NSFWG member Rod Rees on becoming a writer...
I’m thinking of declaring a jihad against actuaries.
Bastards.
My theory is that they’re in league with the
government to stop me retiring. I’m getting to feel like Tantalus: every time
the fruits of a pension come within reach they change the pensionable age and
I’m back to square one looking for something to do that will provide me with
three square a day.
And then, of course, when you could actually use an
actuary – professionally rather than for fertiliser that is – there’s nary one
of the buggers around. And, boy, the day I decided it would be a good idea to
write a novel was sure as hell one when I could have used some advice of a
statistical nature.
Gotta tell you, if deciding to write a novel is a
dumb idea, then deciding to write one when you’re at the wrong end of your
fifties is a really dumb idea.
Fifty is a funny age. It’s the Wednesday of your
lifetime: too far from the fun-packed weekend of your youth and too far from
payday ever to stand a chance. It’s the age – as Leonard Cohen so pithily
reminds us – when we begin to ache in the places where we used to play. It most
certainly is not an age to embark on novel writing. But then I suppose there’s
no good age to start writing because it is – both actually and actuarially – a
stupid occupation.
Okay, you need to be stupid to start writing a book.
But read any guide to ‘writing a book’ and the word ‘determination’ features
prominently, this being the trait considered necessary to finish writing a book. But in my case you can substitute
‘determination’ for ‘enraged naivety’. I was prompted to write ‘Dark
Charismatic’ after watching the travesty of a re-imagining of the Jekyll and
Hyde story that was the BBC’s ‘Jekyll’. Now although I love and revere Stevenson’s
tale I nevertheless accept that like many things approaching their one hundred
and twenty-fifth birthday (me, for example) it could certainly handle a wash
and brush up. Unfortunately as wash and brush ups go the BBC’s effort was more
akin to a really good sand blasting in that it stripped all the good things
away and left ... well, not much actually. And like many before me, as I sat
there aghast watching this twaddle, the thought crossed my mind, ‘I could do
better than that’.
Fool! Such hubris!
So I sat down and wrote ... and wrote and wrote and
wrote. Two hundred and twenty thousand words to be exact, each word of them
carefully, lovingly and laboriously crafted. And the final two were ‘The End’.
Now here I pause to proffer my first statistic, namely,
the one regarding how many books once commenced are ever completed. My guess –
and I suspect this is an amazingly generous estimate – is that no more than one
in a hundred neophyte writers ever stagger across the finishing line. Around
the country there must be millions of first, second and third chapters
gathering dust in drawers or languishing forgotten on laptops (and long may
they remain there; who needs competition). And as support for this contention I
am willing to bet, dear reader, that you too are the proud possessor of an
unfinished novel.
So remember that statistic: only one in a hundred
books is ever finished.
Having written the bloody thing I was troubled by a
rather belated thought: what do I do with it now? And the answer is, of course,
get an agent. Oh, you can do it yourself, sending your unsolicited manuscript
to publishers directly but you might as well spend your time attempting to
roast snow. Believe me, nobody in the publishing world will touch unsolicited
manuscripts. They’re the tsetse fly of the literary world: everyone’s heard of
them but no one wants to come in contact with them. So I googled ‘agents +
science fiction + fantasy’, chose the three I thought most receptive – that is they
had kind faces – and sent off the first three chapters of my magnum opus. And
waited...and waited...and waited. One outright (or is that outwrite) rejection
in the form of a platitudinous standard letter, one rejection because ‘the end
of the book was obvious’ – the guy must be prescient or something because I
didn’t know what the ending was until a week before I sent it off – and –
hurray! – one acceptance.
So back to those statistics. In later conversation
with my agent (get me: ‘my agent’) he advised me that during his time in the
business he’d received something north of six thousand submissions from
would-be writers and as he’s currently got a stable (or should that be a pen)
of forty-three authors that comes out at a newby having something like one
chance in a hundred and fifty of securing an agent.
Remember that: you’ve one chance in a hundred and
fifty of finding an agent.
So ‘Dark Charismatic’ was sent out ... and every
publisher and his father rejected it. The general feeling was that there was
too much sex in it. My fault: in retrospect what I’d written was an over-long
aide-memoire, something to refer to if Alzheimer’s kicked in and I found myself
with some free time on a Saturday night. So what do I do now? As I’d just spent
a year wasting my time, writing unpublishable crap and earning precisely zip, the
answer was obvious: I’d write another book! I think this sort of behaviour is
classifiable under Obsessive Compulsive Disorders. Anyway, thus was born ‘The
Demi-Monde’. Another year drifted by but this time when my agent pitched the
book it was taken up by a publisher.
Remember that: there’s only one chance in two of your
agent being able to find a publisher for your book.
Okay, so you’ve got a publisher now, so let’s have a
look at the sales prospects for your master work. Somewhere between seventy
thousand new fiction titles hit the bookshelves every year in the UK and the
average sales of each are somewhere between one thousand and three thousand
copies. That’s average, folks, so there are some seriously shit sales needed to
compensate for the stellar success of such luminaries as Dan Brown and Stieg
Larsson. No matter, these average sales, by my calculations, will net the
author between £500 and £1,500. That’s after two years bloody hard work (and
don’t forget you’ll also have to go through the publisher’s editing process
which can be enormously time consuming, especially if your grammar is as rotten
as mine ... or, possibly, mine is): that works out at about 10p an hour.
Minimum wage it ain’t. It makes misdirecting customers at B&Q look like a
gig from heaven.
So what are your chances of your book generating
something approaching a reasonable return on your investment of time – say £30,000
a year? My guess is that maybe two and a half thousand titles turn that sort of
profit for their authors: one in thirty.
Remember that: one book in thirty turns an okay
profit.
If I recall my statistics – and those lectures were a
bloody long time ago – the chance of you finishing a book, finding an agent,
having it published and turning a reasonable profit is about one in forty
thousand. Or about the same chance you run of being struck by a renegade meteor
... on a Sunday ... in Slough.
That’s why, in my humble opinion, the chief quality
needed by a would-be writer isn’t determination, or creativity, or style, or a
wonderful plot idea ... it’s stupidity. No matter how you slice it, writing’s a
mug’s game.
But to paraphrase Lloyd in ‘Dumb and Dumber’: ‘One
chance in forty thousand? So you’re telling me I’ve got a chance’.
What do actuaries know anyway?
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