Magic, Theft, Time, and Money

4. Money

Looking back, I can see that I have taken advantage of my protected position (as a White, American, heterosexual author married to a lawyer who makes a good living) to indulge myself professionally. If I had had to sustain myself with my writing income, things would have looked very different (I’d have had to stay in teaching, for one thing). I’ve had the incredible luxury of being financed in my career by my unfailingly supportive spouse, so that I have always been able to write exactly what I wanted to, when I wanted to write it, then send it out there to see if anybody would publish it. If it didn’t get published, I wouldn’t consequently starve or lose my house or car or have to go out and get a second job (notice, not "a real job;" writing is a real job, full time and very demanding) .

This meant that everything of mine that’s out there was written without regard for any "guidelines" but those mandated by my own goals; and my work could be as radical or bullheaded as I chose to make it; and I could take as long as I liked to polish each story and not let it go until it was as perfectas I could make it at the time.

It also means that I’m sure I have had a tendency to take myself and my work too seriously, and that I don’t have the work discipline, in terms of a regular writing schedule, that commercial obligations require and of necessity develop in an author. I’ve been able to sprawl all over the place, writing whatever came to my mind that seemed worth working on, instead of finding a niche that would reliably yield me my bread and butter and becoming a pre-eminent expert in that niche with more or less wide name-recognition and a constant audience. I’ve also never learned to make my stories’ beginnings lean and sharp enough for some readers’ tastes, because I never had to knuckle under to the demands of an editor even if the editor was right. Besides, editors are less likely, I think, to suggest changes when they are presented with a completed work rather than a chapter-and-outline project which is still not entirely set in form.

Also, because I usually take a couple of years on a book and more if I feel it needs it, I’ve never built up the momentum that editors like to see in an author — one book per year — useful in marketing terms because it keeps readers hooked from book to book, or that’s the theory. Whatever the reasons, I have remained firmly lodged in the "mid-list," which means advances no higher than the low double-digits and advertising budgets to match. If I had had a more commercial, stringent schooling I might have written a best-seller by now, might have a fan-club waiting for my next series novel, might have heftier overseas sales — or not. Maybe I could not have succeeded in those ways because I don’t have the ability to work well under commercial pressure, and believe me that has got to be a whole set of talents in itself.

There’s no telling, is there? The road not traveled is a road not known.

An education moment: People should be aware that despite the millionaire status of the top teeny percent of fiction authors like Rice, King, Ludlum, Grisham, et al, the average (the mean or the median, I don’t recall which offhand) income from writing of all the members of the Authors Guild has stuck at something like $7500 per year for a very long time. I can tell you that my lowest advance for a book was $3500 (that book was two years+ work), and that my highest ever was $30,000 (for about the same amount of work-time). Writing fiction is not a sure way to get rich, and it doesn’t trip effortlessly along a la "Murder, She Wrote," either, or even necessarily exhibit a smooth upward curve of earnings and widespread public success.

Worse, conditions in the business have been deteriorating since the eighties, as big money marketing and corporate greed have invaded publishing along with merger-mania, turning much of publishing into a minor branch of the movie industry. This matters, because while advances for the few skyrocketed, the many have been deeply downgraded: in the movie industry nobody is held in lower esteem than the writer, or (among the creative elements) paid worse. That’s the view from where I sit, glued to the mid-list because (in my view anyway) my work has been too edgy and original to have the mass appeal that makes a best-seller. How the internet will change the prospects for work that must locate a smaller, more specialized readership no one knows yet; but I, like everybody else, have high hopes.

And wishes. Here’s what I wish: I wish I’d had more than just a bunch of options taken on The Vampire Tapestry, which would make a nifty TV series or even a feature film. I wish I had ideas spilling out of my ears and stories flying from under my typing fingers, but speedy, prolific production has never been my modus operandi. I wish publishing would recover from its decline into a wilderness of bean-counting and celebrity-mongering. I wish, like most authors, that I saw my books well displayed in bookstores more often, and that more people would buy them and read them. I wish I had more time to read, myself.

On the other hand, I no longer have to wish I could get my first novel published, or my second, so all in all I guess I don’t have a lot to complain about. Still, I reserve the right to lobby for things to get better instead of worse. I reserve the right not only to hope, but to talk about hope, and write about hope, and act on hope. Hopes are what "better" is made of.

There. You thought writing was a lucrative, serene, but glamorous ivory-tower existence. If that ever truly was so, it isn’t now; and I hope I have made it impossible for you ever to believe such baloney again.