Writing popular fiction

artist, for three excellent reasons. First of all, in the early years of your career, money may be the only way you have of telling if your work is being accepted or not. New writers seldom get reviewed and do not generate large amounts of fan mail. Nice advance checks and royalty payments are valuable indications of your popularity among readers (the only ones who count, when all is said and done), and they give you the morale necessary to continue in what must he one of the loneliest occupations a man can choose. Second, the freedom that a healthy, regular income affords you is perhaps the most important factor hearing on your productivity. With the bills all paid and savings stored up against a run of bad luck, you can devote yourself full time to your craft and dispense with the agony of finding some way to meet the latest bill when you could be writing. Finally, financial success is important because it is a good credential to bring before a publisher. If your work generates large sales and earns the top dollar in your field, your publisher is far more likely to give you free rein with what you do than he would the novelist whose works barely pay the printing costs.
    Must you write for money? No. But neither should you write in ignorance of what it can mean to the quantity and quality of your creative work.
    8.
How long must I work to gain financial security
? You may never gain it. If you can produce only one or two category novels a year—especially science fiction, Gothics, mysteries, and fantasies—you will never know a time when the wolves are not a stone's throw from the door—and you without a stone to throw. Unless, of course, you hit the best-seller lists or have a book made into an enormously popular movie, both of which are more easily dreamed than realized. Even if you are prolific enough to produce and sell eight or ten novels a year, your income may hold steady at $20,000 a year, which is comfortable but by no means enough to classify you as
nouveau riche
.
    On the other hand, with a top-flight agent (and there are very few of them), and a willingness to try other categories, to go where the money is the best and the audience the largest, you can achieve an income of $50,000 a year and up with half a dozen novels per annum. The uncertainty and the constant possibility of extravagant success are what make this profession so exciting. The nine-to-five office worker knows he will never starve—but he also knows he will never make a fortune. The full-time freelance writer can always starve—but he may also feast. The second possibility makes life interesting.
    When you begin to make more money than you are used to having, don't fall into the trap of beginning to live more lavishly, as so many writers do. Your first financial goal, as a freelancer, should not be a new car or wardrobe, but the establishment of a savings account at least sufficient to support you, in comfort, for an entire year in the event your markets dry up or you become seriously ill. I say support you "in comfort," because you may develop a writing block, out of emotional depression, if you are suddenly forced to lower your standard of living and deny yourself pleasures you've grown accustomed to. Once the savings account is set up, invest an equal amount in stocks as yet another failsafe source of funds before you begin to live at or beyond your means. A writer must learn to budget year by year, not week by week.
    9.
If I am prolific, won't I make extra money from the sale of foreign rights to my books
? The category fiction writer rarely makes foreign sales in his first three years, barring a best-seller or a much-talked-about movie purchase. If you are agentless, you will not have foreign contacts at all. Even with an agent, you may amass a large body of work before you begin to receive regular checks for foreign rights, because some agents are less able to make foreign sales than others.
    Realize, too, that book advances in other countries average only one fourth or one half of what the American publisher paid and are subject to a 20% agent's commission—as opposed to the standard 10% commission on domestic sales—as well as a possible split with the original U.S. publisher. A writer can make substantial money from foreign sales only if his books make the best-seller lists and thereby demand higher foreign advances—or if he is so prolific that all those tiny checks are multiplied by fifteen or twenty books a