Gad. I need to get the gym. I’ve just read three articles about the miserable lives of writers. I need a drink, and it’s only noon. So, who wants to get depressed? I can share.
There’s Tom Kreider, “Controlling the Narrative” — That’s only somewhat miserable.
My friend, Margie, sent me another NYT’s article — With ‘Stay Lit,’ Writers Persevere in a Hostile World. I guess there’s a whole genre of articles about writers who keep on writing, even though they have horrible lives.
From that article I jumped over to Emily Gould’s essay on Medium, which is the capital of Depression World. Who’s Emily Gould? Well, here’s an essay about her miserable life in the New York Times back in 2008. I probably blogged about it back then, but I’m too lazy to find it. For extra credit, read the reviews of her book on Goodreads.
Apt. 11d 
Hasn’t it always been rare that writers could support themselves just by writing?
Oh that Gould essay – she was put off by Julia’s attention whoring? Wow
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I liked the Gould essay for naming numbers, 30K as the most recent book advance, 200K for the previous book, which would have been considered a successful book if it had sold 40K copies, instead of merely 8000. I think that Americans have taboos about money that prevent people from being informed sellers of their labor and that sharing that information might help people make wiser economic choices.
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Six years ago, which is the last time I had the opportunity to test the market, the per-word rate NYC corporate writers were asking was more than 20 times the rate that the Science Fiction Writers of America considers a “professional rate” for short fiction. So it’s no wonder that people trying to earn a living from writing fiction are depressed. As I have commented several times at the blog of some of SF’s leading book editors, six to nine cents a word is not a profession — SFWA notwithstanding — it’s a hobby.
As an antidote to depressing fiction writers’ essays, one might read George RR Martin’s blog. By all appearances, he is a jolly man having a grand time, as well he might.
John Scalzi had a good post a few — ok, ten — years back on the ninety-plus percent of book deals that do not break out of Publishers Weekly’s lowest category. A sample:
“$0 to $3,000: A Shitty Deal. Because that’s what it is, my friends. Possibly the only thing worse than a shitty deal is no deal at all. Possibly.
“$3,000 to $5,000: A Contemptible Deal. The deal you get when your publisher has well and truly got your number, and it is low. …”
Scalzi, too, is a jolly man having a grand time, though not quite on the scale that GRRM is having. Elsewhere in his blog he’s had good advice for fiction writers trying to make an actual career of their vocation. Taking said advice is unlikely to lead to depressing articles for which they were probably paid, to use the technical term, piddly-squat.
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Self-publish? They can’t possibly pay you worse than you’re getting.
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It’s possible that partnering with a large publisher — even at the “shitty deal” level — will get you better results than self-publishing. Unless you, as an aspiring author, are or know designers, artists, bookbinders, etc., then the physical product from a major press will be better. It is almost certain that you will get better distribution by working with a large, commercial publisher. If they are offering you “shitty deal” terms, then you probably won’t be getting any publicity or advertising from them.
If you self-publish, then you will be in charge of all those details, and booksellers almost certainly won’t take your books, so you will have to be selling and doing fulfillment as well. That’s a lot of work and time that might be better invested in writing that next book, or doing the publicity work for the first one.
It’s not a totally clear call, but money is not the only thing in a publishing deal.
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I had in mind e-publishing.
I definitely would not want to stick you with a garage full of print books, particularly since I suspect you don’t have a garage. (I have relatives who have done very well with self-publishing non-fiction and doing the storage thing, but you have to be able to turn a large portion of your home into warehouse space.)
Aren’t artists’ names on book covers?
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You can make a living in genre writing (GRRM, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich, etc.). But then you have to lower your standards. But this problem has been going on for a long time. Hawthorne complained about “that damned mob of scribbling women,” after all.
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And erotica about dinosaurs is now a genre.
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“You can make a living in genre writing (GRRM, Nora Roberts, Janet Evanovich, etc.). But then you have to lower your standards.”
What does this mean?
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