Book Review: The Business of Being a Writer (Stephen Goldin)

The Business of Being a Writer by Stephen Goldin and Kathleen Sky

I’ll get the most critical piece of this review over with right away. This book was published in 1982. Yes, you read that right. 1982. I was 22 that year and the concept of becoming a writer needed another three decades to gestate.

1982. Almost forty years ago.

Do you know what’s really, really sad about this book being published in 1982? Other than Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer published in March of 2018, there’s still very little on the business aspects of writing for a living. There’s plenty on marketing and even more books addressing craft, but on negotiating contracts? Crickets.

I’ll get around to reviewing Jane Friedman’s book later, when my number comes up at the library. Ms. Friedman’s book (from the University of Chicago Press) is $66 bucks so you can bet I’m not paying for a copy of my own when the library is available. See, that’s the problem with so many books aimed at writers: They don’t address cash-flow.

What is cash-flow? It’s recognizing that $66 bucks out of my extremely limited supply of $$ can buy a round of Amazon Media Service (AMS) ads I can use to sell my own books and hopefully generate some income whereas the library doesn’t supply AMS ads. The essence of cash-flow is don’t spend $$ if you need them more someplace else and definitely don’t spend $$ if you have to borrow to pay them back.

Thus, we come to Stephen Goldin and Kathleen Sky’s book. You can request this immensely useful book via your library, or since it is so useful, you can buy your very own hardback copy via abebooks.com or alibris.com for about $7. The great benefit of having your own copy is that you can refer to it whenever you need to, and you can mark it up with margin notes and highlight passages you found particularly useful.

There are a lot of those passages in this book. My copy is riddled with my notes, including the index. I read it slowly to my husband (and publisher and editor — it’s a complex relationship) over breakfast, day by day, and we discussed the contents as we compared the text to modern-day writing careers.

If you’re a 100% joyfully self-publishing indie author, you may think most of this book doesn’t apply to you. It still does, because what if Hollywood comes calling? You’ll need to know some of what this book addresses with regards to negotiating contracts and managing your rights.

So why do I recommend a forty-year-old book? Let’s review using the helpful (and very detailed) table of contents:

1) A career in writing including part-time vs. full-time, work habits, and pseudonyms. You may already know this part.

2) The Mechanics of Submission. This hasn’t changed much in 40 years other than you aren’t mailing photocopies. It’s all online files today. The key, as always, is to submit exactly as you are told. Agents and Editors are looking for reasons to say ‘no’ and if you can’t follow their submission rules, why should they waste precious time on you?

3) Marketing your work. There are loads of changes since 1982 but the basics remain the same: if you want a writing career, you’ve got to do the legwork of selling yourself. No one else cares like you do (except your longsuffering spouse).

4) Dealing with Editors. Surprisingly little of this material is dated, other than everything being done with hardcopy by mail. Everyone in 1982 used a typewriter and if they were wealthy, they bought IBM Selectrics. Photocopying costs really mattered as did postage. Today? Not so much. Even so, the revolving door for editors at publishing houses remains the same as it ever was. The editor who loved your stuff at XYZ publishing moves to GHN publishing and your book is abandoned out in the cold. Editors live in a small ecosystem, they all know of each other, so don’t piss off an editor. Word gets around.

5) Rights and Copyrights. A lot of this material is dated because of changes in copyright law but keeping track of your rights and copyrights hasn’t changed one bit. It’s still on you. If you plan on selling your intellectual property, i.e., selling your writing, then you definitely need to keep track so you remember what you sold to whom, when, where, and for how long. If Hollywood comes calling, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a complete listing of everything you ever wrote, who you sold it to, what circumstances and so on and so forth so if they ask “do you have any more great ideas?” you can say “why yes! I do!” Then you pull out that file of ready-to-go money-makers.

6) Legal Matters including Fair Use, Obscenity, Libel, Wills & Estates, and Public Lending Rights. That last topic matters in the European Union (an unheard-of concept in 1982) because libraries over there pay the writer a few cents every time their book gets checked out. If you’ve got books in overseas libraries, make sure you’re getting paid when they’re read. The United States still doesn’t pay writers when their books are checked out, although writers’ groups regularly lobby for this perk. On the subject of wills and estates, your heirs own your hard work until seventy (70) years after your death. Do they know? Your publisher and your agent won’t care enough to inform your relatives. You are supposed to do that, via your will. Keep your will up to date.

7) Magazine Contracts and Permissions. A lot has changed, starting with the fact that there aren’t very many magazines out there for fiction anymore. But there are still some magazines and they do still pay. Except, that is, the online ones who expect your hard work for free. Do you really want to work for free, being paid only with ‘exposure’? ‘Exposure’ always makes me think of lost hikers freezing to death in the woods.

8) Book Contracts. Read this chapter carefully. A few concepts have changed but overall, it is your responsibility — let me repeat this gem — it is your responsibility to read your contract, understand exactly what you are signing, and to negotiate a better deal for yourself. The minute you sign the contract, you lose all negotiating ability. As long as you haven’t signed and are willing to walk away, you have some power. After you sign? Nothing. If your contract is unclear, pay your own lawyer to explain it to you before you sign. Plenty of writers have discovered the hard way they’d signed away all rights to their worlds, characters, and formats (hardback, paperback, trade paperback, audiobook, ebook, large print, methods of book transmissions yet to be discovered, etc.) If you read your contract before you sign, you can avoid this little problem.

As with the rights chapter, the book contracts chapter doesn’t address ebooks, graphic novels, large-print editions, or any other of the modern permutations. It does sort of address audiobooks: way back when audiobooks were big, clunky recordings intended for the blind, along with your book being translated into Braille. When you read these sections, mentally add ebooks, graphic novels, audiobooks, and the like to the text. Make doubly sure that your contract is clear as to who owns what and for how long. It should be you and not the publisher owning all the rights in perpetuity in formats yet to be discovered.

9) Agents. Agents have their uses and in this modern world, most publishers won’t talk to writers. They talk to agents. The assumption is that the agent sifts out the wheat from the chaff so the publisher doesn’t have wade through those rubbish heaps of manuscripts looking for a winner. Agents have contracts and you need to negotiate with your agent just like you do your publisher. If you don’t understand your contract, don’t sign. Don’t forget to regularly audit your agent.

10) Vanity publishing vs. Self-Publishing. A short chapter since very few people in 1982 self-published. Vanity publishing is as large and scam-like as it ever was. There are plenty of people out there looking to separate you from your money. Don’t believe anyone who tells you they can turn your book into a bestseller. If the publishing industry could actually forecast bestsellers, they wouldn’t have so many books on remainder tables and being pulped at the warehouse.

11) Record Keeping. If you write a lot and sell in a lot of venues, you need to keep track of who, what, when, where, and for how long. This chapter provides information on how to do this very important task. Remember your will? Your rights? Knowing what you own depends on your record keeping. So does proving it in court.

12) Taxes. You must follow the current IRS tax law. Much of this chapter is extremely dated due to changes over the decades. Tax law is complex and you’ll probably want a CPA to take care of you, preferably a CPA who’s used to working with home-based businesses (which is what writing is). Follow your CPA’s recommendations on record keeping to the letter. In the end, even though your CPA files your taxes, it’s your signature on the 1040. You get to meet the IRS auditor. You get to go to court and blaze new trails in IRS tax law.

13) Publicity. If you want it done right, you’ve got to do it yourself. Just like 40 years ago, the publisher does the minimum necessary to sell your book. It’s on you. If your publisher gives you an enormous advance, you’ll get more help. If you get a tiny advance, the publisher’s public affairs people will help you but only so much. They’ve got bigger books and bigger authors to work with than you.

14) Aid and Comfort. This chapter addresses writer’s groups and the like. Some of those groups are still in existence. Others fell by the wayside years ago. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can network far more easily than you could in 1982.

The appendixes contain two sets of very outdated listings but they also contain a comprehensive and handy list of proofreaders’ marks. If you edit on paper (letting you see errors you can’t see on your computer screen), proofreaders’ marks are nice to know.

As I said at the beginning, there is plenty of outdated information inside The Business of Being a Writer. There’s also plenty of information that you just won’t find anywhere else about the business of being a writer. The plain English discussion of clauses in contracts and what they mean is worth the cost of the book all by itself.

Stephen Goldin is still alive and has a website.

His co-author, Kathleen Sky, doesn’t have an online presence other than her Wikipedia page.

If you don’t want to drop $7 on a used copy of your own, check your library or request a copy via your library’s interlibrary loan program.

Otherwise, you might get lucky at your favorite used bookstore or you can visit abebooks.com’s website.

Or go to alibris.com’s website.

If you’re not familiar with them, both abebooks.com and alibris.com are aggregators of used bookstores. They don’t always carry the same books so it’s worth checking both sites if you’re looking for a title and you’re having trouble finding it.