It had a profound message and impact.
Books are important to the reader, whether they make the author rich or not. Write for them.
It was more like “The Hurls of Divorce” but thanks for correcting my misspelling of throes.
The vast majority of books do not fail miserably. Their authors do. I do publishing and marketing consulting for authors and some of the biggest hurdles that I have found with many authors is their inability to realize that a successful book is 25% writing it and 75% promoting it. If you can’t stand up in front of 10, 100 or 1,000...if you can’t spit out an intelligent sentence on the set of a live national TV program (let alone a local cable production), go rob banks if you’re looking for recognition and a couple of bucks.
Building a platform is also important. Who’s going to buy the book of an unknown author? You need to establish credentials long before your first book. Write some articles for small magazines and get them published. Use that experience to move on to magazines and newspapers with bigger audiences. Build a platform, long before you write your first book.
Subject matter is important too. The “Field of Dreams” approach seldom works. Explore and understand who your audience might be. Look for similar books on Amazon. Sometimes you might mind find that your book is so “unique” that no one has ever done it before. On the other hand, the real reason might be because you’re the ONLY one interested in the subject. Sometimes you’ll find 500 books on a subject-—Chicago history-—for instance. That doesn’t mean, however, that the subject has been overdone. If you can find a different angle, maybe a unique perspective that no one else has done, you might have something.
Try ghostwriting. I’ve put words in the mouths of a number of politicians and wannabes too, some mentioned on FR. “Their” columns, blog entries or radio spots come out and I collect a check. No one knows it’s my words and I don’t care. They look good and I make another mortgage payment.
And finally, realize that a book is merely a means to an end. Standard industry royalties will never make you rich; lectures and seminars might. This week, I made more money from lectures than if I had sold 2,000 books this week. Heck, I even do consulting on different avenues of approach for getting a book published. Books are a means to an end.
Working on my seventh book, I’ve also decided to grab the bull by the horns; I going to self-publish. Not that stupid POD stuff, but an honest-to-God self-publishing effort. I’m talking to printers, lining up a distributor and I’ll be contacting every media person who ever wrote a positive review about one of my books or needed some info for a story (”Please. I’m almost on deadline!”). It’s payback time.
Writing books and getting them published falls under being a business, and until budding authors realize this, they’ll always be disappointed.
I have trouble finishing anything I
Geez, the people in this article are borderline mental cases. Do they write just to avoid having a real job?
Sam, I assume that you have a normal job?
I saw this before my morning coffee and went into mini-opus mode!
Thanks for thinking of me.
heh...I just might have to use that.
I have the same questions.
“The trick to being published is no different than all businesses: address what’s currently hot.”
Bingo! (With some minor exceptions).
“Lulu sounds pretty interesting.”
One of the worst of the subsidized publishing businesses out there. Don’t waste your money.
read later
not funny!
bookmark
Sam, the toddler has it right. A few insights I’ll add...
I’m a lawyer in real life and have my first book coming out with a mid-sized Christian publishing house in 2008 (it’s a nonfiction book offering practical Biblical counsel on everyday legal matters). Like virtually all first-time authors, I did it backwards - I wrote the book, then sought a publisher (really you’re supposed to sell a publisher on your idea, then write the book).
Be careful out there! Scams abound - fake agents, fake agencies, fake editors, fake book doctors, and fake publishing companies - plus some various “joint” or “partnership” alternative publishers that are merely disguised vanity houses.
Best advice I got at the beginning of the process: Money always flows TO the author. If you just go by that rule, you’ll safely navigate the minefield.
Start educating yourself by reading EVERYTHING on the Writer’s Beware blog ( http://accrispin.blogspot.com/ ) and every link they post. Seriously, invest a month or so in reading all that and you’ll be in solid shape, ready to face the realities of the publishing industry.
Now that I’ve signed my contract (two weeks ago) and await my modest (very) advance, I’m gearing up for the 75% percent phase: Promotion. I actually love this part - I care deeply about my message and so I have a passion to sell the book that goes beyond dollars (if I were to calculate the hours I poured into this project over the 5 years I worked on it using my regular hourly billing rate, I believe I would have to sell an infinite number of copies to break even!)- so, I guess I’m saying, make sure you love what it is you’re writing about!
Perhaps in bed on some dark and stormy night when the rain fiercely agitates the scanty flame of lamps that struggle against the darkness.......
Leni
LOL
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