I have a terrible confession to make

Between all the pissing and moaning, you can get some great insights here.

 

$50,000 is a very solid advance. But if you think of a non-fiction book as an average of two years of work (proposal, reporting, writing, editing, publishing, promoting), and you remember that your expenses and agent's fee come out of your advance, then six figures isn't the sum it might first seem. It's totally reasonable to expect that kind of money from a New York publishing house. It should never cost you money to do that amount of work or to dedicate that much of your life to something.

By the way, none of what I said applies to novels, as far as I understand them. You have to write your first novel before you sell it, usually, and they don't often sell for huge amounts. You hear about bidding wars and big first sales, but I think that's unusual.

@Azrael will have more insight there than me.

 

Very hard to make a living writing fiction. Especially 'literary' fiction.

For a short story, the New Yorker pays today about what it paid in 1960.

But in 1960 you could live off that check for the better part of a year. No longer.

Most of the literary writers I've known have a steady job somewhere teaching creative writing, or go from program to program, semester by semester, as a guest lecturer.

You can cobble together a livelihood in some of the genre fields - romance, mystery, etc. - if you can put out a book a year and are really good at what you do. Even then, it's dog eat dog and the advances are small. And as @typefitter points out, you have to take into account the hours and the expenses and the taxes. A $25,000 advance for a year's work by a well-established romance writer isn't much.

And advances in fiction are rare. Especially for first timers. You'll have to write the whole novel, then shop it around. For which you need an agent. And it's very hard to find an agent unless you've already published somewhere.

A handful of celebrity fiction writers exist at any given moment. They get the giant advances. George RR Martin, for example, or Stephen King. The James Patterson franchises, or Tom Clancy collaborations. In the last great age of junk fiction it was Jackie Collins or Jacqueline Susann. Those were the days when you'd read about eight-figure, 3-book deals. And all that famous money junk paid for the great little literary books winning all the awards.

Now the advance money goes out to Kathy Griffin or Amy Schumer or Sean Penn for a book, fiction or nonfiction, that may or may not sell. Publishers hope the name recognition alone earns out the contract. Mostly it doesn't.

Where the real money is now is film and television (which is sort of where it has always been) and what you're hoping for is a decent paycheck for your novel, and a jackpot auction for the movie rights.

Literary fiction has always been a low money/high prestige deal. Maybe you'll eventually win a MacArthur or a National Book Award, but until you do you'll struggle to pay the rent.

 

Be a shame to let it go to waste.

I often salvage usable parts from unfinished or unpublished work.

Try something else with some of it, just for fun!

 

If you take it up again, in any form, I'd be happy to look at it, or help however I can.

 

Have you considered self-publishing it? I know that's stigmatized, but there are plenty of success stories, too, like "The Martian."

 

Sincere indeed. Good luck with whatever it becomes.

 

I will confess that I used to be leery of anybody self-publishing. It seems like a path to real heartbreak. (I know a woman in town who self-published a novel. It is awful, and she has sold zero copies, and I fear it might kill her.) But I know of at least one non-fiction writer who self-published—against my advice, in fact—and that's the reason today he has a deal with an actual publisher. So it can work, and maybe today, with the help of the Internet, it's easier to make a go of it. But the idea of having boxes of your unsold books in a storage unit somewhere makes me gaspy as hell.

 

Not only would that be depressing, one really has to weigh the potential cost and whether one's interest in writing a book realistically translates into audience interest in reading it.
That is assuming one is realistic that one can competently write a book.

Perhaps the cost issue is allayed a bit via virtual publishing, but that again changes the audience factor.