Dear Black Commercial Fiction Writer, You Suck! (But I'm here to help.) Lesson #1

The following is the first of a series of pieces I will be doing over the next few weeks.

Forget About the Money

When I sold Drop, I was paid $50,000. You heard me, $50,000!!! Just for writing some words on a page. Sounds like a lot, right? And it is, probably more than I deserved. I was officially one of the very few lucky ones, those of us who get financially rewarded for doing what we would do for free. But an advance is just gross profit, to see how much I really made we have to do some subtractions to get to the net.

First, my agent gets 15% percent, even before I see it. That's okay, she's worth it, and more than pays for herself. So we're really starting with $42,500. Then, there's taxes. Let's be generous and say I only got hit with another 15% (I have a good CPA), so now we're down to $36,125. Still, not too bad. Now we have to figure out how long it took me to write the book. Drop was literary fiction, which takes a lot of time because it's written on inspiration, which means it can't be cranked out. It's okay though, because I wrote Drop in two and a half years, from inception to final edit, so that's pretty quick. So now we have to subtract our earnings by half, to $14,450. Uh oh.

Now, to get good enough that I could write something anyone would pay for, I went to Columbia's MFA in Writing, which didn't give out full scholarships. So to attend, in addition to working two jobs the whole time, I went roughly -$47,000 in the hole in student loans. Maybe I could have grown sufficiently as a writer without this experience, but it certainly would have taken me a few years longer. So after selling Drop, I was still basically bankrupt (as a corporate entity, that is).

Now I have to subtract for those two years of beginning writing I needed to do to get good enough to attend Columbia's School of the Arts. That brings my yearly wage down to $8,027.77.

That's right, $8,027.77. Fiscally, I would have done a lot better if I had just kept temping at the electric company. I made $6.33 there.

So, for Drop, I made eight thousand a year in salary, and went fifty thousand dollars in debt. So I bought some nice socks after I cashed the check, paid off all the family members I'd hit up during that time, went back for the visit to London I'd been dreaming about, then put the rest of the money towards writing the next one, Hunting in Harlem (which wasn't enough; by the time Drop hit the stores, I was broke).

So what do I have for my efforts? I have a book that I'm proud of, that shows my truth on the page. I have the accomplishment. I have the people who contact me and tell me they enjoyed something about it, that it validated them or made them see life a little differently. I don't know where the hell those socks I bought are anymore, but my book is right up there on the shelf, and in the minds of everyone who reads it. In the end, that's what it's all about.

Now, if I had written a cynical piece of market-driven crap in less time for more money, my bottom line would have been a bit better. Regardless of this fact, there is always a day when that money runs out. And when it did, then what would I have? Shit, I think is the answer.

Yours Truly,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

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