My preorder of Nick Mamatas’s new book on writing, Starve Better: Surviving the Endless Horror of the Writing Life, showed up this week, bearing the dedication “To a future former bestseller”, which in my opinion was pretty much worth the price of the book. But that aside, this is not your average how-to-be-a-rich-and-famous-writer book and is exceptionally informative.
First, because if you are at all familiar with Mamatas and his writing style, you know that he’s blunt, opinionated and not given to telling people what they want to hear. This can be annoying if he in fact tells you something you’d rather not hear, but is very refreshing if you’ve ever gotten the feeling that vague, happyish advice about writing was perhaps not entirely truthful.
For example, here’s Mamatas on the belief that only a select few can actually make a full-time living as a writer:
It is true that only a very few writers do nothing but write; it is not true that they must have another job. Writers choose to have other jobs rather than live humbly. This brings us to the first hidden assumption involved in the question: writing isn’t a job, it is a middle-class profession that should earn the practitioner both petit-bourgeois status and a comfortable income.
A significant fraction of writers who have a day job or a side gig as a teacher could live on their writing; they just don’t want to, as it would mean a smaller house, a less pleasant neighborhood, fewer vacations, or less (perhaps even no) health insurance. That’s an entirely valid choice, of course. Nobody gets any artiste point for eating beans and living in a garret. But wanting to live comfortably is not the same as being unable to live on one’s writing.
Second, because the book is not (as most writing advice tends to be) focused on Writing That Novel, but instead focused on writing short stories and non-fiction articles. Shorter pieces can be finished faster, are easier to market and most importantly, bring in money faster; in the time it takes to write a single novel the writer can most likely produce and sell many shorter works, and possibly even sell them. A hundred dollars today to keep the lights on is better than a theoretical six-figure advance years from now.
Mamatas also talks about work that is profitable, but which most people who want to be writers likely wouldn’t think about or want any part of, unless they were driven by money, like writing term papers (very lucrative, apparently, and the chapter on this work has some exceptional insights into the market; no, the customers are not all bored overprivileged Ivy League kids who’d rather not waste precious kegger time on a term paper). He also warns away from markets that seem like a good idea but aren’t, like content mills.
The only disappointment was the chapter on POD and vanity publishers, which is admittedly many years out of date. It would have been interesting to see an updated take on new incarnations like Smashwords and Lulu.com, even though the underlying structure probably hasn’t changed enormously.
Highly recommended for anyone who would actually like to write and sell their writing. Not recommended for anyone who just wants to sigh about the novel they’re going to write “someday” or whose entire writing output consists of a couple of stories that got shelved after Asimov’s rejected them.
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