It’s been a while since I last posted. This blogging thing is a lot of work! Hats off to all those who manage to post regularly and still lead productive lives. Between going to my oldest son’s college graduation (!) and attending BEA, I felt incapable of thinking coherently, let alone expressing in writing anything worth reading. Anyway, here’s my next piece of advice for aspiring writers, for what it’s worth.
Make sure you have another source of income Even when you do join the ranks of the lucky and receive a contract from a publisher, along with a check, don’t expect to be able to actually live off it. Let’s do the math on the rather substantial advance of $100,000. Six figures, you say! I’m rich! But wait. This advance will be paid out in thirds, or, as is becoming increasingly common, in quarters. The first payment will be paid upon the signing of the contract, which can be six weeks to six months (yes, six months) after the initial verbal agreement. The amount you will receive will be approximately $28,335 (one third of $100,000 minus 15% agent commission), on which you’ll also be required to pay taxes. Depending on your tax bracket, you’ll be left with somewhere around $25,000. This will have to sustain you until the next payment, paid after the publisher has officially accepted the manuscript. This may happen quickly, but it may not. If you have written a very complex manuscript, you and your editor may go through several drafts before it is ready for publication. While this editorial process can be enormously productive, especially for a new writer, it can also be time-consuming. Some of my clients have spent a year or more revising their manuscripts before they were accepted. Once it is, and the manuscript is put into production, it can take from eight months to a year before the book is published, which is when the third payment is due. (As I mentioned above, sometimes, usually when the advance is in the six figures, it is paid out in quarters; the fourth payment is due upon the publication of the paperback, which is usually a year after the hardcover is published.)
Keep in mind that the average advance is substantially below six figures and you can see that it is very important to have another source of income. If you are thinking this sucks, I totally agree with you, since I consider writing a book the hardest thing in the world and it makes me admire all of you who have decided to choose writing as a career all the more.
Be prepared: In my experience, the single most common mistake aspiring writers make is to approach agents too early. It is essential, before you start querying a literary agent, that you show you are serious about writing. That means you should have a body of work–articles in newspapers; short stories in magazines; a blog with an active readership. It also means you should take the project you’re currently working on as far as you possibly can before seeking out an agent. I frequently request a manuscript based on an intriguing query letter only to be told that the author is still working on it and will send it in a couple of months. This is fine, except I ask myself why the query went out when the manuscript was still in progress. But what’s not so fine is those cases when I’ll have read part of a submission, only to receive an email asking me to read the new revised version instead. I know that the revision process is endless and I encourage writers to revise obsessively. But once you have sent it out into the world, that, to me, is a signal that it’s polished, ready for a stranger’s (agent’s) eyes. Finally, for fiction writers, as much as I love short stories, unless that is the form you have chosen as a writer, do write a novel. Not only is it easier to sell, but, more importantly, it showcases your writing talents in a way a short story can’t. It demonstrates your ability to develop a character, maintain narrative momentum, juggle multiple plots and subplots and then bring it all to some sort of conclusion.
I’ve had conversation with several editors and publishers recently that made me scratch my head. I represent clients from all over the world and from many different cultures; it’s something I’m very proud of and feel passionate about. Plus, books about other cultures sell. So I’ve thought–until recently, when I was told that “multicultural is not working right now” and “readers are not really going for the ‘exotic’.” Before I get on my high horse and start holding forth on the merits of publishing books by authors from around the world that shine the light on different cultures, I wondered if this was true. Is “multi-culti” dead? An informal poll yielded similar responses. No, it’s not dead. But it’s no longer a fad, the way that, say, paranormal romance is a current fad. It used to be that simply having a foreign-sounding name was enough to get editors salivating. Now, a writer from Asia, Latin America or Africa is judged by the same standards as an American writer. In my mind, this is actually progress. Being “exotic” should confer no special advantage. But one editor told me that it has become, in her experience, increasingly a disadvantage — bookstores are ordering fewer copies of such books and readers are buying less. Could this really be true? What do you think?
Know who you are as a writer. Have a vision for your work. Don’t think about who the audience for your book will be until you’ve finished it. Your choice of agent, your subsequent relationship with your agent, and with your editor, will be the better for it. The role of your agent and editor is to guide you and encourage you to produce your strongest work. But unless you have a really clear sense of what you want your book to be (even if it is not quite there yet) it is easy to start second-guessing yourself when someone with a lot of experience in publishing makes suggestions about which direction your book should take. It may very well end up being the very best thing for it, but you’ll also know when you feel they’re pushing you in the wrong direction, away from the vision you have for your work. Do you know what makes you distinct as a writer? Do you have a clear sense of your voice?
I came back from Iowa with a huge stack of manuscripts and many of them are short stories. Some of these short stories are very beautiful. They are like little pearls, polished and gleaming, every sentence perfect. Several of the students, who had met with other agents, told me they knew short stories were really hard to sell, the agents had told them so. And of course I had to agree. But I started thinking about how much I love short stories; and I felt a twinge of regret that as a genre they have become so marginalized in mainstream literature. As Stephen King writes, “a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.” Short stories can attain perfection in the way that the novel, with its unwieldy length and many plot strands and extensive cast of characters, never can. What is more perfect after all than a story by Grace Paley or Alice Munro? Never was I more entranced than when reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth. There is a completeness to the experience of reading a short story: you are pulled into the world created therein and for the time it takes you to ride the bus to work or school you are elsewhere; by the time the bus delivers you to your destination you are ready to shake yourself off and re-enter your own life, but your perspective has shifted slightly, the air feels a little different.
As an agent I thank those editors at publishing houses who are willing to take a chance on short story collections and all those who toil at literary journals and are doing so much to keep this form alive.
