Two recent events got me to thinking, yet again, about this whole novel-writing business, and about how fortunate those of us who do it for a living truly are.
First, I was asked to author an essay for publication in a popular legal magazine. The essay deals generally with the business of penning a legal thriller, but specifically with the odds of any one lawyer – or any one person, for that matter – making it into print with his or her maiden effort at book-length fiction. The assignment required a modicum of research into the (opaque, and often contradictory) mathematics of book publishing, the results of which were, in a word, sobering.
Second, I attended a reading at my local independent bookstore, by authors Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer. Their new book We Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (Skyhorse Publishing) is a compendium of essays and interviews with the authors’ mid-1970s IWW contemporaries, on topics ranging from inspiration to craft to coping with success and failure in the fickle world of letters.
Let’s begin with the book.
If you write for a living, or aspire to, or have ever contemplated enrolling in an MFA writing program, We Wanted to be Writers is a must-read that I would liken to One L, Scott Turow’s now-canonical account of his first year at Harvard Law School. In their book, Olsen and Schaeffer make a compelling case for why their 1975-77 IWW class was “pound for pound, the most productive, most published, most awarded class in the history of writers’ workshops, all-time, everywhere,” peopled, as it was, by such future luminaries as T.C. Boyle, Jane Smiley, Joe Haldeman, Allan Gurganus, Michelle Huneven, Jayne Anne Phillips and Sandra Cisneros.
But if we accept the authors’ premise – and alumni of Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program justifiably might not – we must then examine its corollary; namely, the surprising paucity of published novelists produced by even this most exalted of literary incubators. The latter point is perhaps best illustrated by Dennis Mathis, one of the book’s contributors, who recalls IWW guest lecturer Kurt Vonnegut offering to purchase a plaque “dedicated to the ninety percent of Workshop graduates who don’t go on to become writers,” and who quotes Vonnegut as asking: “Can you imagine if ninety percent of the graduates of the Harvard Law School didn’t become lawyers?”
For all its insights, anecdotes, dishy gossip and nostalgic reminiscence, the most striking revelation of We Wanted to be Writers occured for me at the book’s conclusion, under the heading “About the Contributors.” It is here we learn that, of the 27 classmates whom the authors interviewed (selected, presumably for their successes, from a cohort of over 260 members of the authors’ three overlapping classes), only 16 or so have actually published a novel in the forty-plus years since attending the Workshop. And this, remember, from the starting lineup of what Olsen and Schaeffer have anointed as the ’31 Yankees of the American MFA League.
So yes, finishing a novel and having it accepted for publication are demonstrably difficult, even for the best and brightest graduates of the nation’s preeminent creative writing program.
So where does that leave the rest of us mortals? What are the odds of a first-time novelist actually landing a contract with a so-called legacy publishing house? The short answer, of course, is that it’s an impossible proposition to quantify, since nobody knows just how many manuscripts are written in any given year. But let’s give it a try.
I began my research with a visit to the website of R.R. Bowker, which bills itself as “the world’s leading source for bibliographic information.” There I learned that, for the period 2006 through 2010, the volume of “traditionally” published U.S. fiction (defined as excluding reprints, self-published and print-on-demand titles) has generally held steady at around 50,000 new book titles per year. (And in case you were wondering, only 126 of those novels – or roughly one-quarter of one percent – claimed sales of over 100,000 units in 2010, according to Publisher’s Weekly.) Of that total, we can estimate that perhaps one in ten is a debut work.
But how many unpublished manuscripts are chasing after those 5,000 debut slots? Well, here’s where it necessarily gets murky, but one possible method for backing into at least a rough approximation of that number is anecdotally; by dividing the annual debut sales made by U.S. literary agencies by the annual volume of submissions those agencies receive (and adjusting, to the extent possible, for such variables as simultaneous submissions and non-agented sales.) From all that I’ve read and heard, and with all of the qualifications previously stated, my best guesstimate is that only one new fiction manuscript in a thousand will ever be acquired for “traditional” publication, leaving nearly five million would-be authors on the outside looking in (or, as is more likely, pursuing some form of self-publication.)
So if you number yourself among those lucky few, congratulations. If not, take some solace in the staggering odds against you. Either way, join me in a tip of the hat to Olsen and Schaeffer’s very prolific classmates.