It’s the goal of every writer: A place on the New York Times Best Seller List.
A few months ago, I was at a writer’s conference, where one of my fellow writers had achieved that golden status: She was a coauthor of a book that had been solidly stuck on the list for months. There was talk of a movie. I’d been wondering for years about how this watershed achievement changes lives, and the answer turns out to be: Not so much.
My colleague had, like me, paid a few hundred bucks to attend this particularly selective conference, in order to pitch ideas to magazine editors whose interest in the assembled writers ranged from avid to tepid. Many of them, after the conference, would not even bother to reply to e-mailed pitched they had personally solicited.
Believe me, I was incredibly impressed with my colleague’s accomplishment: I figured the editors would be lining up to talk to her. If I were an editor (and I actually HAVE been one), I’d go looking for a story to assign this writer to do. You make it to the NY Times, list, I figure, you get a free pass into the fast lane. But, according to her, that’s not the way the world works. New York Times bestseller? Yawn. She still had to write queries; she still got ignored by 24-year old assistants. I found that about the most depressing thing I’d heard all year (and in the world of publishing this year, THAT is saying something).
So that was reality check number one.
Here comes number two: The money isn’t even all that good. A few months ago, author Lynn Viehl promoised to reveal all if she ever made “The list.” Twilight Fall debuted at Number 19; Lynn kept her promise, and here’s her tale.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is; I don’t even know IF there is a moral to this story. Keep your day job? Do it for the dream, but not for the reality?
I suppose we’re writers, so we write. Reality be damned.
For me Lynn Viehl’s article was the end of fantasies about making a living by writing books–or at least through conventional book publishing. Especially the kind of book I’d like to write once again–what I think of as a think-book, that investigates facts and experience in the service of developing ideas–doesn’t have much of a chance unless you’re already well known. And even well-known writers do have a day job, for the most part.
Maybe the publishing industry will recover and figure out a new revenue model (maybe even one that doesn’t screw the authors).
Or maybe a model will emerge that enables us to sell writing, in one form or another, online as an e-book, blog with ad revenue, who knows? Amazon now has a service that lets you upload a PDF of a book to be formatted for Kindle.
At any rate I don’t want to be a fuddy-duddy who stays stuck in the forms of the past. I’m willing to adapt if it means I could somehow write that book and get it out there. Maybe that’s the moral for me.