I have a terrible confession to make

[Dick Whitman]

Well that certainly fits perfectly with the thread title.

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

 

[typefitter]

Great insight. The sizes of your advances are a little larger than I would have thought. I got $50K and thought I was rolling in it. At the time, I had never made $40K in a year. And I was a columnist.)

I'm tapping away on a phone right now so my patience to post is limited. But for now I will add that I agree with you on: (1) An agent. Best 15 percent you'll ever spend; (2) A proposal. Mine was 50-60 pages, I think, and included a chapter-by-chapter summary. I doubt I stuck to it, but it showed I had skin in the game already, a plan; (3) I wish I had treated it more like my only job. It wasn't my nature at the time. If I'm not doing 10 things at once, I feel like a slacker. Silly. I'm not that way now.

I never got to see if it would help my career, because by the time it was published, I was well along onto another career path.

$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.

 

[Azrael]

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.

 

[The Big Ragu]

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

My experience. ... I ghost wrote and co-wrote a couple of non-fiction books a long time ago. It was NOT big money.

I also wrote a novel -- I wrote it in bits and pieces over several decades and polished it into what I thought was a pretty decent turd. I actually found an agent to work with me -- one who is successful and represents some successful authors. He shopped my novel, we came really close to selling it several times, actually thought we had a deal with a big publisher. ... and they backed away (at a time that publishing was slowing down) for reasons I am still not entirely clear about. Then, the longer it sat, the more stale it became and my agent didn't really have any incentive to devote a lot of time to it. It's still unpublished, but for the amount of money I was looking at at a certain point, I made the decision to devote my time and energy to other things that were exciting me. I've so moved on from the idea. The "low money/high prestige deal" you mentioned would have felt rewarding to me 15 years ago. Even 10 years ago. Today, it's not as important to me.

 

[Azrael]

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!

 

[The Big Ragu]

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!

I know. And honestly, in the right hands it would make an even better screenplay than it made a novel (and I got encouragement to try to do it, but have never devoted any time to it). ...

I believe some people have a writing gene. It drives them. I like writing, a ttimes. ... but I don't need writing. I also know I am better at some things that I am at writing. Even as a writer, when I have earned money doing it. ... well, I am a heck of a reporter.

I used to characterize myself in terms of a lack of focus. That isn't true now, but was when I was younger. I had several goals in life. One was to not get a traditional job, and to this day when I have done consulting work that has forced me to be in an office on someone else's hours, I bristle at it. The other was to be able to bounce around doing lots of different things -- I have made money doing some very disparate things, and at various times, I LOVED the heck out of each of them. The big change was that at a certain point I decided I just wanted to earn money more than anything -- as much as possible over as short a period of time so I can retire relatively young, split time between the U.S. and France. ... and then only do things I want to do. And there were things I was pretty good at that gave me the prospects to do that. As a result, I have a novel nobody bought sitting on a drive in a drawer. Maybe I will get a bug agai nfor it at some point. It wouldn't be out of character for me.

 

[Azrael]

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

 

[Dick Whitman]

My experience. ... I ghost wrote and co-wrote a couple of non-fiction books a long time ago. It was NOT big money.

I also wrote a novel -- I wrote it in bits and pieces over several decades and polished it into what I thought was a pretty decent turd. I actually found an agent to work with me -- one who is successful and represents some successful authors. He shopped my novel, we came really close to selling it several times, actually thought we had a deal with a big publisher. ... and they backed away (at a time that publishing was slowing down) for reasons I am still not entirely clear about. Then, the longer it sat, the more stale it became and my agent didn't really have any incentive to devote a lot of time to it. It's still unpublished, but for the amount of money I was looking at at a certain point, I made the decision to devote my time and energy to other things that were exciting me. I've so moved on from the idea. The "low money/high prestige deal" you mentioned would have felt rewarding to me 15 years ago. Even 10 years ago. Today, it's not as important to me.

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

 

[The Big Ragu]

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

Thank you for this. I can tell it's sincere, and my guess is tha twhatever you are offering is of benefit. Maybe I'll take you up on it at some point.

 

[Azrael]

Sincere indeed. Good luck with whatever it becomes.

 

[typefitter]

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

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 heck.

 

[Buck]

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.