It is to obsessed lunatics that we owe the greater part of the world’s permanent literature. For most of history authors not only didn’t make money from their work, but often risked their lives by publishing it.
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04 May 08
Call Me What You WantPersonal commentary about the challenges of writing a book and getting it published and attracting the optimum audience
book writing farming marketing childcare publishing myths communication storytelling education schools society
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Isn't it interesting how many people dream of writing a book? It's sweet, and it's (mostly) harmless, and I guess I once semi-shared that dream, and I guess one or two brain cells still make room for the possibility that I will someday write a book (fat chance). But, but, but ... Then I followed the book-publishing industry for 15 years.
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Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book.
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And I'll bet that for many of them a part of that fantasy is the making - a - living-as-a-freelancer -doing-something-interesting-rather- than-working-as-a- flunky-in-a-boring- job element. But how many people in the country actually manage to make a living writing books? A couple of hundred.
Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it.
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In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better.
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Technical pause here: there's an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between "book publishing" generally and "trade book publishing," which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing -- ie., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field -- 2/3, if I remember right -- doesn't come from "trade book" publishing. It's generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There's real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance, even if it's a very competitive industry.
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Fact #2: Most people who write "serious" trade nonfiction actually lose money on their projects.
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Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most of their authors. How so? Well, say you're lucky and your agent nails a $100,000 contract for you for a biography you're dying to write. Sounds good, huh? But run the math: First, subtract the agent's fee (10-15%), and then subtract taxes. You've got to write the book on the, say, $55,000ish that remains. Keep in mind that almost all books take longer to write and publish than expected. But, heck, you're a fast worker -- it'll only take you 3 years. That means you'll be living on $17,000 a year. And wait: you've gotta do some research -- what's a biography without research? Visiting some archives, interviewing whoever's still alive ... Guess where the money for these travels and adventures comes from? Your own pocket.
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As a consequence of these sorts of realities, most serious-nonfiction writers either hold down fulltime day jobs (healthcare!) and do their writing during the evening and on weekends (whoops, there goes the private life!), or spend a lot of the time that they'd like to spend writing chasing down grants, fellowships, and stretches at writer's colonies instead. (This bunch is usually very worried about health care. See my posting on health care and the arts here.)
Not long ago, I ran into a woman acquaintance I hadn't seen in years, during which time she'd written a first-class biography of a famous man. We bumped into each other shortly after her book had been released, and I assumed she was basking in the good reviews, and exultant about the way her publisher was promoting the book. "This must give you a great feeling, as well as a great platform into your next book, no?" I said.
She rolled her eyes and told me emphatically that she was never going to write another book. "What I'm looking for now is a nice little not-too-demanding job with an office, regular hours, a health plan, and a regular paycheck," she said.
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Fact #3: The people in trade-book publishing who make the money generally aren't the authors.
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Fact #4: Writing a book isn't fun.
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- Some hope to hit the jackpot despite the odds.
- Some have a dream about being an author, or taking part in "literature."
- Some are obsessed lunatics -- ie., they feel they just gotta.
- Some don't know better (these usually never write a second book).
- Some have other ambitions, and writing a book is a step along the way.
- A handful are determined to be trade-book authors as a career, and know what the game consists of, and have (or think they have) the tenacity, toughness, talent, luck and energy to succeed.
So why do people do write books? I come up with these possible explanations:
- Some hope to hit the jackpot despite the odds.
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All of which leads me to a Blowhardish musing. It's such a pain to write books, it's such a bother to go through the publishing process -- what kind of person is willing to put him/herself through this? Answer: a very narrow demographic -- the obsessed and the ambitious. Exceptions allowed for (hi Hugo!), this would seem to mean that most of the books we've interacted with over the years have been written by people who are nuts. Let's grant that a few of these nutcases have talent and brains -- still: funny, no?
And this is a big part of why I generally celebrate digital media -- because the new tools give people from the non-nuts range of humanity a better chance to contribute and take part in the conversation that is "culture." How many such "normal" voices have really been heard in this conversation before? But these days, if you write and publish a blog, for example, the publishing part of blogging is trivial, at least once you've set the blog up (or in the especially inept case of the Blowhards, paid a good webteam to do the hard stuff). You can say what you have to say, press a button -- and what you have to say flies right out there and becomes part of the ongoing culture-thing. Never before in the history of blah blah blah. Very cool, in any case, and I'm going to follow how this affects the tone of the culture-conversation with interest. Blogs have already had quite an impact on journalism. What kind of impact will they have on the cultural world? (Huge, I hope.)
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Over the years, a few people have asked me for advice about writing books -- fools! Still, I tell 'em what I really believe: Since you probably won't make money on your project anyway, why not do it in a way that minimizes your trouble and results in something that pleases you? How to do this? Publish your book yourself. (Self-publishing is a growing and happening thing.)
But why turn your urge to create into "writing a book" in the first place? You say you've got a story to tell? Well, why does it have to be a book? You'll burden your life with a tedious project for a couple of years, you'll probably overstretch your material, and then no one will read the results. Why not realize your project in a manageable and pleasureable way instead? Put in a month of writing, keep it to a compact length, and post it to the Web. (There really aren't many stories that need more than 50 pages.) It's certainly true that no one may pay attention to your work despite its being out there on the Web. But at least you'll have told your story, enjoyed the process, made your work available -- and you won't have ruined your life, or broken your heart.
No one listens to me, of course, and it's probably better that way. I confess that The Wife berates me (lovingly and charmingly, of course) when I go on like this. She says I'm being a killjoy. Lots of people dream of writing books. What a harmless dream -- why kill it? And she's certainly got a point. I, on the other hand, feel that my point isn't to crush anyone's dreams. Why not make this basic information available? But maybe The Wife is right. It's certainly true that, after 15 years of following the book publishing world, I do sometimes wish people would be a bit more realistic in their thinking and talking about books. But is that an awful wish? Where books and publishing are concerned, maybe it is, I don't really know for sure.
Best,
Michael
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Add Sticky NoteUPDATE: Please be sure to read the comments thread on this posting, which is full of lively thinking and reacting. Aaron Haspel adds a lot to the conversation in his new posting on the subject here.
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The activities of [artistic geniuses] cannot be fully subsumed under the praxeological concept of labor. They are not labor because they are for the genius not means, but ends in themselves. He lives in creating and inventing. For him there is not leisure, only intermissions of temporary sterility and frustration. His incentive is not the desire to bring about a result, but the act of producing it. The accomplishment gratifies him neither mediately nor immediately. It does not gratify him mediately because his fellow men at best are unconcerned about it, more often even greet it with taunts, sneers, and persecution. Many a genius could have used his gifts to render his life agreeable and joyful; he did not even consider such a possibility and chose the thorny path without hesitation…
Neither does the genius derive immediate gratification from his creative activities. Creating is for him agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him…
The creative accomplishment of the genius is an ultimate fact of praxeology. It comes to pass in history as a free gift of destiny. It is by no means the result of production in the sense in which economics uses this term. - 4 more sticky notes...
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The productivity of labor has become so high in this country that most anyone who has bothered to acquire some marketable skills and is not grimly devoted to his job is awash in leisure. Trollope, who produced 40-odd novels by arising at 4 AM daily and writing for two hours before his day job at the post office, would envy us. The Marxist fantasy of a people milking cows in the morning and practicing drama criticism at night has nearly come to pass, though not in the way that Marx intended. You want to make money and write in your spare time, be my guest. You want to make money writing, write romance novels or technical texts. You want to make money writing serious books about your cherished passions, go whine to someone else.
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Hmm. So, according to Ludwig von Mises, if I enjoy writing and it comes fairly easily, I must not be a genius. Gosh, and there I was, beginning to wonder.
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Will: I think what von Mises was getting at is that real artistic geniuses are always unsatisfied, though they may be fluent. That’s where the agony comes in. Writing is hell for me, and I’m no genius either.
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One should never write a book with the goal in mind of writing a book.
The book is only a means to communicate heart-felt ideas. If you don’t really care about the ideas, hey! go ski and/or play golf.
I speak from experience. I wrote a book; I didn’t really want to. But I didn’t think anyone else would do it. So I had to.
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There are enough books in the world. You want to write the ones that are good. The minute you write books because you need the income not because you think you have a good subject you should just stop. There are 60000 books published in this country every year and most of them are crap. You are making someone make a serious commitment, not the money but the time, to sit down with a book and enter this world. You want it to be good. You want the book to be special and they are not always going to be special but at least you want that to be the ambition.
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In my own (ex-)line of business, I see some parallels. Professional (performing) classical music offers a reasonable living to a small number of people in the world. In order to get good enough, and compete with the small handful of world-class players, a musician will have to spend many thousands, often hundreds of thousands of dollars achieving that goal. A starting spot in a major orchestra, is currently about $60,000 a year. Starting spots in the average minor orchestra is about $15,000 - $20,000 a year. Professional grade (string) instruments start at about $15,000. The instruments are merely the competitive edge. First class players have probably been paying for instruction and instruments (some of them) since they were five or six. Most practice (without pay) for many hours a day. Conservatories in the US turn out some 10,000 to 20,000 excellent players a year. There are 6 top grade symphonies in the country (in the SF Symphony class). Each orchestra has some 100+ players, who will probably remain with the orchestra for at least a couple of decades. What sort of person goes into the professional classical music performance industry, expecting to make a reasonable living? Sounds like the same sort of person that sets out to make a living as an author... Of course, unlike authors, it is very hard to convince an orchestra to hire you, if you are an untalented player.
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Hey Alexis, You' ve got good instincts, and The Wife would agree with you about the "relish" thing, although I remain convinced (deludedly, apparently) that I'm just performing a public service. But glad to see you doubting my motives ....
Anyway, the "couple of hundred" figure was given to me by the guy who runs one of the big authors' organizations, so the figure's trustworthy even if I'm not. I can't imagine anymore more quaified to make a decent guesstimate than he.
I said to the guy, How many people in this country make a living from writing books? He said, Do you want to include all kinds of books? I said, No, just bookstore-type books. No textbooks, and let's not include people who write computer-instruction books. And he said, Oh, in the low couple of hundreds.
So yeah, the figure would include sci-fi writers, mystery authors, self-help authors, literary people, etc. The authors of all the stuff at the local Barnes & Noble, minus the computer section.
As I say, one of the surprises of the field is how many even very big names can't and don't get by on what they make from their books.
Can anyone think of a similar industry -- where the people who produce the product don't generally make a living doing so? I can't, but maybe I'm overlooking something obvious...
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Actually, I can think of one right off the bat.
Child care workers. I know this because I am currently doing a child care survey analysis on wages and benefits in Dane County, WI. The average salary for an inhome child care worker is roughly 15k--that's gross. She will work 13-15 hours a day, have no benefits (healthcare!), and getno paid vacations. And the corker is that it doesnt matter if you have a Masters in Early chidhood or are Mrs Joeblow off the street with only a high school education. Workers who care for kids in centers have it only marginally better--they may get paid holidays. Still no healthcare etc. And unlike authors or musicians, these are the folks who are taking care of the majority of the children in this country. -
Another industry: acting.
Only about 1 in 20 professional actors support themselves entirely by acting. This at first occasions rather sad but heartfelt discussions as people struggle to make sense of the idea that they are "really" actors even if they can't support themselves acting.
I wonder if Wallace Stevens worried that he wasn't "really" a poet since he made no money at it.
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Over the years, I've hung out in the furthermost reaches of publishing and talked now and then with writers who are rather more in the thick of things. So I've wanted to comment knowledgeably on Michael Blowhard's initial posting, and even made a couple of attempts that I ended up deleting. I think MB said it all pretty well the first time. Even so...maybe I can add a few odds and ends after all...
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Felicity said something above that may have put a finger on a major factor. That people read at all any more. It seems as though more people want to write a book than actually read books. The perception endures of the successful writer as the wealthy fellow who stays at home all day and makes lots of money by sharing his imagination with his legions of adoring fans. The fans are actually watching TV and the writer is in competition for a share of the declining audience that still reads for pleasure with a lot of other would-be writers who want in on this sweet deal, too. Did something like this happen to poetry, another field where there seem to be more people who want to write it than to read it?
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At least in the science-fiction field, the theory used to be that success was cumulative. You'd write part-time in addition to your day job for some years, building up a following of loyal readers as well as a backlog of novels in print. Eventually, the continuing royalties from your previously published novels added to increasing advances for your latest works would add up to enough of a steady income that you could quit the day job and write full time. As I understand it, there have been changes in how publishers do business that have undermined this model for all but the most successful writers: books aren't kept in print as long, books aren't allowed to sit on booksellers' shelves as long, and as a result there's been a virtual elimination of what used to be called the "mid-list" -- the slow but steady selling titles that were an author's bread and butter. It seems to be getting more to the point of "Best-Seller or Die" for any given book. A working writer could probably explain all this better than I can.
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Are there other industries that have a ratio of paid creators to paid sellers comparable to book publishing? Yes, several that I have worked in:
Game design - Thousands of designers, perhaps as many as a few dozen who make a living (this neglects role-playing game designers, of which more later.) There are thousands of stores in the US alone that sell games, each of which has at least a few employees. There are more hundreds of people employed in printing, assembling, and distributing games. As for the designers, a distributor of my acquaintance used to tell prospective game designers: "Take $50,000 in cash and put it in a suitcase. Go to the middle of the highest bridge you can find and throw that suitcase as hard as you can. At the end of this process, you will not be worse off financially, you won't have a garage full of unsalable games, you won't have suffered the pains of trying to sell your game, and you'll be done years earlier."
Role-playing game design - Again, a few dozen people making a living, hundreds of others spending nights and weekends (or retirement funds) trying to make a living. Very similar to book publishing in the amount of hard work required, but there are many more self-published authors.
Hobby accessories - Whether model railroad scenery, after-market RC car pieces, or doll-house furniture, this is another garage industry (or set of industries).
The unifying theme seems to be that the people doing this are trying to find a way to have their fun and eat it too. 8-)
From an economic point of view, I'd guess that the combination of expected monetary reward (in the long term) plus the nonmonetary reward of working with your hobby (more illusory than real) result in people entering these industries with wildly inflated opinions of their own prospective success.
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There is so much to read and to look at online, it's like being in a vast storehouse full of treasures - literally acres and acres full of gold, jewels, and valuable artifacts - and you can only take as much as you can carry in your hands. You don't know what to choose so you just keep looking, briefly examining and laying aside one piece of treasure and then the next and the next and the next. The Internet is like that for me. I find many sites where I want to spend more time reading but instead I just keep on surfing and finding other interesting sites. I always plan to come back to them... "later." ...
I might actually be reading more now; it's only the routine that has changed. Maybe the availability of so much reading matter makes it seem like I'm not reading as much as I should. It has never occurred to me that I should try to read every book and magazine in the public library, but for some reason with the world's biggest library right here in the corner of my dining room I feel guilty about passing over anything I'm the least bit interested in. I feel I have to read it all.
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One alternative to job versus starvation may be to live somewhere off the beaten track that is very cheap. I have lived for 22 years in a small New Mexico village 75 miles by air from the nearest city, and in a determinedly un-chic part of the state.
I live in a 100 year old stone house with 4 main rooms ( a nice piece of "Alexandrian" vernacular architecture) that cost me less than a cheap new car does today. My newest car is 13. My wife currently works part- time in the local post office. At times she has worked full- time, and often had no job at all. Our main expenses are books and travel.And travel itself can help pay the bills. We have in the last decade spent time in London, France, Zimbabwe, traveled twice to Mongolia, and are heading for Kazakhstan in the fall. All trips were at least work-related, and the last 3 paid for up front. What other life would give me freedom to do what I like and write about it? A job that paid for a month here and there would take all my time...expensive!
Isolation was more of a problem 20 years ago. Now, with blogs, e-mail, and internet it's not even a factor. I "talk" every week with people in England, New York, Latvia, Finland, Russian, Kazakhstan and more. There is more info a click away than you could have had in, say, Victorian London.
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I would agree with the "50 page" theory. I never read books because I don't think there are many subjects out there that deserve book treatment, and I don't have time for somebody to cover their ass and stuff all the facts in a book. I always skim what I read anyway, so why not just chop it down and turn it into a little pamphlet or magazine article?
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By the way, another real economic setback as well as a lot of work in the off hours (goodbye, private life) is having children. If you're into watching TV and saving cash, don't write a novel and don't have kids. Man, the kids really get ya.
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Unfortunately, there are vast numbers of individuals who believe that taxes and the huge government that results from it are good for us. How many authors would be able to suppport themselves if they didn't have to support millions of nonproductive government workers at the same time? How many government workers read? How many of them are so bored with their jobs at the IRS or the CIA that they're writing a novel in the hopes of escaping from their boredom? How many of the government thrillers are competing with other "art" to be published? Think of all the tax accountants and attorneys who make their living by pushing tax-related papers, who never produce any books, cars, houses or products that add any enjoyment to life?
The huge cut that the government sucks out of the markeplace at every level, the author's advance, the agent's salary, the bookstore's income, is money that creative people can no longer use to support creativity. It's time they don't have to write and it's money that they no longer have to buy the books that add value and enjoyment to their lives.
Yes, the money ends up in the hands of others and they will spend it. But what will the recipients of those tax dollars spend it on? Baseball? A wide-screen TV for watching football games? Will they spend it on great stories about the nature of existence and survival when their own survival is guaranteed by the money they can take at the point of a gun from those who produce and sell art?
Nobel Prize-winning ecomonist Milton Friedman noted in FREE TO CHOOSE that taxes distort markets. Once taxed, it is impossible to determine what real value is anymore because the price of something (the price paid to an author for his work or a bookstore for a book) is no longer an accurate measure of its real value to individual consumers. Markets become glutted with useless trash and real value falls by the wayside. Sounds like the book market that you described!
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Leave the lunatics alone...we need writers. Moby Dick sold only 3000 copies in the USA, and the critics were scornful of it. Jack Kerouac was rejected by every publisher on the east coast when he wrote On The Road...it took five years to find a publisher, and he was forced to make humiliating changes to it.(the ms has recently sold for two million.)But boy am I glad those guys stuck to their writing.
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I would also like to note, the low rate of pay for both writers and childcare workers is based on the notion that people think these are easy, low-skill jobs.
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Responding to the point way above about childcare:
When I lived in San Francisco, it seemed as if every waiter and half the carpenters were 'really' artists of some kind - painters, actors, writers - or on a spiritual quest of some sort.I was a carpenter/writer, and when our son was born we found a pregnant artist who wanted to run a small daycare to pay her way. Not being the kind to do things by halves, Sterret Smith had got a degree in child-something-or-other, and instead of actually living off her daycare income, it seemed as if she plowed it all back into toys and improvements (I built her a child-sized play loft, thus circulating our dollars nicely). I loved her paintings but was much more impressed by her childcare. She was truly a master in the art of starting children off in their lives. These kids had their imaginations stimulated every day, and learned how to resolve disputes without an adult's intervention (or with a minimal one) to a degree that still shows in my son's mid-teen years.
I began to wonder why there were so many young people waitressing or hammering so they could occasionally act or write, but few if any doing the same so they could be daycare providers. The latter seemed much more worth doing, or at least as worth doing, but we had all somehow absorbed the notion that it is an unromantic boring slog. For me, it probably would be, just as for some writing is pain and agony (whereas I have had months of ecstasy at the best points in novel writing) but for Sterrett it wasn't. Of course, she had endless dirty diapers, and the money wasn't good, and she depended to some extent I suppose on her husband, except that he was a freelance writer himself...
I wish childcare could be seen as more of an exciting area to work, money or not. Maybe there could be some way of starting an upward creativity spiral inb the field... Or maybe Sterrett should write a book about it... and suffer further penury.
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Every once in a while I get an e-mail from some person who has read a poem or work of fiction of mine, written maybe 30 or so years ago, telling me my words have touched them and moved them enough to contact me. Nothing can replace the feeling that comes from receiving that message. The magic of the well written word cannot be denied.
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You said "Hey, my English profs didn't tell me about this!". Right on! There is a lot more they didn't tell you..
LIKE -- universities are totally geared and set-up to make money and are businesses,not benevolent institutions designed to see you succeed.
LIKE -- when you decide to become a writer (or English student)make sure you do not ignore the fact there is competition in every field and though it seems unfair, others will succeed,
and no matter how much you love it,
you can fail consistently.LIKE -- those who do succeed were destined to succeed through
their "success gene", that little sting of DNA that makes them blind to failure and are driven to success like a moth to a campsite lantern, even if they
studied plumbing they would end up owning a string of shops.LIKE -- higher education is a brainwashing and re-programming process designed to produce worker-bees on various levels, it is NOT a process designed to make you rich or successful, the sooner you realize this, the more successful you become, they are there to sell seats.
LIKE -- people don't buy creative writing to entertain someone else's ego, they buy creative writing to be entertained.
The list goes on what universities don't tell their students. What they DO is sell dreams and a "product" which is a program designed to align your thinking with an agenda. What YOU have to do is figure out what that agenda is. Once you have done that you will have as much money as you can possibly stand. -
Popular Rock and Pop bands don't make millions and zillions of dollars producing beautiful tracks of symphonic
masterpieces, they were intelligent business people who sell well produced songs about the money making themes like SEX, DRUGS, MURDER, WAR all of which the Beatles were a prime example of in the new commercialization of popular culture.Most of outrageously successful and popular rapper groups have management who know it is not a matter of selling a new rhythm thousands of times for a large price, it is a matter of selling
an old rhythm millions and millions of times for a small price.The frustration that you are feeling, the melancholy emotions, come with the sad realization people don't want to pay you for what is GOOD and what YOU want to believe in. But they will pay you for what they have been programmed to believe in.
A few tricks are writing new twists and imaginative new versions on; the masses are entertained by raunchy murder themes, they are entertained by raunchy horror themes, they are entertained by raunchy sex scenes, they are entertained by raunchy drug themes, they are entertained by raunchy sad sad scenes.
I can understand your frustration with writing for a planet of people who are
destined for failure by their core obsession with other peoples misfortunes
and their lust for sex, drugs and violence. But that is all that entertains them now that the "shock value" bar has been raised so high. -
Sure its a sad commentary on the state of our civilization but you brought up the subject of how (or how not) to succeed in book publishing. Simple, write for self-destructing audience. Just how sick is our world? With 80 million copies sold, 65 titles and 37 languages, Chicken Soup for the Soul� made international publishing history.They were rejected by 140 publishers.
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I will say that I detest the traditional publishers. They lie. They cheat. They never tell you how many books are out there, not to say, it's some big KGB secret re: how many really sold. They do deals with other big pubs, and get behind mediocre books due to big names, or friendships. All the chains get paid to show certain books up front in the stores. It's all a big money raquet, in which we lowly writers rarely get to partake. So, question:
Is there something in between traditional publishing and blogging/ self-publishing. ONe hopes yes. This one doesn't have a clue. Best, Louise
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I think a thread that ties the books, movies, TV, and music industries together (and these are the most frequently cited ones in our postings above). They're all big money entertainment industries, geared toward creating bland, middle-of-the-road stuff that everyone will buy. It's largely because of the consolidation of media ownership, and the high stakes of the industries, that this is happening. If it wasn't the case that a huge proportion of books were sold in chain stores, which do big-money deals with the publishers, for example, there'd be a greater variety of books.
As Michael said, it's the proliferation of middlemen (agent, publisher, layout/designer, editor, bookstore owner) all of whom DO make a living that sucks up the money.
Another thing that has cracked me up about practically all the books I've worked on is the way the actual writing is viewed as a small detail by the middlemen. I'm in music journalism, and often write entries in music guides. many of them are good books and pay decently, but their approach has always amused me. They have a concept, it's sold, it's put into production, it's designed in many cases, and then they call me (along with twenty other writers) and say "we need 20,000 words in three weeks." If they don't get it in three weeks, the production schedule is thrown off! Im currently writing an encyclopedia, and it's the same thing; the publisher, a well-respected textbook press, had the whole thing put into production before word one was written. Now I have to compromise quality to get it done on time!
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And a quick note of appreciation to those who say, Yeah, but writing books isn't the only way to get by from writing: Well, of course you're right, and many thanks for reminding us, and for giving examples of such. I will point out, though, that this posting wasn't intended as a comprehensive survey of how people get by from writing.
It wasn't intended as a pro-books-writing or anti-books-writing piece of cheerleading either. People can and will write books no matter what my opinion is, which is as it should be. Instead, I simply wanted to confront people's fantasies about writing books for a living with a few of the actual facts of the field. People who fantasize about writing books for a living aren't daydreaming about scraping by on reprint rights, stays at writers colonies, writing freelance travel articles, chasing down fellowships and teaching gigs, and pulling together encyclopedia entries on ridiculous schedules, which is what the professional book-writer's life often consists of. They're daydreaming instead about getting paid a decent living for writing the books they'd love to write. And the general books press isn't letting them know what the field really consists of. Hence this blog posting.
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I see a lot of comments by writers--published, unpublished, manque, parkay. What I don't see are comments by writers and publishers saying, "You damn fools! Send me your stuff. I'll take an honest, fair look at it. If within three pages I can tell it sucks, I will send you a letter saying it sucks. If it's as good as you say it is I will try to get it published." Don't agents and publishers troll the Internet and the blogs hunting for innovation and talent?
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One profession which, I believe, is even more poorly treated than that of the novelist is the screenwriter. Because they are so expensive to produce, the ratio of written screenplays to produced films is even lower than that of written to published novels. The cost also makes it prohibitive for most people to produce their own. Despite this, everybody thinks screenwriting is easy and thousands upon thousands of screenplays get written that will never see the light of day. Furthermore, although well paid by many standards, screenwriters are poorly paid by film standards, with a small handful of writers making anything near what a mid-level actor or director can expect to make. But, the killer for me is that writers have no respect in Hollywood, where they can slave on a project for years only to have it be taken away from them and given to somebody else. (I have never heard of this happening to a novelist!)
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It took me 8 years to write my first novel, (a piece of crap), 3 years for my second (moderately awful, on the same level as Clancy and his ilk - you know, cardboard characters and boring plot), and two years for my third (which, read the reviews, really is damn fine).
And when I got the third one published, I discovered that if you're not published by one of the 'BIG 6' publishers, *nobody will review your novel*!
It's as if there's some kind of conspiracy going on. And if nobody reviews it, no bookstores will stock it. And it certainly won't appear in any chains, like hotels, airports and so on, because ALL those outlets buy only pulp paperbacks from the New York Times (yech) 'best seller' list - and all those are chosen arbitrarily from the BIG 6 publishers.
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Out of date farming methods are contributing to the erosion of the top soil. The solution, no till farming, currently is not being embraced due to the cost of re-equipping farms. The longer the nations of the world keep from practicing no till farming, the greater amount of the worlds farming top soil will be eroded, leaving less farmable land over time.
Further complicating matters, this huge world population is tearing through the rainforests of the world recklessly. The world is currently experiencing a mass extinction rate comparable to the fabled asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. The casualties of our resource use and pollution policies are not limited to the land, but the world�s oceans as well. Though there are people who are working to save the environment, the combined effects seem only to slightly slow the inevitable. With the onset of the pacific region reaching new levels of industrialization, unchecked pollution emissions are contributing to global warming. Complicate this further with a thinning ozone layer and years of past industrial pollution and we have our current state of environmental problems.
The 6 billion people or more who walk the earth contribute to the potential of a highly communicable disease spreading through out the world. Modern travel by airplane now makes it possible for a particularly nasty airborne germ to make its way around the world in three days. Many people, even in the most industrialized and modern of countries, can�t afford medical care. However, tens of billions of dollars are spent every year for entertainment. Among the highest paid are the few artists, directors, actors, authors, and professional sports people. The point has been made that we pay the people who take care of our children, our future, maybe 15K a year for a 13 to 15 hour day. However we will pay entertainers tens of millions.
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Public Stiky Notes
The book is only a means to communicate heart-felt ideas. If you don’t really care about the ideas, hey! go ski and/or play golf.
I speak from experience. I wrote a book; I didn’t really want to. But I didn’t think anyone else would do it. So I had to.
Neither does the genius derive immediate gratification from his creative activities. Creating is for him agony and torment, a ceaseless excruciating struggle against internal and external obstacles; it consumes and crushes him…
The creative accomplishment of the genius is an ultimate fact of praxeology. It comes to pass in history as a free gift of destiny. It is by no means the result of production in the sense in which economics uses this term.
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