Lessons Learned about Book Writing
1. At Writers With Drinks I met a woman who is writing a memoir. Since I had actually published a book, she wondered if I had any advice about finding a publisher. I said don’t get your hopes up. Practically no one makes anything resembling a living from writing books. (I meant books like memoirs — what a friend calls real books.) It’s a hobby. I asked her if she’d heard this before. No, she said. She said she’s around people who are “positive” whereas I was “realistic.”
2. My friend Phil Price is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A few years ago he wrote a chapter (”"Assessing uncertainties in the relationship between inhaled particle concentrations, internal deposition, and health effects”) for a handbook-like compendium. It was a big mistake, he said. There were three problems: 1. It was much harder to write than he expected. 2. The quality of the final product was lower than he expected. 3. The audience was tiny. Maybe 11 people would end up reading what he’d written.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I don’t make a living from writing my books, but I wouldn’t call it a hobby. I don’t think that, just because something isn’t one’s main source of income, that it necessarily falls into the “hobby” category.
June 24th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
What would you call it? Writing your books I would call a superhobby because they are based on what you do for a living yet writing them is optional and different from what you do for a living. But superhobby is a term I invented.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Many people writing books would bill the time to their marketing budget.
July 5th, 2008 at 9:45 am
This is a very good (and funny) essay about publishing books:
http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story
It’s a bit long, but I think it’s worth reading.