How to Become an Author, in 5 Incredibly Difficult Steps
#2.
Editing and Editing and Editing ...
I actually lied up there again (I have trust issues. There was a whole thing with a cowboy and a public pool bathroom as a child -- we shouldn't get into it): I said I was writing the book right now. But that's not true. I already finished it. Months ago.
What I'm doing now is editing, and that process is a dozen times longer than the actual writing.
For those of you who can just bang out a draft in one go, clap your hands, whirl on your heel and exit the room, burning it behind you so that others might not defile it with their lesser genius -- most of us writers also have to double as self-editors.
Editing is just like writing, except hateful, and in reverse. Instead of birthing words and ideas out of nothing, you're murdering them in cold blood, culling them like sickly sheep weakening the flock. And since you're the one that brought them into the world in the first place, you feel a certain attachment to every single thing you mercilessly cut. Every time you delete a paragraph, you remember the three hours when you had to stop halfway through that sentence to research the sex lives of Romantic-era poets and what molecular alterations would turn human skin into a high explosive (yes, those were both real, actual things I had to do for the new book). But that can't matter when you're in editing mode; something works, or it doesn't, and it has to go.
After a while, it does get easier though. But only because you will rediscover, with every single sentence, what an incredibly talentless asshole you really are. Every stilted phrase, obvious typo or terrible analogy will have you grimacing and swearing tiny vendettas at the horrible hack who wrote all this garbage you now have to fix.
" 'They're is no end?' Really? Really?! Really, you incompetent poser?!"
Learning to edit is, quite simply, learning to hate yourself word by word. If you have a healthy sense of self-esteem right now, you should seriously consider a better career path than "professional writer." Might I suggest prostitute, or "guy that lets people spit in his mouth for a dollar"? After all, it's pretty comparable money.
Oh, that's right! We haven't touched on the money yet. Well, friend, now that you're done with your magnum opus, after these thousands of hours of toil, you're finally going to be ...
#1.
Collecting Your Shitty Money
There's no more sensitive subject than finance. In our money-centric society, pay-rates tell everybody exactly how much you're worth as a human being. Same as with any other job, no self-respecting writer wants to talk hard numbers. Luckily, I also edit for a living, so I've stabbed all that self-respect out with a mechanical pencil long, long ago. Let's talk numbers:
For my first book, I got an advance of $30,000.
Fuck! Not bad, right?
I mean, sure, those fancy guys who own cars and a complete pair of matching shoes may scoff at that money, but 30 grand is 30 more grand than no grands. It seems like a substantial sum. But just like dunking over a child, it becomes much less impressive once you stop and think about it.
"Oh, he's breaking the glass! Bad form, even here, in the child-taunting division of the NBA."
First, there are agent fees: 15 percent, right off the top. So that's down to $25,500. And of course, taxes take a bite of everything: 20 percent, state and federal. Down to a net $20,400. Still, that's like answering four questions right on a game show; you're lucky to be there in the first place, and it's fair compensation for doing something kind of fun. If you wanted to do this full time, all you'd have to do is pump out five of these short little books a year and you'd be ric- hahaha, sorry, I can't even finish typing that sentence.
From inception to completion, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody took me about a year and a half. And not a "just working on it in my spare time" year and a half, but 18 months at 40 to 50 hours a week, minimum. While simultaneously holding down another full-time job, of course, to keep paying the bills. All told, I netted roughly $6.50 an hour for writing my book. In the state of Oregon, where I lived while writing it, that's two dollars less than minimum wage.
Pictured: A more glamorous and fulfilling life than "author."
But then, that's the great thing about books: That 30 grand was just an advance. I still get royalties, and if the book keeps selling, then someday I'll reach that magic number where I pay off the advance, and it's all profit from there, baby.
That should be cake, too, because Everything is Going to Kill Everybody did pretty well, all told: During launch week, it hovered at around No. 31 on Amazon's sales rank list. Do you know what that means? For one solid week, it was the 31st bestselling book (out of all the fucking books in history) for the biggest bookseller in the world. That was just in the United States. In Canada (which I'm told uses for-realsies grown up money and everything), it peaked at No. 5. Just to reiterate: For one whole week, mine was the fifth bestselling book in Canada.
Which basically means "Ted bought a copy."
So what do those impressive sounding numbers translate to in sales? About 1,000 copies. For all of launch week. In September of last year, I got my first and only sales breakdown: The book has sold around 9,000 copies, total. I get about a dollar a book in royalties, and there's that pesky advance (remember, the year and a half at migrant worker pay?) to sell through before I see any of that. So only 21,000 copies more to go, then I get a dollar!
Still want to be a writer?
...
Yeah, me too.
I mean, obviously. I am writing another one, after all. Even knowing how unglamorous the whole thing is; even knowing that I'd be better compensated for my time if I spent my nights underneath the bleachers at a local football game with my mouth open, trying to swallow errant nickels; even knowing that the entire process is built on self-loathing and horrible, tedious monotony, I am still getting right back to work on the new book just as soon as this column is finished, because ... because ... shit. I don't know. It's a sickness?
WHY WON'T ANYBODY HELP ME?
You can buy Robert's book, Everything is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter and Facebook. But you should probably just take the subtle hint all those links were giving you and buy the book: You could be lucky number 20,999!
For more from Robert, check out 5 Disturbing Ways the Human Body Will Evolve in the Future and Revisiting Old-School Text Adventures as a Jaded Modern Gamer.
Eh, I dunno. If somebody like Jim Butcher, who's otherwise an incredible author, can still get away with including that "you only use 10% of your brain" myth in the 21st century, I think we may be blowing things out of proportion.
ReplySo writing a book about something you don't know takes a s**t ton of research, but writing about something you do takes an assload. This is important; we finally have a relation between a s**t ton of something and an assload of it, in that a s**t ton is larger than an assload.
ReplyA few years ago, my brother and I were commissioned to write a book for a small-press publisher. After working on it for the better part of a year, and writing hundreds of pages, the publisher just stopped taking calls or e-mails. I would blame it on us being s****y writers or something, except that they never asked for any pages. When we tried to pursue some kind of legal retaliation, we were told that we would almost certainly have no case since the publisher was in another country. So if anyone ever wants to read about 300 pages I wrote of the middle of a book, that ends suddenly and is populated with characters I have no legal or intellectual claim over, let me know!
ReplyGreat article, Brockway. I totally found myself in that. Except all this publishing business, I never dealt with that shit, and possibly never will. Last few years I've been writing/editing a crappy sci fi novel and I'm not sure I'll even try to publish it.
ReplyThe research, it's all true. I've probably learned more about astronomy while doing this than in school, but it's all part of the fun. And most of the time I just edit it, and by that I mean inserting or changing a half of a chapter (because I still don't have enough skill and experience, so I write it anew till it becomes as good as I want it to be, and yes, I am very self-critic)
And finally, that "sickness" as you say... Been there. That made me waste my free time that could have been spent on something useful. That's the urge to write. You don't do it to make money, you don't even do it to get 10k people to read it, you do it to get the ideas out of your head before it explodes.
I run into a lot of these writing troubles (googling seemingly trivial things, shitloads of editing) and I've never written more than an essay. I would probably kill myself trying to write a book.
ReplyHere in my country, some friends knew about the publishing process and we decided to skip it by doing our books, you know, handmade and artistic. It's hard but it's satisfying to see somebody buy one of our books, also this is just a hobby but we like it.
ReplyPS: I'm gonna kick Meyer's ass just to make justice for you my friend xD
writing is like.... a compulsion. addiction.
ReplyI bought your book, read half of it, then lost it. I've never lost a book in my entire life. Oh well... Looks like I'm buying another one. I have no problem with this.
ReplyOn another note: I am starting a career in game design. Seeing as how you're hands-down my favorite writer on this site and you have an obvious affinity towards video games, I would very much like to work with you in the future. Though you most likely will never see this comment, I felt the need to post it anyway.
That comment sounds so sad that I have to thumbs it up.
*slow claps* I appreciate your honesty. I really do.
ReplyDo like that Zombie equivalent Twilight chick did and publish on kindle. She made a million and a half last year because she got more than 1 dollar per book.
ReplyYou make this sound hard. I think it's be easier to just become a vapid reality TV star, write my memoirs and how I became famous for being obnoxious, and then watch it become an instant best seller.
ReplyYO! I bought your book the other day, that s**t is baller. It makes me question why im going to school to learn instead of just reading some internet writer's work. Very well researched and a ton of fun to read. I cant wait for this upcoming one, eventhough there's probably going to be a lot of waiting.
ReplyI will start and hopefully finish my book when I'm old and bored whit life. Or start it sooner if in the next 5 years is found a new way of makeing a lot of money whit a crapy book.
ReplyWait... authors only get $1 a book? So you want me to pay $15 and you're only getting 1 of those dollars? And the price of books keeps going up? Fuck. Just. Fuck.
ReplySuck it up. You got a thiry K advance which is a lot more ks than no ks. The thing about being a writer, you cockneck, is that the first book doesn't usually do that well. It's when they publish more books and fuck's buy those ones and then think "Shit, I wonder what their other stuff was like..." and then start buying those that things start to kick off. Also, books on the internet? lol.
ReplyWow, you're a complete toadstool.
Good book title, ugly cover.
Replylol I would have lost my s**t if, instead of Ted, you had typed "Joe bought a copy".
ReplyOne of the greatest feelings on the internet for me is when someone says they often do things that are weird or unexpected, and my reaction is "Oh my gosh, I DO THE SAME THING!". And to think all this time I thought I was the only one who would use markers, a world map
Reply(I so conviently have lying around) rulers, pencils, distance calculator, a flight mapper, string, tape, a calculator, a map of the topography of the Atlantic Ocean, and a whole lot of guess and check... just to map out the flight a character of mine uses to get from one place to another. Nothing interesting even happens (Well, the plane does get blown up, but that's beside the point). Besides the publisher detail, (I'm fourteen, do you really think I have had anything published?)I found myself in every single step you mentioned (many the details of which I thought were just my personal quirks). This gives me so much confidence as a writer and I profess my unbounding gratitude towards your fantastic... article? What do you Cracked aficionados calls these? Anyways, I am off to edit my novel in progress while simultaneously kicking myself for being an incrediable idiot (Who, most likely, made at least 5 spelling mistakes and 5 grammatical errors through out the course of writing this comment).
Yeah, probably. Which is why I think your misspelling of "incredible" was entirely intentional.
I consider it one of the marks of a good writer that they care about making sense enough to research down to details that lots would say 'screw it, no-one will notice, much less care.' DON@T feel bad about it, and don't type apostrophes while holding down shift for caps.
Good luck with the novel.
I bought your book used, so I shorted you a dollar. U Mad?
ReplyOh, I liked it.
"Biff Largeblaster's sculpted cyborg abs glistened in the afterglow of the imploding time-vortex like a gargantuan bunch of manly ____ grapes."
ReplyI am wet.