Making a Life as a Fiction Writer

Lecture 24

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need to learn to be two different people. One is the artist, the blinkered and
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must be solitary and self-critical, but you may also be moody, self-involved,
and distracted. The other is the businessperson, whose responsibility it is to
market and sell the work after it has been created. In this role, you need to be
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lecture, we’ll explore these two halves of a writer’s life.

The Business of Writing
z Aspiring writers usually want to know two things from published
writers: (1) How do I get published, and (2) how do I make a living as
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won’t. Most writers have to earn a living doing something else and
make time to write when they can. To put it bluntly, unless you’re a very
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either got the attention of an agent or a publisher or paid a vanity press
to publish his or her work.
o Many writers sold a story to a literary or genre magazine,
which might lead to interest from an agent or a book publisher.

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their work to commercial publishers in New York. The

publisher would buy a writer’s book and pay an advance

against royalties, out of which the agent would take 10 or 15

percent. Then, the writer would go through the process of

editing, copyediting, and printing, and between eight months

and a year later, the book would come out.