#extortion

What do publishers really like? They like their jobs, obviously. 

Even today, in times of declining revenues and endless rounds of redundancies, and disappointingly few opportunities to quaff cocktails in the office, working in the book business is one long coffee-morning compared to, say, picking up someone else’s dog’s crap for a living.

So a book about a publisher is bound to pique a publisher’s interest. Now let’s pin that notion to our corkboard and think about that question again. What else do publishers like?

Books that start with the words ‘The Girl.’ The Girl On The Train, The Girl With All The Gifts, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, even – keeping it nice and simple – The Girls. 

All of them have sold in decent numbers in the past few years and all of them have, and this is the important part from my personal perspective, all of them have extracted decent advances from financially-strapped publishers in a time when advances are becoming increasingly hard to come by.

I like advances. To get royalties, you actually have to do something. Viz: sell lots of books. Selling books means convincing large numbers of people – publishers, reviewers and readers, that what you’ve written isn’t incoherent hogwash. That’s a pretty big ask, for a writer of my abilities.

By contrast, to get an advance all you have to do is talk a good game to one person. 

Get a commissioning editor on your side and you’re most of the way towards a decent pile of money that you’ll only have to pay back if your book sells. And we both know how much danger there is of thathappening.

So, retrieving idea one from the corkboard and stapling it to idea two, if I were to pitch a novel about a commissioning editor who made the classic mistake of reading a manuscript given to them by a pal it would score on multiple levels.

First: it’s a story of someone in the same job as them making a mistake. There are few things more satisfying that a rival crapping the bed, professionally speaking.

Second: it’s got ‘The Girl’ in the title. That makes it a sure-fire winner straight out of the Jiffy Bag. Throw in the fact that I’ve put a more-than-averagely-fruity young miss on the cover isn’t going to harm my chances with (approx.) 50% of the potential audience.

Third, and here’s the kicker: the actual story of The Girl Who Read The Manuscript is one of a someone who works in publishing who read an awful manuscript and spent the following six months avoiding the writer responsible rather than commit the awful faux pas of telling them that their novel stunk the house out.

That will plant in the subconscious of the commissioning editor an ineluctable notion that writers are the kind of people who can turn quite nasty unless you give them a nice advance to keep them quiet.

That’s not a threat, exactly. But it’s not ‘not a threat’ either. So, editors everywhere, I’ll leave that thought with you until it wakes you at 4am. If you want to discuss this proposal further, I’ll be in your wardrobe.

Amber has always said he’ll tell me anything, and he’s pretty honest with me when it counts. I have never called upon him to make good on that promise because the time just wasn’t right - and I know almost any name he’d offer and how I could find and leverage them.

Except one.

This is the big one. This one could bring his complete destruction with one single text from a burner number. And it would truly only take one, instinct would allow this person to see everything in a glance and he’d be out of the house before bedtime.

It actually made me dizzy with power and even now, 5 hours later, I’m still high from it.

It’s his mother in law.

@sissybabyneedsdiscipline

Reblog for good luck

thulium:

In addition to everything else going on, a few weeks ago my wife sort of hit a kid in a bike with her car. It wasn’t her fault, the kid wasn’t really hurt, but there was a very small amount of damage to her new car. Most people would have just shrugged it off, but… anyway, that’s not how she is. The father insisted on not involving the police and said he would just take care of everything. But then when it turned out to be more expensive than he thought, he turned super shady and argumentative. It’s a long story and not important but finally tonight we met at a grocery store and he gave me cash for what we had asked for. But still, while he was being friendly, he was still acting super shady. Maybe it’s just that he’s a foreigner (Turkish maybe?) and wants things done a certain way, but I got a heavy feeling like this isn’t the last I’m going to hear from this guy. Like maybe he thinks we’re running some kind of con on him, or he’s getting ready to sue us and only paid us to have more evidence of our nefarious purposes. I don’t know. I’m just really spun up. I was watching all the way home to make sure he wasn’t following me.

Oh my god your wife hit a child and you demanded payment FROM the father of the child????? Are you serious right now??? Is that a real thing I’m reading??? Yes the kid wasn’t really hurt you could’ve left it there but nooooOoo you need to be paid for the privilege of hitting this poor Turkish man’s kid with ur new car aw poor car it got a little scratch on it.

If you have even A SHRED of moral backbone, you’ll take the money, return it, apologize and fix ur own damn car