If writers were still compared with prizefighters, the way they used to be when Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren and Norman Mailer were in their primes, Frederick Busch would be a top middleweight contender.
But in the highly mercenary world of contemporary publishing, dominated by such goliaths as Stephen King, Danielle Steel and Tom Clancy, Busch is more simply and prosaically known as a ”midlist” author.
What ”midlist” means in strictly economic terms, Busch says, is that the yearly earnings from each of his 15 works of fiction are below the poverty level. While the critics` response to his books has mostly ranged from the respectful to the adulatory, Busch has never had a knockout best seller. And even though his income has steadily gone up, he said, ”it`s not possible for me to earn a living by writing books.”
From all the evidence, Busch has plenty of company. According to Helen Stephenson, executive director of the Authors Guild, a survey of its 6,500 members indicates that the great majority of contracts amount to less than $20,000, usually for books that require several years to complete. That puts their authors squarely on the publishers` midlist, made up of those whose books sell 10,000 copies, more or less.
A chief reason for the Authors Guild survey, Stephenson said, was to help dispel the ”myth of the multimillion-dollar contract,” which is bestowed with great fanfare on such frontlist authors as King, Steel and Clancy, whose books rack up sales in the hundreds of thousands.
Though there may be fewer than two dozen writers who get $250,000 to $20 million contracts, she added, ”They get a tremendous amount of press, which causes the public to leap to the assumption that authors are well-heeled, just like doctors and lawyers.”
Much closer to reality, Stephenson said, is the contrary myth of the
”poor starving author who has to mortgage the house and jeopardize the kids` college educations,” the one whose annual wages are less than that of a bricklayer.
”And it`s been getting markedly worse in the last two years. The bottom has fallen out for everybody but those on the high end. All of a sudden we have authors calling us in despair, not so much about money as because nobody wants to publish their next book.”
In its Rambo-like pursuit of the almighty blockbuster, the increasingly conglomeratized publishing industry has come to resemble Hollywood, with its attention and energy almost totally focused on the star system.
”In a tough economy,” explained David Gernert, editor in chief at Doubleday, ”the perception is that consumers are more cautious. When they go into a bookstore, they`ll buy something by Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon, rather than part with 20 bucks for that hardcover novel by a writer they`re not familiar with.”
Gernert remains more optimistic than many of his publishing colleagues, citing the ancient axiom that ”the more things change, the more they stay the same.” He maintained: ”Of the 40,000 books published in a year, there`s been no tremendous change from the diversity or quality that there was 50 or 100 years ago. I certainly don`t think publishers are significantly less willing to support marginal writers than they were in Twain`s or Dickens` time.”
Gernert`s assessment doesn`t exactly square with that of John Herman, editorial director at Ticknor & Fields, who observed: ”There are two separate publishing industries. One publishes best sellers, the other publishes serious books. The serious books are usually what are known as midlist books. Though there are crossover exceptions all the time, this is not a good time to be a midlist author.”
One of Herman`s more gratifying exceptions at Ticknor & Fields is Frederick Busch, whose latest novel, ”Closing Arguments,” about a lawyer entrapped in a circle of betrayal and deceit, turned into a ”breakout” book for the author. That is, with almost 30,000 copies in print, more than any of Busch`s previous books, ”Closing Arguments” briefly broke out of the midlists and onto the Publishers Weekly best-seller chart.
”That`s a very happy story,” said Herman, ”especially given the publishing climate, which is very dour indeed.”
Supplementing income
During a trip to Chicago to promote ”Closing Arguments” a few months ago, Busch was clearly pleased, even if the book still wasn`t the passport to economic freedom he has been seeking since he published his first novel, ”I Wanted a Year Without Fall,” 20 years ago.
”I don`t do it for the money,” he said. ”I do it because I have to write books. But once they`re written, of course, I`d like to get as much as I can.”
In which case, Busch acknowledged, it`s sometimes difficult to remain upbeat in view of the astronomical contracts awarded writers such as Ken Follett ($12.3 million for two novels), Alexandra Ripley (nearly $5 million for ”Scarlett”), Jeffrey Archer (reportedly between $15 million and $20 million for three books), and Philip Roth ($1.8 million for three books).
”I have to say,” Busch said, ”that I`m jealous, envious, mean, spiteful, malicious, all those things. I wonder: Why can`t I have that?”
Until he does, Busch, like so many of his fellow authors, has had to find incidental ways to supplement his income. For him and numerous others, the lifeline has come from academia. On a typical workday, Busch spends the morning at his home near Hamilton, N.Y., writing fiction, then heads for his office and classrooms at Colgate University, where he is a professor of English.
While he doesn`t knock the university support system, Busch did say:
”There does come a time when a writer feels the need to write full time. I`ve had two full-time jobs for 25 years now, writing and teaching. Periodically, I just get weary. Sooner or later, I`m afraid I`m going to lose some energy, and energy is crucial to writers.”
Because campus life is so congenial and seductive, intellectually and financially, a lot of other writers have taken the academiurance actuaries and other less-glamorous occupations.
Because she didn`t have an advanced degree, Carol Anshaw, whose second novel, ”Aquamarine,” will be published in February, didn`t have the option of teaching full time at a large university.
In the 15 years since her first novel, ”They Do It All With Mirrors”
(published under the name Carol White), Anshaw has managed to make a respectable living as a part-time writing teacher, journalist, author of 20 children`s books (under various pseudonyms), and film and book critic (winner of the 1989 reviewers award from the National Book Critics Circle), among other free-lance pursuits.
”As long as I can remember, I`ve always wanted to write novels,” said Anshaw during an interview in her small office in a North Side bank building. ”I always thought I`d have to have another career or job, that fiction writing was something I`d have to buy myself time to do, which has pretty much turned out to be the case. When I do get to come here and work on my fiction, I`m thrilled. It`s like a present.
”But getting that first novel published right out of the box gave me a false idea of how easy it was going to be,” added Anshaw, who soon learned that her initial expectations (or lack of them) were correct. Before
”Aquamarine” was accepted by Houghton Mifflin last year, Anshaw wrote two other novels, neither of which was accepted by a publisher.
”That didn`t deter me from writing another novel,” said Anshaw. ”Maybe I`m loony, but I never stopped thinking I was a novelist. I just look at that time as a long apprenticeship, that I was teaching myself how to write.”
A generous sendoff
Aside from the unpublished novels (one of which she still hopes to see in print), Anshaw found that writing children`s books was the most nourishing experience in her lengthy apprenticeship. ”They were my bread and butter,”
she explained. ”Because of the way the royalties come in on them, I can have a year where I really make a lot of money. Then I can have a year like this one, which was really hard on me because I spent seven months revising and fine-tuning `Aquamarine,` and I`d already gotten most of my upfront money.”
Even so, Anshaw said, writing ”Aquamarine,” a realistic fantasy about an Olympic swimmer from rural Missouri whose life takes three directions, was ”pure pleasure. I never gave a thought to whether a publisher would buy it. … For a writer, the peak moment is when you sit there and know that what you`re doing is right, that you`ve made it happen.”
Though ”Aquamarine” is getting a generous sendoff from her publisher, the novel brought Anshaw a relatively small advance, or down payment, which could be the final payment if the book doesn`t sell well enough to earn back its advance and bring the author royalties. ”I`m not counting on it to support me for all the time it`ll take to write my next novel.”
As insurance, Anshaw is completing work on a master`s degree in English at Vermont College. ”I`m looking forward to getting a college teaching job, full-time, and taking summers off to write. But I`ve talked to writers who do that, and they say it isn`t the answer, that you`re eaten alive by students, that your time isn`t your own. So wherever a writer is, it`s always a struggle.”
The struggle isn`t restricted to midlist writers of fiction or nonfiction, as Robert Massie can testify, both as a best-selling historian
(”Nicholas and Alexandra”) and as immediate past president of the Authors Guild. In the latter capacity, Massie said, he spent two years commuting from his New York home to Washington, trying to persuade members of Congress who were revising tax laws that ”not all authors were lazy and dishonest, living on the French Riveria and deducting things that had no relevance to their writing.”
Based on the Authors Guild survey of its 6,500 members, Massie said: ”We extrapolated that their median income was $7,900 a year from writing. And that included the Stephen Kings on one end, so there were obviously a lot of writers on the other end who were making very little or nothing.”
Discussing the other troubles he`d seen during his four-year tenure at the guild, Massie said: ”The advances for midlist authors and first novelists declined, while advances for celebrities and proven authors went into the stratosphere.” As chief exemplars of that trend in action, he cited Alexandra (”Scarlett”) Ripley and Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who collected an estimated $5 million for the rights to his ghost-written autobiography.
With his own advances estimated in the high six-figures, Massie probably can`t enlist much sympathy from his compatriots in the middle regions of publishing, no matter how strenuously he championed their causes while heading the Authors Guild.
Even so, Massie said, he had to take a substantial pay cut for his latest history, ”Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War”
(Random House), which took him nine years to complete.
Most of the responsibility for his shrunken paycheck goes not to his publisher, Massie said, but to the Book-of-the-Month Club, which gave him only half as much for ”Dreadnought” as it did for ”Peter the Great,” his previous book. ”The explanation was that the Book-of-the-Month Club is in deep, deep trouble because of the shopping malls and book chains, and that there`s less money out there for us.”
Eroded confidence
As he admits, Massie has only himself to blame for spreading his advance over the decade it took to write ”Dreadnought,” a 1,007-page opus that he had intended to be a brief history of the origins of World War I.
”I chose to take this long, so I have no complaints. I was indugling my own fascination with the material. But I`d rather write what I think is a better book, than write more quickly and turn one out every few years.”
Even though Massie`s large advances ”don`t really amortize very well,”
said his agent, Deborah Karl, ”he`s one of the rare writers who can live on his earnings. And overall income for most writers is definitely not as high as it was three years ago.”
Hardest hit are younger writers, who are working on their third or fourth books, Karl said. ”Because publishers` confidence has definitely been eroded by this recession, they`re putting the emphasis on the blockbusters instead of spreading the money around. They`re going to wake up eventually and find that they don`t have any balance on their lists, that they`re not cultivating any young writers.”
Publishing`s biggest hitters
Jeffrey Archer (above): estimated $15 million to $20 million for three books. Ken Follett: $12.3 million for two books.
Stephen King: $8.25 million for untitled novel.
Ronald Reagan: estimated $8 million for his memoirs.
James Clavell: $5 million for ”Whirlwind.”
Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: estimated $5 million for his memoirs.
Norman Mailer: $5 million ”plus” for ”Harlot`s Ghost” and two other books. Alexandra Ripley: $4.9 million for ”Scarlett.”
