If you’re looking for a career that pays less than minimum wage, has more ups and downs than Cedar Point has roller coasters, and makes you constantly ask yourself, “Why the heck am I doing this?” – then become a writer.
Ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil I had dreams of growing up to be a famous author. I can remember how excited I was back in the third grade when my teacher announced that anyone who wanted extra credit could earn it by reading books and then turning in book reports on them.
It was the perfect way for me to test my creativity.
See, back then, households didn’t have computers, which meant my teacher couldn’t verify that a book actually existed unless she made a trip to the city library and searched through about 10-million Dewey-Decimal files. So I wrote my own books and then reviewed them. I came up with titles like “The Little Lost Pig” and “Candy for Dinner” by fake authors such as Linda Moon and David Ducky.
And I received an “A” on every one of them.
My writing career had begun.
I wrote my eighth-grade class ode. I joined the staff of two different newspapers in high-school, was on the yearbook staff and was selected as the school’s reporter, which involved submitting school-related news articles to the NH Union Leader newspaper.
But my greatest writing achievement during my high-school years was becoming a stringer for Datebook magazine, a popular teen magazine located in New York. My job was to interview rock stars and musicians when they held concerts in my area. Then I'd mail the interviews to the magazine…and actually get paid for them. Talk about a 16-year-old’s dream come true!
But throughout my life, my ultimate goal never changed. I wanted to write the proverbial Great American Novel.
The problem was, writing a novel back in the late 1960s, when I first became determined to make my dream come true, was nothing short of torture.
For one thing, I had to use a manual typewriter, which was good for nothing other than typing. So if after I completed typing 250 pages I then noticed I’d omitted an important paragraph on page four, the only way to insert the paragraph was to retype the entire page and add it. This, unfortunately, then made every page following it out of sync...so I’d be forced to retype all of them.
That’s why writing a book back then took an average of about 127 years – or so it seemed. Now, thanks to all of the new-fangled computer programs, authors can crank out a War and Peace-length novel every month.
There also was the torture of packing up my precious, hand-typed manuscript and mailing it off to a publisher…and then rushing out to mailbox every day to see if there was a response. It usually arrived in the form a pre-printed letter that began with: “Thank you for your submission, but unfortunately it does not meet our current needs.” If anything handwritten, good or bad, appeared somewhere on the letter, it was considered a bonus because editors rarely bothered to personally comment on anything short of a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature.
I figured that while I was waiting to become the next Jane Austen or Emily Bronte, I would try to get a job that involved writing. I was hired as a newspaper correspondent for the Suncook-Hooksett Banner back in 1973 and progressed to a columnist in 1994. Around that time, the prestigious NH Union Leader bought the small-town newspaper and suddenly I was writing for the “big guys.” Meanwhile, I continued to work on my novels…for which I actually began to receive handwritten responses.
“I thoroughly enjoyed your novel,” one editor wrote, “and I think it has the potential become a bestseller if you make a few small changes. For example, I’d like to see the Native American warrior as a British naval officer, and his love interest be a woman of nobility rather than a seamstress. And instead of the novel taking place in New England, set it in 18th-century England, preferably in a quaint village not far from London. Make these changes and submit the manuscript to me again, and I’ll reconsider it.”
I tore up the letter.
Fast forward to the present, nearly 50 years later.
Five years ago, my 43-year newspaper career came to an abrupt halt in the form of a one-line email from the Union Leader telling me I’d been “discontinued.” Not only was I blindsided, I also was completely crushed.
Immediately, however, I began to receive offers to write a column for other papers. The problem was, every time I responded and asked, “How much do you pay?” I received the same response…”Pay? We don’t pay.”
So why, I wondered, would I write columns for newspapers and not get compensated for my time and efforts?
“Exposure,” they told me. “You will get plenty of exposure.”
After writing columns for over 40 years, I'd already had more exposure than a convention of nudists. I didn’t need any more. I needed to feed my dogs…and myself.
I finally got upset with one of the “we don’t pay” editors and responded with, “When you take your car to a mechanic, do you expect him to give you free service?”
She answered, “No, of course not – I mean, that’s his job.”
So I guess it’s official…writing isn’t considered a job.
Finally, in 2017 I found a NH newspaper that offered to pay me for my column. And only two months later, the editor gave me a raise, which was a record for me. I mean, I’d had to wait 20 years for a raise at the previous newspaper.
Also in 2017, I began writing for a newspaper syndicate that sells articles to over 60 publications – and each time they sell one, my share is supposed to be $15. I guess my articles have been doing well getting published because people constantly write to tell me they enjoyed reading my stuff in publications I’m not familiar with in places like Houston and Denver. The problem is, the syndicate has been very slow in paying me...like only when there’s a lunar eclipse.
Last week, I once again received the dreaded, unexpected “Dear John” email from the aforementioned NH newspaper that gave me the raise after only two months, informing me the paper’s last edition would be this week. So once again, I am without a regular column.
But that’s okay because over the years I’ve succeeded in writing and publishing 11 novels. What’s important when it comes to a novel's bestseller potential, I’m learning, is getting as many four-star and five-star reviews as possible on sites like Amazon and Goodreads. This, however, is about as easy as pushing a Greyhound bus up Mount Washington.
The thing about reviews is when and if someone actually does decide to leave one (one book I wrote has been downloaded over 11,000 times and has received only 10 reviews) the opinions can be as different as root beer and champagne. For every 5-star “This was great! I couldn’t put it down, it was so exciting! It kept me constantly guessing with all of its twists and turns!” there’s a 2-star “Totally predictable – I could see the ending coming a mile away.”
Go figure.
And then there’s the average royalty I receive for each book – which is about 40 cents. If I sell a book overseas, however, after the exchange rate, the royalty drops to only four cents. So I figure if I can sell about 200,000 copies of my novels per year, I just might earn enough to treat myself and my dogs to a steak dinner.
Still, as the old saying goes: “When you give up on your dreams, you die.”
If that's true, then I guess I’m going to live to be about 250.
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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at sillysally@att.net
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