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.”
That's an excellent point. In the same way audio recordings are becoming virtually free commercials for a musician's live performances, non-fiction books are becoming virtually free advertisements for one's professional or personal services.
For fiction...just forget it. In our television-dominated culture people don't read books any more, so there are only going to be ten to twenty fiction writers worldwide at any given time who are really making big money from selling novels. There's more money in the anonymity of writing for television and movies, but the barriers to entry there are extraordinarily high.
The best way to get started is to create an eBook, sell it from your own web site, and as you said, build up an audience and credibility.
Ouch!!! At least FreeRepublic is a double-wide sitting in a nice spot. ;)
Authors are like professional athletes. Successful ones are paid large sums of money to do what the rest of us gladly do for free. But for every successful major league ball player making the serious money, there are a thousand who never made the big time.
It is the nature of the beast. So you do what you want and follow your dream. Maybe you make it, and maybe you don’t. But if you have done it right, you have a good time along the way.
Bookmarking bump!
I’ve been there...
I usually write a 40-page (or so) book proposal that describes the premise, who the market is, how to work the market and get publicity, chapter titles and summaries (that can change as I actually write the book), my bio, tear sheets and clips of other things I’ve done, DVDs of TV appearances (The View, Fox, ESPN) and tapes of radio interviews (local, national and a few overseas), and a tentative preface or foreword, plus maybe a chapter or two. http://lisaekus.com/literary-proposal.asp
I sell the book idea through the proposal, really a marketing tool. With this, you sell the manuscript and yourself-—and they go hand-in-hand. First you have to "sell" an agent. Then, if an acquisition editor likes it, he/she then has to sit down with a board of his/her peers and sell the idea to them. If it gets a thumbs down, you don’t go and spend 2 weeks on a bender, you simply tell your agent to keep pushing at the next publishing house on his/her list. http://lisaekus.com/
After I get a contract, THEN I write the book. Why spend months/years writing a manuscript that we can’t sell?
The proposal will get you a contract and an advance, and once all the details are worked out, that’s when I write the book.
Acquisition editors will read a proposal, especially if you have a good agent who will send your proposal to publishers who she knows have an interest in my subject matter. I don't waste much time with websites of writing "experts." Many of them are put together by someone who has sold 100 books of poems with LuLu or just had an article published in the hometown paper with a circulation of 1,500. There are a LOT of them out there. I also quit going to writers groups. They all to often consists of unsure writers who want to know all about how to handle a book tour, getting on Oprah, what they will insist upon in their contract, and how much money they will make. The cart, all too often, is placed well before the horse with these people. I know. I've been there. Talk to published authors and read some how-to books from those who have really been published---and least one time by a traditional publisher. Pay a few bucks for a phone consultation with authors who have an agent, who have been published with consistentcy through various means (traditional, self-published, subsidized, etc.) and who know the advantages and disadvantages of each approach); and then close your eyes and jump in! I go crazy when I read postings on writing web sites (and FR) of people with 10 manuscripts in their closets but haven't done a thing to get them ready for the publishing process. What's it going to take? Eleven manuscripts? Twenty? Fifty? Cut the BS, and just do it---but have a plan. Having someone say "No, it's not what we're currently looking for" is not the end of the world. Rejection is just one part of the process. Deal with it. I know it's so much safer to talk about your unread manuscript than have someone tell you it's not what they're looking for. No guts. No glory. Just DO it!
Let me echo the sentiment of some other posters on here. Just finish the book and go for it. If you get it published, I’d be happy to go out and buy it. I happen to be a notorious book addict.
As for authors incorporating their own experiences into novels, that is the seed of all creation. I always think of William Styron (God rest his soul) and one of the books he wrote that moved me deeply; Sophie’s Choice. He met a woman in an apartment building he lived in and his brief encounter(s) with her were the life force that began “Sophie.” I love that.
God bless and don’t get discouraged!
Woe is the author. Snif.
We ALMOST moved to Beaufort, SC a few years ago....then I decided it just was too damn cold there too! When I move, it will be tropical. I'll give up the Hostas and start on Hibiscus.
I already have half a dozen palm trees, bananas and Spanish moss growing outside year round here (Z-7).
If I thought that man-made global warming was real, I'd be sitting in my back yard spraying CO2 into the air.
And, I live on the coastal plain...so my soil is like yours acidic peat sand. It can be a bit frustrating at times... Worse are the voles. I sure do hate those suckers....
All excellent points. I have successfully followed & executed similar steps and processes in the technical marketplace. Eventually, I began to focus on electronic publishing, with which I've been involved now for many years.
The only exception I would make to your comment above is that this generally applies to all life activities. It's only through experience that one begins to realize that life is like an iceberg (oblique pun intended). That is, 90% of one's efforts will be directed towards activities you didn't even know existed until you became involved.
This holds true for engineers who exhaust themselves on design, only to discover that debug & integration take X times as long. Or the attorney who only finds out later that initial research has nothing on presentation & review. Writers are no different; only after the manuscript is completed do they realize that the real work begins.
This in turn is what separates the wheat from the chaff. Those who have extra reserves and buck up in the face of realizing this horror can carve out a living. Those that collapse in despair become road kill.
I work at a garden center and you’d think I’d have an outstanding yard! LOL Too many skeeters and sand gnats—we live right on the marsh. Besides, my 17 year old prunes everything with the lawnmower!!
You do know that’s BU-fort, not BO-fort?! I live real close to Beaufort, NC. Constant bone of contention around here.
We carry a product called Rozol. It’s a rat poison that’s okayed for voles. Go out in the evening and step down on the runs. The ones that are bumped back up in the am are the active ones. Dig a small hole in the active runs and drop in a few pellets of Rozol. It may take more than one app as they live in colonies. Around here, they tend to live around big pine trees, or stumps. (Southern Pine Vole)They’re getting worse every year. The local extension agent says there aren’t any. What a maroon! Try explaining to people why the mole poison they’re putting out isn’t killing the moles!! Not sure about secondary poison so if you have dogs/cats use caution.
Had a customer come in and tell me that his fruit tree died.
Questioned him. Turns out he planted it ten years ago and it never grew. More questioning. It was balled and burlapped. Tag said plant “as is.” Ten years later—the burlap was still in perfect shape. LOL The tree died because the roots couldn’t grow. Our soil is like the peat bogs of Ireland. Things don’t decompose.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooo-kay, was there a secret message that I should’ve been aware of?
Didn’t you get it? It was written in invisible ink!!! LOL
If you don't know people in the industry or have an in with someone and you can get an agent, get one. Be warned, shop for your agent carefully. Make sure they work in the genre you're trying to get into and make sure you like them and that their style suits you. Some agents are hand-holders and back-patters, some are business only. My wife loves her agent, but rarely has contact with her outside of business dealings. She doesn't call to see how things are going or check in, she doesn't call a month before deadline to make sure everything is on schedule or read during the writing process and offer feedback. If you need that, make sure you get it.
Most unsolicited manuscripts get round-filed or are passed on to "readers" who skim manuscripts for the editors and try to pick out the ones they think have promise. Many readers are part-time or college kids and my wife has told me that if they don't like the query letter the manuscript goes in the trash without another look. As an example, when my wife was an editor the lines she was responsible for published 12 books per month. With the responsibility of overseeing and publishing 12 books per month, how many unsolicited manuscripts do you think she read? An agent can put your book in an editors's hands.
Forget about money, you won't make any initially. Unless there is a bidding war for your manuscript you'll be lucky to make enough to survive. Advances are half up front, half upon acceptance, which can mean anything from the day they receive the completed manuscript to when you complete revisions, which can be months later. Royalties are usually paid twice per year, but don't expect much unless the book is a big seller.
Most importantly, you're not crazy. I wish I could do it. If you can make a living at it (or don't have to) it's a great lifestyle, you can live anywhere, set your own schedule and, if lucky, make a nice living. My wife has known she wanted to be a writer since she was a child. If you do it for any reason other than the love of writing or because you have a burning, obsessive need to I would discourage you, but otherwise go for it.
If you or anyone else have specific questions that you think my wife could help with, just Freep mail me and I'll pass it along.
Well I wanted to write something profound --- you know --- the Great American post ---
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--- but I got Writers Block (TM)
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