True Harrowing Tales of Book Publishing!

This is a really terrific essay by Alex Shakar, who was set up to be the Hot New Un-Sad Literary Young Man ten years ago with his first novel, when Bill Clegg got him $300,000 (or more?) from Robert Jones at HarperCollins. Pub date: September, 2001. Guess what happened! That’s right: Jones died and Clegg, soon enough, went MIA in a crackhouse. Oh also some other stuff I guess.

Part of the purpose of a large advance, I understood, was to gain a book publicity. But I told nearly no one. Instead, for weeks, I did math in my head. I subtracted my agency’s cut and divided the figure by the five long years I’d lavished on the book and came out with a perfectly reasonable — boring, even — middle-class salary. I divided it by the ten years since college I’d been writing, the result more lackluster still. I thought of acquaintances and friends of friends who’d been riding the dotcom wave into stupefying wealth. I was basically a peasant, I reasoned. But one who could pay off his student loans. One in need of tax advice. It was about a third of a million bucks.

He’s back with another book… ten years after 9/11, set five years after 9/11. It is not published by HarperCollins.