A hundred easy ways to lose your book contract

Jervey Tervalon will likely be better known in a few months as the co-editor (along with Gary Phillips) of the anthology The Cocaine Chronicles. But he’s also published several novels, although his current one was orphaned thanks to a recent “publishing misadventure:

When you do the writing and develop some skills and ambitions, that’s when it gets interesting. You learn that the rigors of the market are all important — another immutable law of the universe, more real than a noble gas law or the laws of thermodynamics. So when my first editor, an African-American woman, told me it would be impossible to get my book through the publisher’s acquistions committee unless I changed the white, upper-class love interest of my black protagonist to something, anything else, I complied. “How about a Sade-like biracial adoptee from Nigeria,” I asked. “Fine,” she said.

I got a little nervous, though, when the publicist at my publisher, Atria, had to quit over an outbreak of boils or something that sounded equally biblical. He hadn’t been doing much to promote my previous book anyway, but it was a bad sign. Almost as bad as meeting Atria’ s publisher, Judith Curr, an Australian woman who didn”t seem to know that Latinos in California speak English as well as Australians or maybe even better. I sensed I wouldn’t be receiving the royal treatment from Atria — no book tour, no post cards, not much of anything. After finishing the first of the two books, Lita, I assumed they’d send it around, you know, for reviews. But they couldn’t bring themselves to do even that. When I asked my new editor, Malaika Adero (my old editor, Tracy Sherrod, left to become an agent), if I should hire an outside publicist, she said yes. I truly had become an orphaned writer.

But things get worse: in order to get out of his contract (which he “violated” by writing a different book than the one specified, even though his editor okayed it) he has to pay back his $41,000 advance, a tough thing for an unemployed writer to do. But he manages to strike a deal:

I informed this woman that I was receiving unemployment and wasn’t in a position to repay the advance. I argued that her demand was ridiculous and that I had permission from my editor to write “what I felt.” It didn’t matter. If I didn’t pay, she said, they’d sue me. Finally, I was offered a compromise: Pay Atria a thousand dollars every six months for the next 10 years, and they’d go away.

And so that’s exactly what he’s doing, echos of indentured servitude and all. I don’t necessarily buy the comparison, but there’s no question it’s one of the tougher breaks I’ve read about in this crazy world o’ publishing.