You are a purchasing agent for a large corporation or a secretary or a mid-level manager, or you are a waiter, a teacher, a used car salesperson. You took the job twelve years ago or fifteen years ago or twenty years ago, just out of college where you earned a degree in English or history or accounting or teaching. But what you really want to be, what you've always wanted to be, is a writer.
You wrote the first few chapters of your novel on your lunch hour but soon had to start getting up early to write and spend evenings and weekends at the computer. You realized early on that it's not quite as easy to write a novel as you thought it would be. You took some writing classes and joined a writing group. You wrote some short stories and even got a couple published and won a fairly prestigious literary prize. You gave up on the novel you were writing to write what you were told would sell, genre fiction, a murder mystery that transcends it's genre. It took you seven years to write it but when it was done it was really quite good. You had a few friends read it and they loved it. You even had a critique done for which you spend a big chunk of money and followed most of the editor's suggestions.
You sent out queries to a number of agents and publishers and got no response or a form rejection--unbelievable after how hard you've worked. You sent out more queries and tried a number of regional small presses. You got a new, small publishing company to pick up the book, no advance, no book tour and you have to pay for review copies but you are getting twelve percent royalties and are assured that the distributor is one of the best in the industry, whatever that means.
The publisher says the distributor will peddle your book to book stores and of course your book will be available on Amazon.com and through Barnesandnoble.com. No book tour is fine with you because you really don't want to have to speak in front of large groups of people. You might have to go to a couple of conferences to sit at the publisher's table with your book. That's fine so long as you don't have to travel too far and stay overnight anywhere because the publisher won't pay for it--aren't they supposed to cover travel expenses?
Okay, the book is being published. The initial print run is five thousand copies. You are calculating your royalties and it seems pretty good. The publisher will send pre-publication review copies to pre-review companies to get quotes to put on the jacket and in the distributor's catalog, so a second printing will be a sure thing, right? You'll be able to quit your day job and live off the royalties with maybe a part-time job on the side until your next book comes out after which its easy street, you can devote all your time to writing. Or maybe you can move to someplace like the Philippines where life is easy and cheap and you can spend all your time writing the next book.
Suddenly your publisher wants revisions. Lots of revisions. But you were done with this manuscript. You have started the next one. You don't have time to spend going over the manuscript another time. But you do it and send back the revisions. Another round of revisions and a bit of a nasty rejoinder from the editor when you complain. You consider scrapping the deal but the book will be out any day, right? But months pass before you get the galleys and now they expect you to go over the galleys to be sure there are no errors—isn't that their job? Then the review copies go out and you are told the book will be in the distributor's fall catalog eight months from now. Eight months! How can it take eight more months? Then production is pushed back six month but the publisher won't tell you why. The book will come out spring of the following year. By then almost two years will have passed since you signed on with the publisher. You are still working as a purchasing agent for the large corporation. Progress on the second book is slow and you wonder why you even bother.
Then the book comes out. You get a couple good reviews in the local paper, your friend at the library says the reserve list for your book is through the roof and the library system is buying twenty-five more copies. You watch the numbers on Amazon.com jump around. You're anxiously awaiting your first royalty check and the announcement that they will be doing a second run of ten thousand this time. But the royalty check, when it comes months later, is seven hundred dollars and you are at over a million and half in Amazon's ranking down from three hundred and seventy-five thousand and you realize you don't really know what these numbers mean. There are no more reviews because the book has been out for six months and it is old news. The publisher hasn't even asked you to sit at their table at another conference after the first one when you complained that you had to drive five hours to get there and the motel was going to cost sixty-five dollars, and you declined a book tour at five independent books stores in New York and New England arranged by the distributor—your book is set in Connecticut--because you already said you didn't want to do a book tour and the publisher wasn't going to pay expenses.
So now what?
Now you readjust your expectations and take a look at why you are writing. If you are writing to make it big, unless you are brilliant, you might be better off buying lottery tickets—Oprah no longer champions undiscovered, living writers the way she once did. If you are writing to make a living that will allow you to keep writing, you will probably have to live modestly and work a part-time job with benefits if you can find it until you have at least four or five books out and have developed a readership. Or you could become a career writer.
I wrote about the writing life in my last post. Anonymous, a career writer, commented that he/she made a living writing magazine pieces, articles for newspapers, advertising copy, pieces for medical journals and has worked as an editor and copywriter. One can also become a technical writer writing manuals and instruction booklets or maybe even ghost write for other writers. One can also teach writing classes or become a consultant or develop a blog with a readership and host advertising to bring in some revenue. There are lots of ways to make a living writing if what you want to do is write. It is a lot of hard work and constant hustle at least early on if you work freelance. For those who don't enjoy this kind of writing and want to write fiction or “creative” non-fiction, writing as a job may leave the reservoir dry.
Many people who have started their own businesses—even the ones who are successful--report that if they'd known what they were getting into, they never would have done it. I am in touch with many fiction writers who are very upset to be disillusioned by the whole process. They don't actually come out and say that they never would have started writing had they known how difficult it is to earn a living as a novelist but the frustration level speaks volumes. Somehow they got the idea that it should be easier, that if they found someone willing to publish their novel, the rest would fall into place. But writing the novel is the easy part, the hard work comes once you have that contract signed. Much of the work for making a success of a first book falls to the author. That's the simple reality—publishing is not for the squeamish.
Sept 1 - Oct 1 2008 deadline: Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Submission Guidelines: A $12,000 advance and publication by Graywolf in 2010 will be awarded to the best previously unpublished, full-length work of literary nonfiction by a writer not yet established in the genre. Robert Polito will serve as the judge.
Graywolf Press's prose guidelines can be found at Prose Submission Guidelines.
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