(Ed note: This is the third in series of posts by Jeffrey Meyers.You can find Monday's post here and Tuesday's post here.)
As a professional
biographer without a regular salary (I left academic life in 1992), I have not
lost my job or my house. But I have
suffered during the current economic crisis and seen my precarious income
eroded on all fronts. Many publishers,
magazines and book reviews have disappeared, and many bookstores have
closed. For writers without substantial
savings, it has become difficult to survive between books in these hard times.
Large trade
publishers, pressed for time, no longer
consider proposals unless they are filtered through an agent. No matter how much I’ve published or how
solid my reputation, my personal submissions would go straight into their
dustbins. Luckily, I have an experienced
agent who can sell my proposals. But
after bringing out books with more than one hundred publishers, I’m certain,
when competition is more intense than ever and the corporate money men overrule
editors and make the final decision, that it’s now much harder to get a
contract. To attract a wider audience
for serious books, I’ve published works for the general reader on art and film
as well as literary biography. I’ve also
brought out books on four Impressionist painters and lives of two subjects
instead of one: Errol and Sean Flynn, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. But publishers don’t seem to want books about
several different writers that are unified by a single theme. A friend has not been able to sell a lively
and original proposal about homosexual writers—from Verlaine, Wilde and Gide to
Bowles, Mishima and Bruce Chatwin—who
were married to women and whose marriages affected their work.
It’s also more
difficult to sell foreign rights.
British biographers, who publish with trade publishers in England, usually
resort to American university presses.
But since Oxford and Cambridge university presses want world rights,
there’s no equivalent outlet in England for American biographers. The once wide open market for translations
has become considerably tighter, and shifted from Western Europe and Japan to
Eastern Europe, China and Korea. China
has a growing middle class, Japan has been in a long recession. I had a Japanese translator keen to do my
life of Orwell, but he couldn’t get a publisher for that book.
In recent memory,
when agents got 10% instead of 15%, authors got half their advance on signature
and half on delivery. Publishers then
began to pay in thirds (the last part coming on publication) and now pay in
fourths, with the last part coming a year after publication. Since current books sometimes take eighteen
months to appear—twice as long as the old gestation period—some authors have to
wait two-and-a-half years after completing the book for the final payment. To make things even worse, many publishers
delay these payments as long as possible and hold on to authors’ money for
several more months after it’s contractually due. Authors and agents may loudly protest, but
there’s not much they can do about it.
Three years ago I
published with the University of Illinois Press a collection of my previously
printed essays on Orwell. Though I got
standard rates for royalties, I had no advance for this book. If I wrote a biography in a year, with an
exiguous advance from a university press, I’d be working (without counting the
considerable research and travel expenses incurred for this kind of book) for
about a dollar an hour.
Publishers have
recently fired many editors, who now seem to be outnumbered by agents. Those who remain, burdened by the work of fallen
colleagues, are more fearful than ever about losing their own jobs and grope in
the dark for the next successful trend or book.
During the rapid turnover of book and magazine editors, when they
suddenly slip down the memory hole (leaving no forwarding address), authors
lose valuable ties and find it difficult to establish connections with new
people who arrive with their own cadre.
One editor told me he wanted an author who’d stay with his firm. As I emphasized my undying loyalty, he
changed jobs—the best way to get a raise—the very next day. Women in publishing now outnumber men. A feminist editor in New York, whom I
inherited when my own editor was sacked, said she wanted to publish only books
by women. I briefly considered a sex
change, then pressed on to her more responsive colleague. Cultured professionals like my best editors,
Peter Davison and Aaron Asher, are rare today.
Frightened editors
tend to follow an increasingly oppressive political correctness. I sent my literary memoir Privileged
Moments (later published by Wisconsin) to Johns Hopkins University Press,
and after a month of silence rang them to find out what was happening. The director said he hadn’t sent it out to a
reader because I’d quite unacceptably called a woman “fat.” Since I’d discussed only one woman writer and
had not called her fat, I asked for an explanation. The woman in question was V.S. Naipaul’s
brother Shiva, whose obesity was a direct cause of his fatal heart attack when he
was forty.
Jeffrey
Meyers, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature, has recently published Samuel Johnson: The
Struggle (2008), The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn
Monroe (2009), George Orwell: Life and Art (2010)—his fifth work on
Orwell—and John Huston: Courage and Art (2011). Thirty of his books have been
translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six
continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour
lectures on biography, sponsored by the National Library of Australia, in
Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney.