The career novelist

THE CAREER NOVELIST

about the periodic rush to pay six-figure advances to total newcom-

ers. This addictive and at times destructive game only endangers

other first, midlist, and genre novelists.

You would think that ego and gambling would have no place in the

bottom-line corporate culture of book publishing in the nineties, but

on the contrary gambling is its essence. The reason is profit margin. In

publishing today it is not enough to make money; one has got to

make serious amounts of money. One's corporate parent, after all,

might be a cable TV giant used to an annual pattern of double-digit

growth. That same cable giant may also be laden with debt. Either

way, to win high margins a publisher must take big risks, i.e., gamble.

Whether or not the craps game produces the desired profits is

debatable. (Remember, no one knows what profits in book publish-

ing are anyway—see Chapter 10.) It is worth noting, however, that of

the fifty-four novels that sold more than 100,000 copies in 1990, not

one was a first novel.

Surprised? The surprise is that publishers continue to drain

money away from proven money makers: midcareer genre and

mainstream authors.

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION
There are ways for new and midcareer authors to protect them-
selves. But to avoid the perish trap they must be informed, alert,
and aggressive.
The first step—easy to say, hard to do—is to write a novel that
readers cannot resist. That's facile advice, I know, but do not dismiss
it out of hand. It is amazing how reluctant some writers can be to
revise. Time and again I have seen it: validation comes and growth
ceases. Having found acceptance, authors start to believe that ever
afterward their publishers will purchase, even publish, their first
drafts. They start to treat their advance checks as paychecks.
Another big pitfall traps new writers who are in a hurry to receive
validation. Rushing to find a publisher is a mistake. New authors in
a hurry tend to sign up with inferior agents, sell to career-killing
publishers, and accept lousy deals on the flawed theory that any
deal is at least a foot in the door. One way around this pitfall is to
get the best agent one can right away (see Chapters 4 and 5).