The Ugly and Unpalatable Truth About Being A Writer

At least the competition thins out at the top

According to the New York Times, ninety-eight percent of all books released by traditional publishers last year sold fewer than 5,000 copies.

If you’re a professional writer, the gruesomeness of that statistic should drive you straight to the liquor cabinet or a suicide hotline. But if you’re a reader, it might depress you, too. In a capitalist society, when something isn’t profitable, it’s usually eliminated.

The pandemic is partly to blame, of course. Book sales rose in 2020 (although much of that was textbooks and cookbooks), and yet, with less discretionary income, consumers mostly went with books by known entities, such as rap impresario Snoop Dogg. His 2018 cookbook, From Crook to Cook, sold 205,000 copies in 2020, almost twice as many as it did in 2019.

Why? Because people knew him.

The truth is, consumers spend differently online than they do in stores, and even before the pandemic, stores were finding it increasingly difficult to turn a profit. Consider the way you purchase books. Online, I’m guessing, you zero in on one specific book. You drag it to a virtual basket, pay for it, and then wait for it to arrive.

Go to a bookstore, however, and you’re lost for hours, drifting from one section to the next before staggering to the check-out counter with an armload of books.

Or maybe that’s just me.

For a consumer, books are expensive—too expensive to take the risk of buying a bad one. When you do an accounting of the amount of work required to bring a book to fruition, the wonder is that they’re not even more expensive. Most professional writers take between six months and a year to write a book. An agent usually takes one to nine months to sell the book to a publisher. The publisher has to get approval for the acquisition by submitting it to a board. Then the manuscript goes through a development edit where changes are suggested, the writer dives back into the manuscript to make those changes, and then the whole kit-and-caboodle is given a brisk line editing. Galleys are then dispatched to writers who approve those line edits.

Meanwhile, the sales team is gearing up to sell units of the book to a dwindling number of bookstores. The PR team is dreaming up ways to promote the book to an audience with a dwindling attention span. Printers print and bind the books. Truck drivers must drive the books to bookstores or Amazon fulfillment centers.

All that to sell maybe 5,000 copies.

If bookstores keep circling the drain, readers and writers will suffer, even more than they’re suffering already. Writers, because only famous people sell books anymore. Readers, because it will get harder and harder to find exciting new books.

We’re accelerated particles moving toward an event horizon, a black hole so dense, nothing can escape its gravitational force field except the famous, the infamous, influencers with a huge social media platform, or a driver’s license that says E.L. James.

So how do we stop it?

I don’t know that we can. The world is changing, and publishing isn’t changing fast enough to keep up with it.

For writers like me who aren’t E.L. James, the challenge isn’t churning out book after book. It’s keeping the lights on while you churn out book after book. What that does is winnow out the number of writers to mostly those who can afford to write: trust fund babies, retirees, people with gainfully employed spouses. Writing 1-2 books a year takes time, energy, and brain power, none of which is available to you after a full day of work, whether that work is outside the house or herding children.

Lack of sleep is cumulative. If you manage to carve out an hour to write and end up falling asleep instead, welcome home, brother. We’re all asleep, too.

They don’t tell you this, by the way. In the death-grip autocracy of our American workaholic culture, we flog and punish ourselves for failing to write a masterpiece on the crowded, forty-five-minute train ride to work. It’s not our fault. Writing a book, composing a piece of music, painting a canvas, these things take time and space that few people can afford to give themselves these days. Frankly, that’s sad.

So, as a writer who lives on subsistence wages, toils in obscurity, faces daunting amounts of rejection, works in isolation, is rarely appreciated or praised, and is constantly beset by that gargoyle of every creative, namely massive amounts of self-doubt, why do I keep doing it?

I have a compulsive need to write.

That’s it.

That’s why I believe writers are born, not made. I’m not talking about talent. There are plenty of folks out there who, through study and effort, hone a talent. I mean those of us who continue to write, no matter what obstacles or discouragement we face.

We write because we have to write. It’s really that simple.

If you’re a writer who’s gone pro or is hoping to go pro, you need to ask yourself an important question: are you only committed to writing, or are you a compulsive writer? Because it is my deeply felt opinion that only those who suffer from an unshakable compulsion to write will survive in this business, especially now.

Writing is hard, even for professionals, maybe particularly for professionals. It requires a long apprenticeship. In the beginning, you’re not very good—and you don’t know enough to even know you’re not very good. More than eighty percent of published authors stop writing after they’ve produced three books. Only ten percent of published authors slash and burn their way to six books. Five percent make it to twelve.

If you can do anything else to make a living, you should. You know that. But if you’ve been either blessed or cursed with the compulsion to write, write you must. You have all my love, empathy, and respect.

In the immortal words of Charles Bukowski:

Just don’t expect to sell many copies.