Crawford Killian's Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

Soon after. your publisher takes the hardback edition out of print, selling the remaining copies to a jobber for $1 each; you don't receive any money from this remaindering but you will be able to buy copies at the same price. On the remainder table, the book will sell for $4.95.

Exactly four years after you got your inspiration and began writing. you receive a second check from the paperback house, again for $3,000. This is the last money you will see from the novel. The paperback publisher hasn't even printed enough copies to earn out your advance - it would rather wait to see if booksellers reorder. They don't, and your novel is out of print by Christmas.

This is a very optimistic scenario for a first novel by an unknown writer Most writers' efforts to get published are much tougher and more protracted.

Once you're published, however, your publisher is likely to respond quickly to your next novel. If it's a good one, you can look forward to considerable editorial encouragement. You may even contract it on the basis of just an outline and some sample chapters. If your first two or three books sell reasonably well. advances for later ones will improve. Paperback advances may also be more generous.

Nevertheless, building a career as a novelist is like building a pension fund. You are sacrificing today in hope of success several years from now. And you have no guarantee that you will succeed at all.

As the Dragonstar timetable implies, actually writing the novel can be the least time-consuming part of the process. But if you take years to get the novel into publishable shape, you are only delaying the payoff even longer. The process is brutally Darwinian: would-be writers drop out at every stage, from conception to submission of the finished manuscript, and only a few of those who complete their manuscripts actually see them published. Of those, a still smaller handful succeed financially and critically. And yet in a semiliterate culture that far prefers loud music or violent moving images, thousands of people quietly painfully, put one word after another to give life to their dreams. Whatever their success, they deserve respect for their determination.

The Fiction Writer's Page

Go To Page: 1 2