THE CAREER NOVELIST
Sadly, many authors bring fatal accidents upon themselves. On
the other hand, that means that some career disasters can be pre-
vented. So let us look at why midcareer authors perish.
FATAL ERRORS
Is there any way an author can predict that he is going to get
zapped? If you have been paying attention to this book thus far, you
have probably already identified some of the pitfalls.
A low advance, for example, is a certain sign that a novel will be
brought out with little support. Bad covers can hurt sales, too. If in
the middle of the publication process one's acquiring editor departs
for another house, or law school, or an ashram, well, it is now near-
ly certain that sales—or, more importantly, sell-through—will fall
below a sustainable level.
There is also the matter of switching canoes in the middle of the
stream, by which I mean authors who, before they have reached the
five-book threshold I discussed in Strategy Session I, radically
change the direction of their fiction or change publishers. Those are
risky moves. In the first case readers are lost. In the second, backlist
is lost and intervals between books become irregular. Support from
key accounts is then lost, leading to sales purgatory.
Some authors lower their survival odds still further by signing up
with publishers who are known career-wreckers. Who are these pub-
lishers? They are easy to spot. They bring out twice as many genre
titles as their competition. They adore first novelists, too, especial-
ly if they are not represented or have lousy agents. Theirs is the
buckshot approach: fire lots of books at the market and hope that a
few will hit the bull's-eye.
What happens to those authors whose books miss the target? If
they are not dropped outright, they may be relegated to a kind of
publishing limbo, where they neither move up nor are pushed out
until in frustration they leave of their own accord.
Most new authors are caught by surprise when that happens. Is
it any wonder? Caution and common sense can be the first things
to go when one's first novel is accepted for publication. Indeed,
many green authors describe their books as their children, and