cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dissecting the book advance issue Today I warily re-enabled my social media accounts. The bad stuff seems to have blown over. I had a lot of really nice messages from total strangers thanking me for my coverage of the whole missing person turned murder turned suicide case. That meant a lot to hear. Somehow, that whole thing fucked me up worse than August 12th did. Clearing a man of murder feels like an empirically good thing. It tears me up pretty fucking badly to hear criticism from her family about my publicizing the fact that Molly committed suicide. That hurts A LOT, especially because I started on this thing because her mother asked me to. But what the fuck else was I supposed to do? The fact that it was suicide was the exact thing that cleared Anson of murder. I couldn't sit on that. I had to report on it. Which I did, both on social media and in a news story on public radio. What the fuck am I that I even find myself in these positions? This was just one weird week from start to finish. Just one week. The city is asking to settle my FOIA lawsuit against them over 8/12 stuff. So that could be nice. Some details to hammer out still. And I probably have Ob@ma's badass lit agent representing me starting next week, which keeps my plan for the new book on track. And PBS wants me to do some kind of shit with them related to my film. I have an assignment for Rewire that I was supposed to be working on for the last few days and just haven't been. Why? I don't know. No good excuse. Just feeling overwhelmed with the whole Molly thing. It feels really good to have this agent on board for the new book. Like, it seems like this should be a really important book that publishers and the public should care about, and which should be worth something in terms of an advance that I can actually live off of. But I hadn't shown the book proposal and chapter summary to anyone except Kerri, so I'm working with zero feedback until now. This agent is a very big fucking deal. If she thinks it is good then that really means something. After the slow shittiness of December, I started to doubt whether I had anything or if I have a reason to exist. Publishing, film and TV all pretty much shut down between Thanksgiving and New Years so I was getting zero movement or feedback on any project. And I was broke that whole time, so mostly I'm sitting around destitute and isolated and thinking that everything about my life is completely stupid and pointless. I go from these heights of doing things at an extremely high level -- journalism and books and TV and film-making and radio and public speaking -- to sitting around without money for food and wishing I was dead. The fact that this particular agent wants to represent me means that she has some belief that this book can get a significant advance. Most books lose money. Independent of that, most books get advances of only a few thousand dollars. Spitballing, I would guess that 95% of book advances are for less than $3k. What I need is around $50k, because I don't have a spouse supporting me or a trust fund or a non-writing day job. The agent I am dealing with probably gets 50% of her negotiated advances of five figures and 40% of them are six figures. So I'm working with an agent and a book proposal that should put me in the five to six figure range. God I fucking hope so. I'm trying to get a book advance that would probably put me among the top 1% of advances, and if I'm offered less than that then I don't think I can take the offer. But I think that I'm being reasonable. In the first place, this would be the only book about what happened on August 12th here in Ch@rlottesville. And it would be written with the highest possible authority. I witnessed everything. At times, I was accidentally part of the story. I have extremely good journalistic credentials and happened to witness every key moment of the story before, during and after the pivotal historic event of 2017 America. That should matter. This would likely be a book that millions of people want to read. In the second place, I can't write this book without an advance of around $50k or better. Usually you get it in two installments. Half up front, and the other half on acceptance of the manuscript. This will probably take me 3-5 months to write the first draft. That's working full time all along. Plus, consider the fact that this also represents months of work beforehand. Showing up at every rally, protest, hearing, etc. Conducting interviews. On 8/12, I got gassed or pepper-sprayed 5 times. I was teargassed twice at the KKK rally. People tried to kill me by cutting my brake lines in October. Just in the last month, I've probably spent at least 50 hours just reading government reports and legal documents. I'm in the middle of a lawsuit against the city and the state for documents about this whole thing. My point is that its an insane amount of work. Someone can write a first novel after work and in weekends and accept a $3k book advance and that's a nice deal. I can't take something like that. I have to provide for myself and two kids for months while writing this thing, and the insane suffering and effort I have been through before this point deserves some sort of consideration as well. $25k to live on for five months or so while writing the book seems pretty fucking reasonable. Then there is the wait while the editors go over the manuscript and they send it back with notes and you have to spend a few months at that stage. And when it launches, there's a few months of promotional work. Generally, you are looking at at least a year or work for one non-fiction book. Demanding a minimum of $50k for that is pretty fucking reasonable -- especially in a place where a month's rent for a 3 bedroom (I have 2 kids) is around $1600 a month. I don't think I'm being greedy -- I'm just asking to survive at the minimal level where someone could actually produce this book without being distracted by hunger or lack of electricity. And yet angling for a book advance that would allow my kids and I to have a roof over our heads and food (no health insurance at this price, of course), is absurdly still in the top 2% or so of all book advances in the publishing industry. 1:07 a.m. - 2018-01-06 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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