THE CAREER NOVELIST
If a licensor is involved, they too get a big slice of the cake, per-
haps 25 percent. So what is left for the poor writers who execute the
actual books? Often less than they might have gotten for novels of
their own. Indeed, some authors are working for pitifully small pay.
I have heard of some who wrote full-length novels and were paid as
little as a flat $1,500. Advances like $3,500 and $5,000 are quite com-
mon in the packaging game.
Does this add up? Are ideas and outlines (when packagers them-
selves trouble to write them) worth the 50 percent that they skim
off? I wonder. Still, there is no shortage of authors willing to accept
deals for this kind of money. In fact, so many authors need work-for-
hire assignments these days that it is getting quite difficult to
obtain them unless you already have several solo novels under your
belt. Packagers are getting picky.
Why are authors dying to write work-for-hire? The most common
reason is the desperate need for income. For others, it may seem
that this is the only chance they will have to see their writing in
print, a fear that grows more valid as packaged product multiplies.
Of course, most writers do not see themselves as desperate or
exploited. They convince themselves that writing work-for-hire nov-
els is a really good idea. One attractive illusion is that work-for-hire
contracts are easy to get, and so it may seem at first. For frustrated
authors-in-waiting, being offered a contract with no delays and lit-
tle up-front work seems like a sort of paradise. (Needless to say,
this paradise is not all that it appears, but more on that in a
moment.)
Another reason that authors clamor for work-for-hire is that they
may believe it will help them to build an audience. That is quite
wrong. One's name may appear on the cover of a packaged novel,
but that is not why the public will buy it. They will buy it for the other
names that appear on the cover: licensed characters, TV shows,
celebrities credited as "author," and so on.
Readers will not necessarily follow authors from their work-for-
hire novels to their own fiction. In fact, the evidence suggests oth-
erwise, despite the lucky few who have managed a successful tran-
sition, such as Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman or R. A. Salvatore,
all of whom wrote for TSR (creators of "Dungeons and Dragons").