I can't write a damn word, and Art Garfunkel is staring at me.
Well, not Art himself. Just his image, peering at me from the cover of the Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album. Paul Simon's altogether more sinister visage is at least blocked off by the record sleeve, so I'm left with Art gazing quizzically at me, like he's daring me to make fun of his haircut.
I wouldn't, you know. The man's done a duet with Amy Grant. Clearly, he's suffered enough.
So I'm a novelist now. A real novelist, even. None of this mooning about telling everyone what a great idea for a book I've got, or secretively typing on a single manuscript for twenty-odd years because I can't bring myself to decide on an ending. No, I'm an honest-to-God novelist, with reviews and multiple books in print and everything. The Library of Congress has my deathless prose in its moldering grip. Years from now, when I'm dust and the last Internet site devoted to selling boxer shorts with my name on it is long gone, someone will still be able to shamble through the stacks and find a little piece of me, immortalized.
That, of course, is where the problem comes in. Because every lit major in the world (not to mention two-thirds of the population of the greater New York metropolitan area) knows, just knows, that once they sell their brilliant novel, all their problems will wash away. The money will flow in like booze, the booze will flow in like money, and Oprah will ask you to sit in her lap and tell her all about the naughty scene on page two-hundred sixty four.
Well, I'm here to tell you it ain't like that. It ain't like that at all.
Now, the publishing industry loves to float stories of promising young writers plucked from obscurity and handed huge advances for their unvarnished brilliance. Admittedly, this does happen occasionally, in much the same way that large asteroids occasionally smack into the seabed off the Yucatan peninsula. It's impressive and it makes a lot of noise, but you can't set your watch by it. The rest of us are down here in the trenches, toiling on Yet Another 45-volume mystery series starring an alcoholic nun-polisher and his wisecracking Dalmatian-breeder sidekick. Or a tale of two-fisted adventure. Or a touching story of dysfunctional family life on the Maine coast that has the misfortune not to be issued in trade paperback. (The story, not the family or the Maine coast.)
These books sell their few thousand copies, fill space on the shelf, and then quietly go away after 60 days when the chain bookstores do their automatic restocking cycle (which, I might add, can best be described as aggressively autocannibalistic). The author gets a few bucks, hopefully earns out a meager advance, and goes on to write another book without quitting the day job. The really unlucky ones have contracts that screw with the advance on their next book if the current one doesn't earn out; such unfortunate souls are in a position roughly similar to that of Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance. They may get out of the deal one of these years, but they're not going to be too spry when they do.
At least, however, the work they do is theirs. They own it, they own the characters and the situations, and if God willing they catch a break, they can re-sell the rights and hopefully introduce the book to a whole new audience.
But not me. You see, there's one sort of novelist who doesn't get to keep his stuff, and that's the poor bastard who's writing to a licensed property.
Now, writing to a license isn't all bad. Some of the publishers take care of their people very well (if my sources can be believed, a single Star Wars novel earns the author, straight up, more than I've made in five years of writing professionally, and that's without royalties), there's a built-in audience, and you're probably going to get at least some marketing. None of this is bad, not in the slightest, and there certainly are some fairly reputable authors – Michael Stackpole, Alan Dean Foster, Vonda MacIntyre, et alia – who've done quite nicely by the licensed property market.
But you don't own the work. You're playing in someone else's sandbox, someone else's universe, a setting with some very clearly defined rules, characters and situations.
"So what's so bad about that?" you say. "Makes it easier, right?"
Wrong. Because no matter how careful you are, no matter how much research you do, you're going to slip. You're going to describe Romulan ale as the wrong shade of blue, or the markings on the Inner Sphere mech wrong, or (horror of horrors!) bend the rules of the roleplaying game you're writing the tie-in novel to.
And that's when the scary people come out on the warpath. Because, you see, by missing some tiny detail of continuity, you have invalidated their sixteen-year campaign, and that is an insult that is not to be borne. It's an act of premeditated warfare on their fun, a direct slap at they aggrieved loyalties. (The fact that you wouldn't know this kid's game from the 1912 Democratic Convention doesn't matter. It's all about him.) Never mind that maybe you were given the OK to stretch the rules. Never mind that maybe you were working from a pre-release version of the property's bible, and things have changed since that mammoth pile of pages landed in your lap. And never mind that maybe, just maybe, you decided that it might make a better book if your characters didn't refer to page numbers in the source material every time they did something more complicated than pick their noses. Because what you're doing is not yours. It's theirs, and if it doesn't meet their expectations, it's a worse betrayal than any the little red haired girl ever gave Charlie Brown. It doesn't matter if those expectations were unattainable - the book isn't just a book. It's an extension of something they identify with, and any mucking with the property is mucking with that identity. And that's dangerous. You'll never see a review reading "this book was OK, but the characters were a little weak." You'll see "This book sucked rocks, and I'm going to the author's house to stew his pet rabbit" instead. And I don't even own a pet rabbit.
And again, let me specify that this gig ain't all bad, even if the timelines are short and the word counts are tight. You can have a lot of fun romping around the troll-infested hinterlands, having your elfy mages doff their pointy hats and use magic missile spells to give rampaging orcs a bad case of eldritch hotfoot. You can even drop in Kierkegaard references to your heart's delight, or rip off your plot from The Revenger's Tragedy and shout a silent "huzzah!" when someone on alt.sf.written.by.hacks figures it out. But sooner or later, you realize that it's not yours. The transaction's a little rawer, the veneer of art-for-art's sake is gone. And while there is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with writing for money and doing so well – I'm proud to be a good craftsman, and recompense for work well done is part of the bargain – there is something vaguely disillusioning about the moment when that amniotic sac of artistry gets ripped open and you find yourself dumped on the market floor. They really do work hard to drum all that "art for art's sake" stuff into you all the way through school, and the simple fact is that for most of us, it just doesn't apply. And you can react to this in one of two ways – you can freak out over how you're piddling away your talent (which you're not too sure you really have) on this dreck, or you can take a deep breath, remind yourself that people like what you're doing, and write the next goddamn book.
Incidentally, when offered my latest three-novel tie-in deal, I discussed my ambivalent feelings with several "real" authors I know. They're all extraordinarily talented people who've landed some of the highest awards their fields have to author, and all of them told me in no uncertain terms to stop kvetching and write the damn books. A writer, you see, writes.
Of course, once you've written the damn book, you have to promote it. In the best of all possible worlds, that means going on a book tour, staying at lavish hotels and chatting with the press over thin slices of Emmenthaler on Triscuit before being swept off to a book signing at some chi-chi bookshop that's decorated entirely in orange taffeta and wicker. In my world, it means constantly checking amazon.com and the like to make sure they're actually giving me credit for having written my own books. Amazon originally gave me credit for my first novel, then took it away and gave it to the woman who'd written the excerpted blurb in the back, then gave it back to me after I sent a rather pointed email, and then to make up for the aggravation listed my next two without my name at all. Each of these incidents sparked a small conniption of the sort Bill Bixby used to go through every week on ABC. It got fixed, eventually – it always does – but the next day it would be another store, or another chain.
This sort of behavior goes hand in hand with something every author does (at least those of us who still drive our own cars) and no one admits to. We all cruise the local stores and check for our books. If they're there, great1! We surreptitiously place them prominently, an effort which is invariably noticed (and undone) by the store staff. If the book's not there, we go over to the information desk, all casual-like, and ask "Do you have Elflords of Sheboygan, by Shecky Lefkowitz?" If they do, the next step is to casually mention who the author is.
Bookstore clerks, incidentally, are used to this crap, and are not impressed by authors of less gravitas than Senor Stephen King.
If the book's not there, however, there's an awkward moment of hemming and hawwing, followed by a desperate, whiny, "Why not?" This is also followed by the revelation of the author's identity which, if it is possible to do so, impresses the clerk even less. This tends to come back to haunt you, by the way, when you've finally talked the manager of the local B&N into having you do a signing, and said employee is put in charge of the whole affair. Inevitably, he'll place you at the back behind the kiddie books, and position you so that the only people who can hear you discuss precisely how you came up with your brain-munching demons are the four-year-olds in the next aisle and their very displeased parents. (Mom and Dad get more displeased if the kids actually think it's cool. Trust me on this one. I know.)
There's also the comp copy ritual. In a perfect world, the publisher has a list of influential reviewers who automatically get copies of your book before it comes out. The transaction is simple: They get the book for free, and they read and review it, if they feel it's worth the space. That's the theory; in reality any reputable reviewer is going to get flooded in more books than he can count, and there's no way he can review them all. (Even if he could, most editors are generally fairly stingy with column inches. The science fiction/horror book reviewer isn't going to get a yard and a half to fill in most publications, any more than the Ronco Egg Scrambler's going to get advertised during the Super Bowl.) So the reviewer picks and chooses the books he reviews, and the rest pass gently into the night2. And if yours is among the passing, well, sooner or later the publisher decides to stop wasting postage, and it falls on you to try to get your comp copies into the right hands. Fortunately, the postage is tax-deductible.
In the end, though, all you can do is wait. Sooner or later you're spending more on driving (or flying) around to push the book than your book can ever possibly earn you. Sooner or later you just have to let it sit on the shelf, and hopefully people will take it off the shelf with malicious intent to purchase. You scan the net for reviews, you send copies where you can, and when necessary, you sidle up to people scanning the shelves and say, "I hear this one's really good."
Sometimes, they even buy it. They listen to you, pull it off the shelf before the clerk can re-shelve it back with the romance novels, and haul it off to the cash register. Then they take it home, they read it, and they tell their friends about it.
One copy at a time.
That's all I can tell Art Garfunkel right now. I hope he's listening.
