A professor for one of my graduate writing classes is an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house.  He’s worked with some pretty big-name authors.  Last week we took the entire class time for a Q&A session about the publishing industry.  We’re all in this great program, focusing on our writing and how to make it better, but no one is really talking about how to market our ideas, what to do once we’ve got something good.

Many interesting questions came up during the two-hour session (Should one use a pen name if they want to write something commercial before writing something literary? Can a successful author switch genres mid-career? How do you find an agent who really gets you?) until someone finally broke the ice:  ”What kind of advances do authors get paid these days?”

A weight was lifted off everyone’s shoulders. After frankly stating that very very few authors will get the big advances of the last ten years, our professor told us a story about Junot Diaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apparently two publishers had a bidding war over Diaz’s first book, until finally, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), offered Diaz a $150,000 advance for two books, guaranteeing themselves first rights to whatever he ended up writing next.  The other publisher gave up at that point, not being able to outbid such a high figure.  Well, they probably regret their decision now given how wildly successful Diaz’s two books have been.

Most of us aren’t going to have such a high-stakes bidding war for our first book, let alone any bidding war at all.  Diaz is a pretty lucky (and talented) guy.  Given all this, it was refreshing to find his recent admission that even he — a Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has had problems churning out good work.  So even if he’s successful on the whole making-money-off-your-writing thing, he still struggles with the whole actually-doing-the-writing part: Read more »