How Much My Novel Cost Me

Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent.

Illustrations : Leah Goran

It’s hard to write about being broke because brokeness is so relative; “broke” people run the gamut from the trust-funded jerk whose drinks you buy because she’s “so broke right now” to the people who sleep outside the bar where she’s whining. But by summer 2012 I was broke, and in debt, and it was no one’s fault but mine. Besides a couple of freelance writing assignments, my only source of income for more than a year had come from teaching yoga, for which I got paid $40 a class. In 2011 I made $7,000.

During that $7,000 year I also routinely read from my work in front of crowds of people, spoke on panels and at colleges, and got hit up for advice by young people who were interested in emulating my career path, whose coffee I usually ended up buying after they made a halfhearted feint toward their tote bag–purses. I felt some weird obligation to them and to anyone else who might be paying attention to pretend that I wasn’t poor. Keeping up appearances, of course, only made me poorer. I’m not sure what the point of admitting all this might be, because I know that anyone who experiences a career peak in his mid-twenties will likely make the same mistakes I did, and it’s not even clear to me that they were all mistakes, unless writing a book is always a mistake, which in some sense it must be.

In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed to sell not to be considered a flop. This essentially guarantees that no one will ever pay me that kind of money to write a book again.

It took me a while to realize that my book had failed. No one ever told me point-blank that it had.

It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B.

I spent some of the advance on clothes that no longer fit my body/life, but mostly I spent it on taxes—New York even has a city tax, on top of the state and federal kind—and rent. I lived alone for three years in Brooklyn, paying $1,700 a month ($61,200 all told) for a pretty but small one-bedroom within eyeshot of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. I also spent $400 a month on health insurance. At one point I thought I would find another full-time job after finishing the book, but then I must have convinced myself that teaching yoga part time would better enable my writing. I also thought that I would immediately start another book, which I would sell, like the first, before I’d written half of it. In order to believe this I had to cut myself off from all kinds of practical realities; considering these realities seemed like planning for failure. In retrospect it seems clear that I should never have bought health insurance, nor lived by myself.

For many years I have been spending a lot of time on the internet. In fact, I can’t really remember anything else I did in 2010. I tumbld, I tweeted, and I scrolled. This didn’t earn me any money but it felt like work. I justified my habits to myself in various ways. I was building my brand. Blogging was a creative act—even “curating” by reblogging someone else’s post was a creative act, if you squinted.

It was also the only creative thing I was doing. While some people, mostly young women, embraced my book the way I’d dreamed they might, much of the reaction had been vehemently negative—not just critically, but among my family and friends. In the fall that followed the summer of my book’s publication, my entire immediate family briefly stopped speaking to me. No one would acknowledge that this was because of the book—officially, the last straw was a stupid fight that happened during the two-day car ride home from a family vacation. I’d spent the whole vacation whining about my bad reviews and jonesing for the internet. Whenever I took out my computer, trying to write something, anything, to prove to myself that I still could, my mom suspected—as she later confessed—that I was blogging about how miserable our vacation was, and specifically about her. I wasn’t, and I felt her suspicions were irrational, but they weren’t.

She’d hated the way I’d portrayed her in the book, and I owed her an apology but couldn’t muster one that would satisfy her. No one wants to hear you say, “I’m sorry but I might do it, or something like it, again.” But in the months that followed I discovered that, even when I wanted to, I couldn’t write well in the first person anymore. I tried, but what came out read as self-conscious, self-censored, chastened—and worst of all, insincere. Then I tried to write straightforward critical essays, but without that dose of “I” I’d reliably been able to inject before, they were dry and boring, and suddenly my lack of real expertise or research skills was glaring—I’d always been able to fudge it before, compensating with feelings and observations when facts weren’t at my fingertips. I started to feel like I’d been fired from the only job I’d ever been good at. In a way, I had. I knew I needed to train for another line of work, but I had no idea what it might be, or what form that training might take. Instead I deadened my anxiety and sadness with an unending litany of jokes and observations and news briefs and petty complaints: the real-time collective unconscious that’s reliably unspooling on Twitter, even as I type (with my computer’s internet access disabled) these words.

Eventually I started writing in the third person as an exercise. “Maybe I’m writing a novel,” I thought at times, but this seemed far-fetched.