Same as it ever was, and still infuriating. It's a system designed to ensure that if anyone gets screwed, it's the little guy.
— a journalist friend, yesterday
Well, once again, my uncanny sense of timing proves itself. Within 72 hours of setting up this ironically titled blog, I learned that Advanced Marketing Services, and its subsidiary, Publishers Group West, have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. You can read about this at MediaBistro.com. If I understand correctly, this means that about 150 PGW-distributed independent publishers will probably never get their money for three months' worth of book sales during one of the year's busiest seasons. That means the writers of those books will most likely never get their money, either.
It is eerily prophetic, too, that in 2005, I declined my PGW-distributed publisher's offer to produce a sequel to a book that has been generating steady income for us both since 2002. From a career perspective, writing that book would have made heaps and gobs of logical sense. Yet had I completed that sequel on schedule, I would have just lost that crucial first quarter of revenue. Many books never recapture that initial-order volume.
The deal-breaker — and it was tiny — was my publisher's decision earlier in 2005 to stop paying its writers a few hundred dollars per book at the time of signing. I believe they did this to help resolve a cash-flow problem they were having. In any case, I took their suspension of that small advance as a harbinger of $tormy $ailing ahead. I have wondered many times since whether I should have backed down and written that book without the advance. However, I have remained confident in the correctness of my decision. As Maureen Dowd has said, "The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."
Last year was a bad time to write a book anyhow, since I was busy settling in Hawaii after leaving California at the end of 2005. I figured that, if my publisher didn't assign that project to another writer (which they soon did), maybe we could work together on it, or something else, down the line — if they reverted to their prior policy. "Always forward, never backward" is a motto I adopted years ago as a guiding principle in my career strategy, and while it may seem a bit too idealistic or rigid to adhere to a policy of steadily upgrading my career, especially in a book industry of steadily diminishing prospects, this motto has been a gentle reminder to myself that a book advance is a statement of trust. I do excellent work and therefore I deserve to make a comfortable living at this, no matter how many writers who are willing to settle for less may be vying for the same project.
I've been down this road before, with the publisher hat on my head, and that was far worse. Black Books lost its shirt (that is to say, my shirt) after our distributor, the LPC Group, declared bankruptcy on April Fool's Day, 2002. Since then, I have been part of a class action suit that has yet to recoup a significant portion of what we are owed. Although Black Books is the debtor with the smallest claim pending in that suit (about $24,000 before lawyer's fees), that money still represents a year's worth of my life work. We were a micro-publisher, typically myself and one half-time co-worker, that produced one or two titles a year prior to signing with LPC. I knew about the president's prior history with Inland, another distributor that went bankrupt under his leadership in the mid-'90s, so I checked him out carefully with three different LPC-distributed small publishers before signing on.
After getting the thumbs-up from all three, I negotiated with LPC's president for a month, and Black Books signed with LPC in mid-2001. I agreed to produce five titles for the Christmas 2001 season, by far the most ambitious season we ever undertook. Two of those books became finalists for a Lambda Literary Award, and a third was nominated for a Firecracker Alternative Book Award. We had been working for nearly ten years to make the leap to national distribution, and LPC was our ticket. I went into substantial debt to publish those five books because I knew we would get our money back as soon as LPC paid out for the Christmas 2001 season. What I got instead of a check was a Notice of Bankruptcy Filing dated on April Fool's Day.
After struggling for a year and a half to keep Black Books afloat, a friend showed up unexpectedly one afternoon, took me out to dinner, and convinced me to declare personal bankruptcy. While every publisher under LPC took a bath thanks to LPC's mismanagement, I dare say that, due to the timing involved, the damage suffered by Black Books was the most comprehensive — it drowned us entirely. I have not published a new title since 2002.
Meanwhile, I have moved on with my life. For a while, I collected unemployment under California's insurance plan for the self-employed that I had been paying into since founding Black Books in 1992. Then finally, after ten years of forgoing benefits due to an AIDS diagnosis in 1995 (I had too much pride and tenacity to self-identify as "disabled"), I finally threw in that towel as well, and now I collect disability. Between that $751 per month, my average monthly royalties of $400, a bit of supplemental assistance from the state of Hawaii's HIV system, plus whatever money I make via an occasional story or article sale, I can manage.
But I just lost that $400 in monthly royalties for the last three months of 2006.
Ouch.
And still I write. It's the only work that makes me thoroughly happy. It's what I do best.
Yet right now I am scrambling just a bit. Soon I will re-open that eBay store I just closed last month so I could focus on writing my novel over the next quarter. Tomorrow I will consider marking down any remaining inventory in my book listings at Amazon Marketplace, if there's still enough margin left to make it worthwhile. Today I've been putting a bit of friendly pressure on a couple of prospective writing clients.
Still, it's beginning to feel like I get knocked up anytime I do the slow dance with a handsome book industry representative. At least here I have an audience, one that will continue to grow, with no distributor or publisher to come between us. I'd rather dance for your tips, anyhow. So I will keep showing up for this shift.
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