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Freddie deBoer's avatar

You know, if you don't like the topic of a post I write, just wait one day! and there will be an entirely different topic.

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Stephen Harrod Buhner's avatar

I do have some comments on being a writer that have relevance here. I do understand what you are talking about, none of it is inaccurate. it is just incomplete. I have wanted to be a writer since i was a teenager (50 years ago). luckily, by the time i was 21 i realized i had nothing to say and decided to wait awhile. i began to write in earnest when i was 38 and yes, most of it was terrible. nevertheless my first book came out in january 1996; it still earns me around $3000 a year. few of my 23 books have gone out of print or failed to earn back their advance. Only three of them in fact. I decided at the beginning that i wanted to make my living as a writer. to do that i realized i would have to publish a book a year for ten years. There are a great many people clamoring for attention, most of them want to write a book. it takes sustained effort to gain any attention when there are so many voices trying to get it.

Like far too many writers, esp of my era, i was enamored of the NY literary world. But as one world class editor told me long ago, there is no NY in NY any longer. it is just a corporate jungle; they could be selling toilets or tobacco, they don't really care; they just want the money. Yes, you can get large advances (and yes i went there once and got 50k for a two book deal, worst experience of my life) but except for the huge sellers or the prestige market, they don't care about their writers. Midlist writers, which most writers are, are not welcome. they don't make enough money for them. (They are the world of the blockbuster, not books that matter.) The magazine market is even worse. the competition is fierce for far too little money. I realized that long ago and took my ball and went home. They call me every so often and offer a thousand dollars or so for a piece and i generally say yes. but i never ask them.

Further, too much experience has shown me that editors at magazines are the worst editors in the world to work with. they pretty much have to urinate in every writer's work and stir it around with their pencil before they like the smell enough to print it. Usually this means removing every particle of my unique voice and style. Truthfully, i generally had to do more editing work on a 3000 word magazine piece than a 100,000 word book. it really isn't worth it. So, i took my work to the large, independent, small presses. THAT is where writers should go. They are the equivalent of the pulp magazines of the early to mid part of the twentieth century. it is where you get paid for learning your craft. There are a million words of bullshit in every writer, the only way to get them out (and out of the way) is to write them out. Out of quantity comes quality, eventually. I have had, to date, three best sellers (over 100,000 copies) and many award winners. By my sixth book i was making a living from my royalties.

The trick to it was: find a niche that is undeveloped, write the shit out of it, have something unique and essential to say (that is, don't copy all the other writers), keep saying it more elegantly with each book while at the same time never repeating what you have previously done, have all the books connected to an overarching theme, travel all over the place giving talks and workshops on the books (this does NOT mean bookstore signings, they are a waste of time), and write write write. After awhile i gave up asking for any advances. by doing so i got the money from sales nearly immediately and the publishers loved doing it that way. in the beginning, at the moment of greatest excitement on the publishers part (that is, right before the book came out) i sent them another proposal, which they always accepted. Publishers and editors are always seeking breakthrough books, they hunger for it. this can be leveraged as any hunger can. and for sure, always, always treat the profession like a business. The publishers and editors are not your friends, they are in business and they like you as long as you treat it as a business and make them money.

My work has primarily been nonfiction; with one caveat it is the easiest to sell to both publishers and the public. There are very few nonfiction books that contain luminous prose, so that is the kind of writing i used and the kind i love anyway. it offered something that most nonfiction books don't have. Into that form i included by poetry and memoir stories and fictional pieces as well. I make a very good living at it. But I didn't get here by going through NY. Their final determination was that my work would never sell, no one cared. I think about that every time i deposit a 40k royalty check from one of my publishers. (I have 6 I have worked with; they all still pay me, twice a year, each and every year.)

The one caveat for fiction writers? Amazon. Many of the best sellers on amazon have not gone through NY but have self published. They make a LOT of money. hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The truth is, the publishing world has changed. NY is dead for most writers but people still want to read and they want to read, for the most part, something other than the NPR voice, manhattan literary style of writing. Most people hate it and the snotty voice that goes with it. They just want to read a good story, to be entertained, to be talked to like a human being. Anyone who does this and really focused on it can make a good living at it. you just have to be outside the old box.

The world does not need any more MFA graduates who sound like all the other MFA graduates. As Elif Batuman once put it, never have so many books been written so well that no one in their right mind would want to read. Or as judy garland put it, be yourself, all the other positions are already taken.

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