The knotty thorn of contracts

I’ve been hopelessly remiss in not pointing people to  the Lipstick Chronicles, a kickass new blog from the minds of the Book Tarts: Susan McBride, Harley Jane Kozak, Nancy Martin and Sarah Strohmeyer. But this new piece from Kozak about the difficulties of the business of writing merits attention:

I was offered a contract this week. Actually, I was offered two. After a year of writing “on spec” as we say in Hollywood, that was pretty exciting news. It’s not that I made no money this past year; there were those first two books, and I still get residuals for the acting work I did in my previous life (another six bucks for that 1986 Highway to Heaven episode) but it’s safe to assume that I spent a lot more than I took in. Would that I could say the same about calories.

So, when I sold a short story to Ms. Magazine, and was offered a two-book deal from Doubleday on the same day, I called my husband at work to tell him the good news. “Great!” he said. “How much?”

I told him.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

I could hear him mentally dividing the book advance by two (two books in two years), then subract taxes and agent’s fee, then add up babysitting costs, marketing and promotion … “Can you ask for more?” he asks.

As Kozak puts it, her idea of doing well is that they will pay her more money when she writes more books. Her husband, on the other hand, “let’s find what Dan Brown makes and ask for that.”

The comments section’s especially lively in this thread as well, turning towards the realities of raising young children and writing, which is something that ought to be discussed far more often.