The career novelist

THE CAREER NOVELIST

In any event, it is wise for authors to push for as much as they can

get in work-for-hire contracts. Packagers are hard-nosed people, and

one can be sure that an unchallenged work-for-hire deal will be a

bad one. Get a fair contract.

A FINAL LOOK AT THE ALBUM
Before closing, let's take another look at the snapshots from my
agency album.
Is Writer A right to feel satisfied with herself? Since her earnings
are running into six figures, it is hard to say that she should not.
However, there is a potential danger for her: if she becomes too
dependent on work-for-hire income, or compromises her work cre-
atively for too long, then she is taking chances.
A full-time work-for-hire writer is not an independent author, but
is rather a franchise manager, one with fewer rights than most
employees. There is no security, and while the pay may be good it
ultimately has upward limits. Such writers will never get really rich.
Packagers have no reason to let them.
What about Writer B, the one who is trying to launch his own
fiction after doing someone else's writing for many years? The only
problem this writer has is one of self-perception. He feels like a pro,
but in practical terms he is a first novelist. Readers have never heard
of him. In selling to publishers, he actually faces only the same
problems that all first-timers face. If Writer B will relax and let his
career unfold as if from the beginning he will be okay.
Writer C, on the other hand, is heading down a slippery slope. In
scrambling to get work-for-hire to pay the rent, she is setting herself
up to get snared in the trap I described earlier. What should she do?
If she does wind up writing that YA horror novel, she will have to
accept that she is really only taking another sort of day job. Her own
fiction will have to be done as it was before: late at night and on
weekends.
Her biggest mistake was going full-time too soon. If she had wait-
ed she might not be in this situation now. Oh, well. At least she will
build an audience and get paid quickly. That, at any rate, is what she
is likely to tell herself.