By this circuitous route of turning down dazzling job offers from three of America’s finest publishers—Macmillan, Curtis, the Digest—because I felt I had a chance of becoming a writer, I set forth on the perilous road of the free lance. Of ten who attempt this venture, nine fail, because to succeed one requires equal parts of talent, ideas, fortitude and luck. I was aware at the time I made this daring choice that I had just turned down three splendid salaries, each higher than the one before, so as I started my work it could not be said that I was doing it for money.
Then a quiet miracle happened. Because I was able to touch on some nerve in the reading public, my books were accepted widely, and in all countries, so that without my ever being aware of exactly how it had happened I was catapulted into the high finance aspects of publishing.
It has always seemed to me that the general public, and even many informed people in the book trade itself, fail to appreciate the magnitude of what it means financially to be the author of a fantastically successful book.
Let us follow the experiences of an imaginary writer, Tim Jones, from a little town in Kansas, who has written four rather good novels that he couldn’t sell, then two that were published by Galaxy Hall in New York and received good notices but no sales. His editor has been convinced since reading his first short stories in the little magazines, which pay nothing but do showcase beginners, that he has a real talent. Somewhat against the advice of older editors in her firm, she has insisted that Jones, despite his early failures, get one final advance: ‘One of these times he’s bound to break through.’
As soon as she finishes reading the word-processed pages of his new work she knows that Tim has made the big leap. Ignited by her enthusiasm, which fellow editors endorse after quick scanning of the manuscript, she rushes copies of the work to magazine editors, book clubs, readers for motion-picture companies, paperback houses and representatives of European publishers. And this is what can happen to a good book supported by an editor who launches it with expertise:
Grudging advance two years ago $ 10,000
Royalty of 10 % on first 5,000 copies, 12.5 % on the next 5,000 copies, then 15 % of $17.50-per-copy price on first printing of 180,000 copies 465,938
Later rush printing of 490,000 copies 1,286,250
Author’s share of advances from foreign publishers 185,000
Book-of-the-Month Club main selection—author’s share 110,000
Prepublication to magazines and newspapers 20,000
Sales to motion pictures with small royalty on later profits 900,000
Results of auctions among competing paperback houses, advances against later royalties, half-share of $800,000 400,000
Royalties from third Galaxy Hall printing of 350,000 additional copies 918,750
Later royalties on extra European printings 169,650
Unexpected collateral income, various sources such as newspaper articles on book, speeches, commercial 52,000
$ 4,507,588
So Tim Jones, after a protracted apprenticeship, finds himself with a best-seller and an income of more than $4.5 million, from which he must pay his agent the standard 10 percent, leaving him an astonishing $4,056,829, a good deal of which he will hand over to the Internal Revenue Service, as he should. Each of the individual items listed above has been equaled or surpassed by some book in recent years, but it would be misleading to suggest that Tim’s hypothetical bonanza has often been reached. Some books have come close, but not many and none of mine.
The first thing to say about such figures is that they are indecent, not because they are out of line with what a good baseball player or a popular singing star makes, for they are not, but because when a few lucky writers receive such outlandish rewards, they deprive a host of worthy writers from earning the more modest sums to which they are entitled, and which would enable them to earn a decent living. Today’s boom-or-bust rule in publishing—spectacular rewards for a few, niggardly returns for the many, including some of our finest writers—must prove deleterious to the normal growth of American culture and personally destructive to aspiring writers, who otherwise might constitute the next generation of distinguished literary figures. Things are badly out of balance.
I have realized for two decades that I am one of the worst offenders, for I have enjoyed an almost unbroken series of best-sellers, some of them on the list for months and even years, and although most have fallen far below Tim’s dazzling figures, I have obviously earned substantial sums and have had to grapple with the propriety of accepting them.
From what I have said about my background and my painfully acquired attitudes toward money, it should be obvious that I would handle these unexpected and unsought sums in ways peculiar to my upbringing and my personal habits. The following facts are relevant:
I have never been obsessed with money, nor sought it avidly.
About half the books I’ve written have not been best-sellers, nor were they intended to be. They have dealt with restricted or even arcane subjects that could never conceivably have gained popular acceptance, and several of them were so clearly noncommercial that I had to help pay production costs.
I have never once in my entire publishing life discussed royalty rates or size of the first printing or advertising budget. Nor have I ever sought cocktail parties for the press or other such amenities; I have been honored at many when others insisted and have sometimes appreciated them but have more often been ill at ease or embarrassed.
A typical business phone call from my agent Owen Laster concerning financial details lasts about three minutes at most: ‘Jim, Random insists they can’t go any higher, considering the increased cost of paper and the length of your manuscript,’ to which I say ‘O.K.’
Year in, year out I receive directly or from my agent about four major inquiries a week about writing projects, some gratifying beyond any dreams I might have had as a boy, and always I say: ‘Sounds good. You handle it.’
Now I am not so naive as to think that negotiations are as simple as I try to keep them at my end. I know that Laster works diligently and imaginatively to protect my interests, and hence his own. If it takes me only minutes to accept arrangements he has made in principle with Random, I remember that in some intricate cases it has taken him and Random more than a year to hammer out details regarding new adjuncts to publishing like audio books or cable television. I have proceeded with very large contracts after only a telephone handshake, and never have I goaded Owen or expressed dismay when he later found himself in a stalemate. Often a final contract, not necessarily from Random, will run to fifteen pages, and I can never recall having read one, not even from Random, from start to finish, nor have I bothered to take note of the provisions. Almost never have I known what I was being paid and a week after filing the papers I could not possibly recall what the terms were.
Some two dozen times in my life other people working with me—publishers, producers, Hollywood—have had to go to Owen and ask him, because of adverse business conditions, to beg me to accept a cut in my royalty, and in every instance I have listened, never interrupted, and said: ‘Sounds reasonable.’ Never once has any such caller said that in consequence of success beyond expectations someone wanted to increase my share; always it has been a reduction, and I have always consented.
I have not been indifferent to balances, but when income tax or other legal situations require accounting, I leave this to others, scan their figures and generally forget them. I have from time to time known vaguely what the rough balances were, but only because others required the estimates. The real figures I have never known.
During the past fifteen years or so I have never been in a bank except to affix my signature to a legal paper that required notarizing. My wife cares for our accounts and provides me with an allowance. Only rarely do I carry a wallet, and when I do carry a credit card I use it only in emergencies.
Like many men who were scarred by childhood poverty or the Great Depression, I have always lived as if bad time
s were sure to recur, and for years I expected that one day I would be applying for a job at this year’s reincarnation of the Federal Writers’ Project, writing the new version of those great state guides. As a Quaker, I live simply, spend little and often chide my wife for her reluctance to give away things we don’t need, such as property we don’t use, but she acquired from her Japanese-American parents a strongly rural attitude toward real estate and cannot bring herself to give away any land that she cherishes. This embarrasses me, but I am powerless to alter mindsets that began in her cradle, and in other details of our married life her stubborn approach has aided our family immensely.
If I disdained money, how did so much of it come into my possession? As a writer I enjoyed two accidental advantages, for I published my books at the precise time when Americans were beginning to look outward at the entire world rather than inward at themselves. They were spiritually and intellectually ready and even eager to read the exploring kinds of books I wanted to write. And with the intrusion of a largely banal television many were prepared to seek refuge in long books. Had I come along fifty years earlier, when America was isolationist, I doubt if anyone would have bothered much with my writing.
I now see that the harsh years of childhood and my premature introduction to the financial problems of adult life, especially at the Willow Grove amusement park, produced gaps in my life and perhaps even psychological imbalances, as a result of which I have never handled money well. It isn’t that I have abused it or allowed it to abuse me; I have been contemptuous of it. If it could do the damage it did to my mother and me when I was a child, and if it achieved so relatively little in the development of my playmates who had plenty, it could be dismissed, and I did just that. It is important to note that I never adopted as my basic reaction the biblical creed that it was more difficult for a wealthy man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I never objected to someone else’s having money, and I do honestly believe that never in any period in my life has envy of other people’s affluence played even a minor role.
· · ·
In some respects turning my back on money left me quite limited and it certainly made me unprepared for the life I would lead as a result of my good fortune. My wife says: ‘You live as if prices are what they were in 1934,’ and she is right. I remember when Frescoln, Talbott, Vitarelli and I used to drive into Philadelphia in Rees’s car and have a robust Italian five-course lunch for thirty-five cents—antipasto, soup, pasta, meat dish, dessert—with a twenty-cent tip from all of us. That remains, unfortunately, my concept of just about where prices ought to be, and when my wife buys me a pair of ordinary garters, the kind that used to cost $.50, and now costs $14.50, I feel that the world is going insane. Then she points out that the novel that sold then for $1.50 now sells for $22.75, but I do some quick calculation and tell her: ‘The garters have still increased at twice the rate of the books,’ but she either does not believe my figures or is simply unimpressed.
My life as a writer with considerable wealth is the exact reverse of George Gissing’s mournful protagonists who sweated away their lives on Grub Street with no money. In each case there was a dislocation from normal living experiences, but for anyone to claim, as some do, that the damage from having too much is comparable to that from having too little is nonsense, pure and simple nonsense. When I look at the scores of writers whose lives would be enriched if not actually ennobled by the small assured yearly stipend that Gissing once dreamed of, I conclude that their collective deprivation is vastly greater and more lamentable than the damage done to the occasional American writer who is knocked loose from his aesthetic or moral underpinnings by accidental wealth.
I must now cite several personal experiences that have taught me the relationship between the artist and money. One morning Bennett Cerf called me from his office at Random House about a woman I’ll call Madame Xenia: ‘Jim, we have a problem. Madame Xenia is in my office,’ and I visualized the intense wife of the amiable artist—writer, musician, painter, poet?—whom I knew only slightly. ‘She’s distraught and says it’s so unfair for you to be so well paid for your books while her husband has to struggle to survive. She says she and her husband are going to commit suicide unless you give them five hundred dollars right now. And they’ll leave letters blaming you and Random House.’
I shivered, because whereas a threat of suicide from an ordinary citizen can sometimes be taken casually, when high-strung Madame Xenia and her delicately balanced husband made the threat it had to be taken seriously. Then I could hear Bennett’s wise, consoling voice: ‘Madame, relax. Your husband will be attended to. Jim Michener has said he’ll give you two hundred and fifty and so will I.’ And the scandal was averted.
On three other occasions artists from a variety of fields have told me they would have to commit suicide if I did not assist them, immediately, and a score have come simply to plead for even fifty dollars to tide them over, and more often their need has been in the thousands. Invariably I have given assistance because I remembered what need is, but it seems strange that never has one of these borrowers repaid the loan, even though in some cases they have had subsequent successes.
I do not take it kindly when well-meaning acquaintances lecture me about money and the artist, pontificating that the true artist never worries about money because it is unimportant. It is damned important and can be, as in the case of Chatterton, Gissing and Madame Xenia, a matter or life and death.
From the things I’ve said one might conclude that I think Tim Jones with his fantastic income from one lucky book is grossly overpaid, but do not jump to that conclusion. My thinking on this matter divides into two categories, the economic and the moral. Economically I have been strongly influenced by a study made some years ago by the economists of the Brookings Institution, who investigated from a hard-nosed business point of view the notorious salaries then being paid superstar athletes like the basketball wizard Kareem Abdul Jabbar or the latest hotshot baseball pitcher. Relying not on biased opinion but only on certified box-office statistics, they proved that not only did superstars earn back every dollar they were paid, but owners would still have had a bargain if they paid their superstars twice or three times what they were already paying. Their presence in a game or a season brought into the club coffers many times what they were being paid.
The same is true in publishing. Let’s look at the figures cited earlier regarding the runaway best-seller by Tim Jones. His publisher, Galaxy Hall, sold out three huge printings of his book for a gratifying total of 920,000 copies at a list price of $17.50 each, but since the publisher allows the retail bookstore a discount of about 40 percent, Galaxy Hall keeps only 60 percent of the income, in this case an enormous $9,660,000 of which Tim receives $2,415,000. He falls into the same category as Kareem: theoretically he could be paid double whatever royalty he did receive. The so-called superstars of writing are not overpaid; they are underpaid.
Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. It is to everyone’s benefit—writer, publisher, reader, the nation—that Galaxy Hall not only remain in business but remain strong. The large sums earned from best-sellers must help to finance the publication of those fine books that cannot be expected to turn a profit, or even, in many cases, break even. I have been a positive boon to beginning writers, because the rewards I did not get, and to which I admit I was not entitled in the long run, have been invested by Random House in the careers of younger writers who were battling to establish themselves. This is the way it should be and I do not want any more from Random, providing they are applying my surplus to young writers who have a greater need.
But with the recent changes in publishing the proper balance between paying popular writers at traditional levels and investing the excess profits from their books in younger writers has been imperiled. Speaking still from the economic point of view, I fear that publishers are not protecting their own long-range interests by focusing so much on popular writers of today while ignoring the
development of good young writers for tomorrow.
Priorities are out of balance and I do not know how they should be corrected. I do not think that one can ask a successful writer to refrain from publishing his or her next book so that space will be made for a more deserving younger writer. Nor can we ask the bookstores or book clubs to place an embargo on the work of writers they know their subscribers want to read. In healthy economic enterprises the operations of the marketplace serve to make adjustments and should probably be allowed to do so in publishing, too.
I must make an important point. In none of my reflections on writing do I ever waste time on the pornographic work that sells well, the acknowledged trash or even the nonbook, for I believe that serious writers are not in competition with them. It is improbable that Thomas Berger or Robert Coover could ever have sold a book to the audience of such books even if the junk had not been available.
In such matters I am guided by a telling experience I had in 1929, when I was just becoming aware of contemporary American writing; prior to that I had concentrated on authors like Balzac, Dickens and Flaubert, but now a publishing sensation burst upon the American scene, a book by a veteran vaudeville comedian with a magical feel for the hilarious statement. Chic Sale’s The Specialist offered the rib-tickling, mock-serious reminiscences of an imaginary carpenter somewhere in the Deep South who had spent his life in rural areas digging and then building outdoor privies. Through the years he had accumulated a wealth of practical wisdom about his trade, summarized in his recurring dictum: ‘Dig ’em deep and dig ’em wide.’
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 62