In all likelihood, the majority of you whose roving eyes have settled upon this page already know a thing or two about the vagaries of the publishing biz.  As for you newbies to the trade, please allow me the privilege of disabusing you of a few peskily persistent myths.

First of all, most writers, even the published ones, don’t earn a decent wage from their labors, let alone find themselves at liberty to buy up half of Scotland like J.K. Rowling.  Steven Levitt, that microeconomic bon vivant and co-author of Freakonomics would no doubt agree that, like the trade in crack, the publishing industry functions as a kind of tournament.  Most participants are willing to toil away at substandard reward for two main reasons: one, to bask in the prestige that emanates from the glamorous world of letters, and two, in the hopes of someday not only surviving the gladiatorial combat of the marketplace, but gloriously ascending to a platform of even more prestige, and with that, the phat remuneration that comes to the major leaguers.  Yet very, very few ever do actually blow up.

The majority of critically acclaimed literary novelists are forced to grudgingly accept posts at the ever proliferating creative writing programs of the Ivory Tower in order to scrape by.  Paradoxically, to make ends meet, they are obliged to coddle the delusions of an ever surging wave of wanna-be literati--and thereby help to make the competition for a readership all the more stiff.  Some may genuinely enjoy teaching craft, nurturing the ineffable that is writerly talent.  They are fortunate--and probably more mature than the rest of us.  Others do it because it’s a cush gig and garners them a ready-made and captive audience of sycophants.

But even these positions are few and far between in relation to the massive pool of pretenders to the precious-in-their-scarcity academic chairs.  And the applicants to such posts, like applicants to the programs they front, face stiff competition indeed--magnified by the cruel fact that they are just as subject to the fickle moorings of subjective judgment in this pond as they are in the wider seas of publication.  Just how does a program's hiring cabal decide which MFA with three or four solid publishing credits out of the pile gets that one open job?

Another myth: books don’t sell themselves, even the ones put out by high-profile houses.  Most titles are designated mid-list, get a formulaic run through the publicity mill, and are then unceremoniously left to fend for themselves in the cacophony of the market.  Authors are inevitably responsible for mustering their own marketing campaigns.  Mid-listers are even advised to contract a PR champion on their own, a savvy pro who will toot the author’s signature fanfare amongst the bannered tents of the media.  Still, it is easier to win Lotto than to get on Oprah.  In this respect, an author might be better served by publishing with a small house where each title represents more of a stake in the concern’s overall welfare.

I’ll return to this topic at another time.  Suffice it to say, though, that publishing is one tough racket.  Your mother, stick-in-the-mud that she is, has probably already tried to burst your bubble-gum-fantasy of becoming the next Zadie Smith.  A thousand may have the talent and even the perspicacity of a Zadie Smith.  Nine hundred and ninety-nine of them lack her luck.  My advice: keep your day job.  Enjoy the day-to-day discovery of whatever it is you set your heart and hands to.  And think long-term.  As far as creative writing goes, you may be forced to subsist on an ascetic’s diet of silence, exile, and cunning for some time to come.

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