I really admired the comments about advances (but I guess the story "My agent made a big mistake" doesn't win out over "Midlist publishing is a tragedy!"). I'd have to say that what seems to be the underlying theme of the article -- and why so many of the responses I've seen are dismissive -- is that she seems to expect writing to give her a stable, guaranteed, protected income. Like....a job. As a would-be writer raised by a pianist and a freelance newswriter, I grew up with You Don't Do It For The Money dinned into my ears. The gig you thought was a sure thing for next month falls apart next week. The boss who loved you Monday is fired Friday. The agent who loved your book won't return your phone calls. It happens. Not that it's impossible to make a living as an artist -- far from it, if you're willing to do things like play in a piano bar, which my mother, a Julliard-trained pianist, did -- but it is not stable. And if any artistic family member or friend had ever come into $150K, they'd have realized within a New York second what a windfall it was and squirreled it away accordingly.
But it goes beyond that -- she seems to be saying that if it can't all be like it was with her first book, when she got $150,000 -- she doesn't want to play at all. Without a writer's foolish fantasies -- envisioning Book 5 piled in stacks of 50 in every airport bookstore, its carefully chosen title appearing on the Times bestseller list, my agent calling with breathtakingly, indisputably, non-euphemistically good news -- how can I face the otherwise overwhelming prospect of a book waiting to be written? Say what? Sure, every writer I've known dreams of bestsellerdom -- including me -- being invited on a network morning show, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, suddenly no longer having to worry about juggling the damned bills. But if you sit down to write expecting that to be the only reason you're writing? Madness.
Besides all that, the article seemed riddled with stuff that was just plain, well, wrong, like -- follow up a flop of a first novel with a collection? Not take on some kind of regular column or freelance work to support novel-writing? Or this, the worst klunker in the piece --
By the end of this story I will have broken the most sacred rules of modern authordom. I'll tell you how much my publishers have paid me for the books I've written. I'll tell you how many copies each of those books has sold.
((rolls eyes so far back into head they stick there, and require medical manipulation to work again))
moi
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 2 |
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