A Writer's Tale (21 page)

How far can you stretch $2,000 or even $5,000?

Of course, your advance
might
be higher. Sometimes, a writer really gets lucky comes up with the right book at the right time and gets it to the right editor and your advance might be astronomical. If that happens, you’re in a different realm. You can probably do without most of my advice. Enjoy!

The fact is, however, a first novel makes an author rich so rarely that you don’t really need to bother your head about it.

Let’s talk about more likely sceneries.

Your first novel is bought for $5,000 or less. About a year later, it is published. Suppose it does
really
well? That can happen. It happened to me with
The Cellar.

Your initial $5,000 is an advance against royalties. You might be entitled to 8% of the book’s cover price, meaning you get eight cents for each dollar. If the eight cents add up to more than $5,000, you have earned back your advance and you will be owed additional money.

Say your book sold so many copies that you earn $80,000 over your advance. The publisher has to send you $80,000! You’re in the chips! Your ship has come in!

Now,
at last, you can quit your job!

Well, maybe not.

There are things called “accounting periods” and “monies being held back against future returns.”

The first accounting period generally ends about six months after a book’s publication date. About two months after the end of the accounting period, your agent should be sent a royalty check. That is at least
eight months
after the book was published but frequently longer.

But will you get $80,000? You wish.

You’ll get more like $34,000.

$40,000 minus $6,000 for your agent ($4,000 if you’re lucky enough to have an agent that only takes 10%).

The missing $40,000 of the $80,000 you think you’re owed is being “held against returns.”

In truth, it is being held so that the publisher can keep it longer. They use your money for other purposes, such as paying salaries, printing costs, advances to other authors, whatever.

Unless maybe they’re just going for the interest on it.

Okay, so you ended up with $36,000 instead of $80,000.

No big deal, right? You’ll get the rest next time.

Wrong.

Six months later, you should receive your second royalty statement for the book. But it won’t be for the $36,000 you probably expected. It’ll be in the amount of $17,000.

($20,000 minus your agent’s fee.) Six months after that, you’ll get $7,225. Six months later, it’ll be half that amount. Six months later… Each payment will be half as much as the previous one until the amount has been whittled down to nothing. Eventually, you do get your full $80,000. It takes five or six years, though.

If that shocks you, it should.

Somebody is getting screwed, and it is the author.

However, you should consider yourself very fortunate if you have earned out your advance. It is a sign that your book did better than the publisher expected, and that they didn’t pay you a high enough advance in the first place.

Many writers never see a royalty check.

Let’s get back to advances something writers
do
see if they sell a book.

If your first novel does reasonably well (but is no blockbuster), you might be offered the same amount for your second book. Or maybe a couple of thousand more. (Or they might dump you. Who knows?)

After a few novels that have all sold reasonably well, you might be able to get your advance up to $10,000 or $15,000.

Which isn’t too bad. You’re fairly successful if they offer you that much.

But they probably won’t buy another book from you for a while because, all other factors aside (such as rejections), most publishers don’t want to publish more than one book per year by any author.

So, can you live on $15,000 per year?

Let’s take it to the next step. If you’re
very
successful (but still not a bestseller), you might be offered an advance of $50,000 or even a little more. And maybe you get a contract for two or three books at that amount. Now we’re talking real money.

Say it’s a three-book contract for $150,000. Sounds great. And it
isn’t
bad.

The contract, of course, will divide up your payment like a pie being fed to the 101st Airborne. You’ll get a good chunk of on-sign money. (Which will lead to
owing
a big chunk to your friends at the IRS you need to pay quarterly estimated income taxes, you know. After the on-sign money, your payments will be divvied out in much smaller portions. You’ll get a payment on acceptance of each book, and on publication of each.

Already, we’re talking about a sevenway split. If your contract includes both hardback and paperback publication, the money will arrive on ten different occasions. (These matters vary a lot, depending on many factors.)

If all goes well, you’ll receive most of your $150,000 over a period of three years. This would give you an income of approximately $50,000 per year.

But something might go wrong. Maybe the publisher doesn’t
accept
your second book, or your third. Maybe your first book doesn’t sell as well as they’d hoped, so they look for ways to get our of the contract.

A lot can go wrong, and usually does.

Many U.S. publishers don’t exactly keep their promises… or their contracts.

Even if you’re lucky enough to get the entire $150,000, it doesn’t seem like quite so much money after it has been spread over a period four or five years.

On a really bad note, the sales of your first or second or third novel might disappoint your publisher, so you don’t get offered another contract. And word gets around that your stuff doesn’t sell so well…

I’ve painted a very gloomy picture, haven’t I? Well, plenty of writers will be quick to point out that I didn’t paint it gloomy enough.

The thing is, you need to know the score.

You don’t want to be taken by surprise by the tough facts of a writer’s life
after you’ve
sold your first novel and quit your job.

Hang on to that job.

Unless you’ve got income from another source, you’ll run into extremely bad times if you try prematurely to make a living from your writing alone.

I don’t know much about inherited money. If you’ve got so much that you don’t need a job, you can write full time without any problems. Whether or not you’d be driven by a hunger to succeed might be a different matter.

If your spouse has a good job and
is
willing to support you and the family while you try to be a writer, that’s great. And it may be a real solution if you’re a woman and a housekeeper.

In spite of women’s liberation,” however, the man is still almost always expected (lip-service to the contrary) to be the bread winner of a family.

No matter how “liberated” your wife might be, you’d better get ready for some big-time resentment if you stay home to write fiction but don’t quickly produce some decent money.

Before you know it, your wife will almost certainly start to consider you a loser, a loafer, a freeloader. You’ll feel enormous pressure to succeed. And you don’t need that.

What you need is a job of your own.

As I realized from hard experiences, a job of your own gives you
great freedom.

Without it, you’re under horrible financial stress. Even if your books are selling okay, you have to wait and wait and wait for payments to arrive. You watch your bank account dwindle away. You watch your credit card balances grow till you hit your limits. You watch bills come in… bills you can’t pay. And you watch for the mailman, praying that today, at last, he’ll bring you the check you’ve been expecting and expecting…

Maybe an on-publication payment that’s three months overdue. Maybe the check’ll arrive in time for you to pay your mortgage or your rent or your car insurance or your income tax. (It almost never does.)

With a job that pays the way, all those troubles vanish.

Don’t give it up until you’re
absolutely sure
you can get along just fine without it.

A good job is a lifeboat. Though the temptation might be overwhelming, don’t jump off it and start swimming at the first sign of an island. The island is probably a lot farther away than it looks.

While it is very difficult to
make a living
as a fiction writer, income derived from writing can be a great source of
additional income.
It’s like moonlighting as your own boss.

You work your own hours. Whatever you’re able to make, no matter how little, is extra income, like a bonus. And you always have a chance of hitting the jackpot.

You can’t exactly
live
on a $5,000 advance, but you can take a darn good vacation. Or re-roof your house. Or start saving for a rainy day or for the day you decide to go full-time as a writer. Five thousand bucks is pretty nice when it’s frosting on the cake instead of your annual income.

When is it safe to quit?

It’ll never be entirely safe. (But then,
any
job can go down the tubes for one reason or another.)

There may come a day, however, when it no longer makes financial sense for you to hold down a nonwriting “real job.”

Though I painted a dismal picture in the earlier portions of this piece, excellent money
can
be made by writing fiction.

Writers of bestselling novels earn many millions of dollars every year.

But you don’t need to write bestsellers to earn a good income. Even if your novels are being bought for $10,000 to $50,000 each, you can make a significant income.

How?

There are many ways to earn money as a fiction writer, but they only work if you
produce.

You have to write and sell novel after novel after novel. (And perhaps some short stories along the way.) By producing a lot of finished pieces, you can create an
overlapping
of payments.

The secret is to write a lot of books.

This is how it works.

This is how
you
can be a successful, semiwealthy author without ever having a bestseller…

Ready?

Here is an example (but there are countless possible variations).

During the course of a year, you might receive the on-publication payment for a hardbound edition of a novel that you wrote last year, on-publication money for the paperback edition of a novel you wrote two years ago, on-sign money for a new contract for books you haven’t written yet, on-acceptance money for a novel you finished a month or two ago, film option money for a novel that was published three years ago, royalty checks for several of your older books that have sold beyond their advances, payments for a short story or two that you knocked out during the year, money for three or four of your old novels that your agent has sold to a foreign publisher.

And so on.

You may be selling your novels, one per year, to a U.S. publisher for about $20,000 each.

But due to what I’ll call the
Pile-On Effect
or (P.O.E.), you might very well earn an actual income of $50,000 -$100,000 (or more) over the course of a single year.

The Pile-On Effect is how a normal, non-bestselling writer can earn a good income. The more you write, the better it works.

However, it can’t be achieved easily or quickly. It has to be developed over a span of several years. The key to P.O.E. is the number of books you write and get published.

It doesn’t work very well if you’ve only sold two or three books. But by the time you’ve sold ten or fifteen, it will almost surely be generating plenty of money.

You need to keep a nonwriting source of income to sustain you until you’ve produced enough material for P.O.E. to kick in.

When is it safe to quit the job and write full time?

As soon as you see that the Pile-On Effect is producing a steady, large income. How large? That’s up to you and your spouse.

Generally, by the time you see significant results from P.O.E., you should be able to earn more money from writing than from your “real job.” At that point, any job other than writing becomes a waste of time and money.

It’s quitting time.

My 22 Favorite Poets

1. William Ashbless

2. Rupert Brooke

3. Robert Burns

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

5. e.e. cummings

6. Allan Edward DePrey

7. Emily Dickinson

8. Lawrence Ferlinghetti

9. Robert Frost

10. A.E. Houseman

11. Randall Jarrell

12. John Masefield

13. Rod McKuen

14. Kenneth Patchen

15. Edgar Allan Poe

16. Carl Sandberg

17. Robert Service

18. William Shakespeare

19. Robert Lewis Stevenson

20. R.S. Stewart

21. Dylan Thomas

22. William Butler Yeats

My 10 Favorite Playwrights

1. Agatha Christie

2. Sean O’Casey 3. Ira Levin

4. Arthur Miller

5. William Shakespeare

6. George Bernard Shaw

7. Neil Simon

8. John Synge

9. Tennessee Williams

10. William Butler Yeats

Garbage Language

HAVE YOU EVER NOTICED THAT LITERALLY EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK, people are abusing the language?

I just did.

Since when did “literally” come to mean “figuratively”?

That is almost the
only
way you find it used, these days.

“Literally” has stopped meaning literally altogether. It has become a term of exaggeration.

And it has, thereby, become literally useless.

It has been turned into a garbage word.

The funny thing about “literally” is that, even when used properly, it is almost always a garbage word. What does it mean, anyway?

It literally means nothing.

Which is a wordy way to express, “It means nothing.”