Don't Quit Your Day Job, Published Author

We all have this image of the rich author, able to cruise around the world and enjoy the company of starlets in their prime, of driving sports cars and big-game fishing off the coast of Cuba with a member of the Kennedy family or walking into any bookstore in the country and seeing dozens of copies of our books on a life-size display with our name in beautiful lettering.

Well, you can probably thank people like Ernest Hemingway for these kinds of bald-faced lies, because the life of a published author is almost nothing quite like that, with a few possible exceptions. Any published author is rich in a sense - how many people can actually finish a novel or collection of short stories - but how many of them get considerably, classically rich? Very few, actually. If you go over to Rants and Ramblings: On Life as a Literary Agent, you can see the cold reality which faces most authors when that book finally makes it into print:

Example: a $10,000 advance
After agent commission: $8,500 to author
Paid in halves: You will get two checks, several months apart, for $4,250 each. If you set aside 20% for taxes, that leaves you about $3,400 to spend.
Paid in thirds: You will get three checks, several months apart, for $2,833. If you set aside 20% for taxes, that means you'll have $2,266 to spend. Perhaps it will cover the rent or mortgage payment for a month or two. But it's not exactly a kitchen remodel.

It's definitely eye-opening. I remember when, in college, I visited the home of Ernest Hemingway down in Key West. I heard a famous story that, while waiting on a car to arrive, Hemingway stayed in Key West and then didn't leave for another twenty years. I thought, "I want that. It sounds awesome." That is not entirely out of the picture for any writer, but the prospect of being a wealthy, jetsetting literary figure is slim. Unfortunately, that's the reality of it. However, if you're writing for all the life-affirming reasons, then you won't need to be wealthy to keep doing it. You'll do it because you love it, and beyond being a cliche, it's also the truth.

I mean, who wouldn't want boat loads of cash to write? I'm not saying getting paid is bad, even in vast sums of money, but it should not be the only reason for writing, nor should a lack of publishing success be what turns you away from writing. I stand by that statement, as hokey as it sounds.

Maybe You Shouldn't Quit Your Day Job Just Yet

Iain Banks - An Old Dog With New (Publishing) Tricks

The publishing industry is changing in big ways, and not necessarily just for the up-and-coming author. Even those with reasonable success have been hit by major changes, including authors like Iain Banks. Banks is perhaps most well-known for his violent, surreal novel The Wasp Factory. In addition to lowering his advances, Banks's publisher has decided to try new marketing tactics to sell his books:

With book publishers now facing the same potentially ruinous challenges of the digital era as newspapers, Banks has gamely agreed to act as guinea pig for his own publisher, Little Brown, which is releasing an abridged audio version of Transition free on iTunes (the first instalment went online last week, on the same day the print version was published). Is he really reduced to giving away his work? Banks seems sanguine – perhaps even a little resigned – about the whole thing: "I think [the podcast] is quite brave of my publishers. I hope they're getting it right. My agent said to me: 'What do you think about this?' I said: 'I don't know.' We've got our fingers crossed."

The lesson here may be that the monolithic author is probably going to be a thing of the past. After the generation of Stephen King and Dean Koontz and James Patterson goes away, the super high-quantity author (mostly) may not require the vast sums that he/she used to. It's my belief that, unless the major publishers restructure to account for changes in technology and the way that people read, publishing will slowly become more decentralized and will benefit the most self-driven authors. But that's just my take on what I see in publishing trends.

Iain Banks: Even at my age I still have something to prove
Video: Iain Banks on 'The Book Show'

Nick Cave's Musical E-Book

Audiobooks can be awfully boring, if they're not your "thing". And, combine that with the possibility that the publishing industry is tanking, and it frees up artists to try out new marketing tactics.

Nick Cave is one to take chances. He's never hid behind crass commercialism, and he's beloved by hipsters and "those in the know", so perhaps his e-book gamble may pay off. The Guardian UK does a good job of predicting the potential pitfalls. Sorry for the alliteration.

Later this month, Nick Cave's new novel The Death of Bunny Munro – the story of a sex-maniac travelling salesman taking his last road trip – goes to market through the iPhone App Store, in an enhanced edition that is being launched before the print version.

The Enhanced Edition does some of the things we're now accustomed to seeing as standard in electronic texts: you can faff with fonts, change colour, bookmark it, and so on; and there's some smart social networking stuff attached. But it also includes enhancements that could have a noticeable effect on the experience of reading. Instead of paginating the book conventionally, it's presented as a continuous vertical scroll (one geek-pleasing trick is that you can adjust the scrolling speed with the angle of tilt of the phone), and the App includes an audiobook that syncs with the written text. Pop on the headphones, thumb the screen and Cave's voice picks up where you left off.

To put a finer point on this, there's also another little easter egg involved with the purchase of the audiobook:

The other thing is that it comes with a soundtrack, composed by Cave and Warren Ellis, one of his Bad Seeds. Soundtracked novels: now that really will change the experience. Could the soundtracked novel be to fiction what song is to verse?

I do not want to place super high expectations on Nick Cave as some visionary savior, but it's clear that the future in publishing could be very exciting indeed. What began as a very sober time for the big industry of publishing may turn out to be an interesting one for the niche writer, as with the market shrinking, the possibilities grow. The better one is able to perform in a niche, the better off that person will be. It's akin to the chocolate and sprinkles idea Friedman pushes in 'The World is Flat', and it may cause a shift in the changing publishing world. Let's hope it is a shift toward the better.