THE FREE LANCE

by Tabitha M. Powledge

Hitting the Books

Most of us yearn to write books, even though the market is heartless, even malevolent. Only 7,577 of the 114,487 US books published in 2001 were about science, according to R.R. Bowker statistics unearthed for the nasw-books listserv by Eric Bobinsky. And the figures were not much more encouraging in the boom year 2000: 8,464 science books out of 122,108 total.

The process—selling a proposal, writing the book, and promoting it—is a humiliating meat-grinder. Book-writing rarely makes financial sense. And yet . . .

The process is rotten for even the best and most fortunate among us. Robin Marantz Henig’s several books have gotten splendid reviews, and she has won a string of prizes and fellowships. Her most recent book, the lovely Mendel biography The Monk in the Garden, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. She’s now at work on a book about in vitro fertilization. I asked her what she would say to science writers who aspire to be authors.

She wrote, “The only way I get through the miseries of book writing—the low advances, the lousy publicists, the books never being in the bookstores, the ignorant reviews, and the crummy sales and the agony of the writing itself which you usually have to endure in complete isolation—is to realize that at least when I’m writing a book, I don’t have to write dumb magazine articles. I’ve finally, after seven books, almost gotten to the point where I don’t take the disappointments personally. Most of the time I feel lucky to be able to receive an almost-living wage to craft a piece of nonfiction I’ll be proud of. On bad days, though, I still wish I could figure out how to write a bestseller, and the hell with pride.”

It is possible, I suppose, that although publishing’s present is grim, its future could be rosy. See, for example, Jason Epstein’s Book Business. In his nearly 50 years in publishing, Epstein has gone from fair-haired boy (when he invented trade paperbacks in the form of Anchor Books) to grand old man with near-guru status. Book Business is mostly memoir, but also holds forth on the electronic future of books. (Skip the hardcover and read the Norton paperback, out this year, which has a new Preface and Afterword that expand on these ideas.)

Epstein forecasts street-corner ATM-like electronic vendors that will dispense quickly printed bound books on order from an immense electronic catalog—and in his imagination he plunks down these literary cornucopias not only in major Western cities but also in Ulan Bator. This will come about as what he calls “bewildered conglomerates” abandon publishing, allowing it to return to its roots as a cottage industry. There the noble writer will labor in the inky vineyard, along with dedicated editors and designers and book promoters, to create good books for salivating readers.

The list of What’s Wrong With This Disneyesque Picture might begin by asking whether even 17th-century publishing ever fit into this rhapsodic framework, and then go on to pose other impertinent questions—such as, with the Internet to hand, why do writers need publishers at all? If publishers consistently provided intelligent editing, along with careful proofreading and manuscript prep, and then made serious efforts to tell the world about their fine products, they would earn their keep. We all know how common that is. Sometimes I think the chief function of publishers is gatekeeping, conferring a sort of imprimatur that may help readers distinguish the superior explications of, say, NASW members from the daft, incoherent theories that spill out of vanity presses.

Well, let me not hex Epstein’s enchanting vision of those street-corner book machines. From his lips to God’s ear. Back in this universe, however, getting your book born is pretty much fraught. On the other hand, if we had any sense, we wouldn’t be writers in the first place, would we? Which is why, even in the face of much evidence that books are a bad idea from beginning to end, we yearn.

Nonfiction

That yearning is why there was such a crowd in the big auditorium for last February’s NASW workshop session on book writing. It was organized by NASW treasurer Laura van Dam, senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Co., who was accompanied by agent Jill Kneerim, of the Hill and Barlow Agency, in Boston. The workshop covered both literary nonfiction about science—Laura’s specialty—and self-help books and collaborations with scientific and medical experts, Kneerim’s area of expertise.

Van Dam emphasized storytelling as a nonfiction book’s core structure. In the book world, she said, a good story is one that is too complicated and full of diverse ideas to get into a magazine article. Kneerim offered examples. Dava Sobel’s Longitude tells a story, whereas Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel presents ideas. The story sort of book generally does better, Kneerim agreed. But it has to be the right story, one that captures some topic of larger interest.

A literary narrative revolves around a few characters, and description functions to help develop the story, Van Dam said. A literary narrative is not just good reporting, but must also focus on analysis and thoughtful perspective. “Read, read, read to see what good narrative is about,” she advised. Think of the audience, she said, as a bright relative who is not very interested in science—an NPR kind of person.

“The terrible reality is that it is far easier to sell books by experts than books by journalists,” Van Dam said. Collaborating with an expert, perhaps on a how-to book, may be one way into the system for a first-time author—but it can also mean a hard sell because two authors need a much bigger advance.

Kneerim described the writer’s job in collaborating with an expert this way: Capture what the expert knows, but incorporate other material, too. You may be able to find your own collaborator, or an agent or publisher may put you together with one. She outlined the financial nuts and bolts of forging a writer-expert collaboration. “The deal is cast before I take it to the publisher,” Kneerim said. The writer must figure out how long the book will take and how much money will be required to live on for that time. Kneerim advised writers to seek a plausible year’s pay. A typical arrangement would be for the writer to get $5,000 to $10,000 to write a proposal, then $50,000 for writing the manuscript, plus a share of royalties that might range between 20-50 percent. “You’d be unlikely to own the copyright; you’d do it as a work for hire,” she explained. That’s why the writer would not sign the contract with the publisher and might or might not get his or her name on the book.

Before you hit the keyboard, you should know what the competition’s like. Kneerim’s agency gets about 30 proposals a day. Van Dam gets 30-50 proposals a month. She buys about 15 a year. So best case and rounded off, your chance of getting your proposal accepted appears to be well under five percent.

Fiction

Competition among aspiring fiction writers is even more brutal because there are so many of them. But, in contrast to nonfiction books about science, at least the fiction market is growing, even in harder times: 15,867 books published in 2001, up from 14,617 in 2000, according to Bowker. The science writer might be thinking especially of turning to genre fiction, where it is a little easier to break in than with literary fiction. One of the February workshops tackled that topic too. It featured Jessica Speart, who has turned science and environmental writing for magazines into book writing via a series of mysteries featuring a fictional U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agent as her detective.

It became clear fairly quickly that the “workshop” was in fact a promotion for Speart’s books, for sale at a table placed handily just outside the door. Speart cheerfully pointed this out, noting that authors must be shameless, gritting their teeth and hawking their own books with ploys of this kind.

Speart explained that some fiction writers make up everything, but she has a different answer for that idiotic cocktail-party question, “Where do you get your ideas?” She turns fact into fiction, spending months in the field doing the same sort of research she did when she was writing magazine pieces on environmental topics. The research is essential for building her incidents and characters, although she disguises them enough to avoid lawsuits. “If I weren’t doing this research, I’d never be able to think of this stuff,” she said. She sidestepped financial specifics, conceding only that there wasn’t much money in what she does: “Some people do need a second job.” But there’s a big plus to writing fiction, rather than articles: “It’s an advantage not to have to be unbiased. I can tell the story the way it should be told.”

The workshop led me to wonder about science writers and science fiction. That would seem like a natural pairing. We are better informed about what science is up to than most writers, and we daily encounter mind-bending examples of truth being stranger than fiction. But I know of only one NASW member who writes science fiction. That’s Jeff Hecht, author of many nonfiction books about lasers and fiber optics, and New Scientist’s correspondent in Boston. So far Jeff has written only short stories, averaging less than one a year.

“I’ve considered doing fiction books, but have never had the time to get one together. I want to, but making money takes priority, and I’m not that fast with fiction,” he told me wistfully. He also pointed out that fiction writers are up against even more formidable obstacles than those of us who deal in facts.

“First, fiction publishers almost inevitably want a full book to read (many will take the first few chapters and an outline from established writers, but some won’t). They usually sit on a manuscript for months, and I’ve heard horror stories of years. Second, you need either an agent or a contact with the publisher to get anyone to open the manuscript. You don’t have to for nonfiction.” (I would argue that nonfiction authors need agents too, but let’s not quibble.)

“Third, the division of the market between short and long works is very much the inverse of nonfiction. The handful of surviving SF magazines are struggling for survival, and the best pays 10 cents a word. (There is a Web site that pays 20 cents). Books may work out to be the same or less per word, but my perception is that the market is easier.”

Electronica

Jeff is an experimental subject in a pretty intriguing project that may eventually prove important for our financial lives. He sells his previously published fiction online for a pittance (.45 to $1 per story, depending on length), at a site called Alexandria Digital Literature (www.alexlit.com). And he’s a teeny bit optimistic. He reports:

“I think there should be a future for selling SF short stories on line, but we aren’t there yet, and have a long way to go. Typically I’ve received a few dollars per six-month royalty period, enough to take my wife out for an ice cream cone if we both ordered small cones. I’m sure better-known writers do better, but I doubt anyone is earning much money. People aren’t paying for fiction, not just because they’re used to free content, but also because it isn’t easy to pay pennies. Advertisers don’t seem interested, either. And, to be honest, the state of the short-fiction market is poor all over.

“Things may differ with nonfiction, but I doubt many people are making money with online publications (excluding pornography)—they’re just losing less than they would if they had to pay printing and postage charges,” Jeff argues.

I would argue that too, but I cherish the very occasional counterexample. Epstein’s street-corner book machines may be a fantasy, but services that will print existing books to order have been in existence for a few years now, and at least one of us is a fan. That would be Joel Shurkin, long-time freelance science writer, author, and now a writer at Johns Hopkins. He reports:

“I have one book on iUniverse, Invisible Fire, the smallpox book. It is through the Authors Guild Back-In-Print series for books that are out of print for which the author has regained copyright. It has sold several hundred copies to my amazement and I’ve had several nice checks as a result. I’m pleased enough to get another one up there if I find the time.”

Shurkin republished his fine book about smallpox on iUniverse (www.iuniverse.com) in the spring of 2001. We all know what happened in the fall. While people were still trying to come to grips with September 11, the postal anthrax attacks awakened them to yet another horror: the reality of biological weapons based on virulent microbes. Smallpox was at the top of everybody’s list, and Shurkin’s book was there, available literally on demand, ready to slake the thirst for information about a bug that everyone thought long gone.

Brilliant timing like this is not a typical publishing story. But I’m dreaming that what Joel reports is the tiniest of bellwethers, suggesting that electrons will some day alter conditions for marketing books about science as radically as they have transformed the selling of articles. Copyright disputes and other battles make it clear this transformation has its down side. But on balance, it’s been good for our work and good for our businesses. Maybe it will be good for our books, too.

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Tabitha M. Powledge’s book, Your Brain: How You Got It and How It Works (Scribner’s, 1994), has recently been remaindered. She can be reached at tam@nasw.org.

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