The Writer’s Predicament

Yes, I realize the last blog was a bit on vitriolic side. I’ve read it five or six times and considered taking it down, but I’ve decided to leave it. If you aspire to write fiction, because of all the turnover in the big publishing houses, there’s a good chance you might run into someone like Jerkoff at some point in your career. That will put you in a predicament.

The predicament I faced was serious. I’ve already told you I’d been suspended from practicing law and had looked to publishing to replace that income. It looked like it was going to happen until Jerkoff came along. In the meantime, my lovely wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was going through some terrible, terrible times. Six months of chemo, thirty radiation treatments, a mastectomy. A failed reconstruction. We’d already lost three cars and one home to bankruptcy, but I was hoping the publishing thing would bring us back from the financial abyss. It almost happened. Almost.

The decisions that slowed my writing career were made in rooms inside the walls of the publishing house by people who didn’t know me and didn’t care about me or my family. That’s the reality of the business unless you happen to be the one in a million who hit it BIG. Then everybody will be your best friend. But if you’re not one of the big guys, your career is tenuous, you will be exploited, and then you’ll be cast off for somebody newer.

There was absolutely nothing I could do. I wasn’t there when the decision to tank me was made and had no say in the matter. My agents weren’t there and had no idea what was going on. Even if they had known what was going on, they wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, either. I’ve learned that agents don’t have much power, not much “clout” as Mike Royko would have called it, with big publishing houses. They send the manuscripts to editors. The editors read. They either like it or they don’t. It’s as simple as that.

So what to do? What does one do when he or she has been tanked by a publisher? I had two books on the shelves and another in production. The second book had received zero promotional support and I had no reason to believe things were going to be any different. To make things even more complicated, I’d chosen to write a series, the people who were reading it loved it (most of them, anyway) and they wanted me to write more. I was three books in. So do I write another in the series? Write a standalone? I decided to go to New York, meet my agents face-to-face for the first time, and try to figure out what to do. I met Philip and Lukas in the restaurant of a New York hotel and we spent four very nice hours together, talking, drinking and laughing. We decided I’d write another in the Dillard series and try to sell it to another publisher. So I wrote “Reasonable Fear.” It took me about six months. The agents sent it out and we sat back an waited. Rejection, rejection, rejection, rejection.

They couldn’t sell it. Yikes.

So I decided to publish it myself. I used Createspace for the formatting and the print-on-demand and I put it up on Amazon. I was pretty bummed about it, to tell you the truth, but then the weirdest thing happened. I got a check in the mail from Amazon, and it wasn’t small. I started scrambling around trying to figure out why they were sending me money, and lo and behold, I learned that I could track my sales day by day, hour by hour if I wanted. The next month, on the second of the month, I got another check. The royalty I was getting from Amazon was seventy percent of the retail price. SEVENTY percent. Not the measly eight percent I was getting from Penguin. If I sell a million dollars worth of books for Amazon, they’ll send me seven hundred thousand. No percentage to the agent. If I sell a million dollars worth of books for Pengiun, they’ll send me eighty thousand, minus fifteen percent to the agent.

So which do you think is the better deal?

Me, too. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years. I’ll tell you some more about it in a day or two.