Counting the Costs
Nobody told me how much writing and promoting a book would cost me. I’m at $30,000 and counting. But it’s been worth every penny
Writing is a business. I wish I could say that I’ve done it for entirely altruistic reasons. Certainly, at times during the reporting of Does Jesus Really Love Me?, as I racked up credit-card debt for the first time in my life, it felt like a bad business. Was I doing better or worse than anyone else who writes a work of journalism like mine? I didn’t know, because people rarely talk about the financing of book writing.
We’re secretive to our collective detriment. I know I’m among the lucky ones. For the last 13 years, I’ve earned a decent living as a writer and editor for some of America’s best (and best-funded) magazines. Thanks to my aggressive agent, Todd Shuster (who fully earned his 15% cut), HarperCollins gave me an advance that helped to defray the book’s costs. I’ve gotten publicity beyond what I ever dreamt possible. My boss at Fast Company graciously allowed me to go part-time for over a year—I needed to keep working for the steady (much reduced) paycheck and insurance. But this isn’t the kind of book anyone would write to get rich.
Though the final numbers won’t be in until after the paperback comes out next spring, here’s a rough tally of what I’ve spent so far.
$15,000 for travel and reporting – When I look at my travel bills, I sometimes wish that I’d been able to write the Great American Novel—or, really, a Half-Decent American Novel—that didn’t require me to spend so much to visit sources. But I don’t regret the travel. I’ve never loved telephone reporting, and I always want to see my subjects in their homes and offices, believing that I can learn something about them by observing them in their usual surroundings. I wanted to take readers where they’ve never been before, and in the case of places like Westboro Baptist Church, where they’ve never wanted to go. And it’s an incredible—indeed, priceless—gift to be invited into people’s homes and into their lives. Visiting 28 states, flying 20,000 miles, and driving 5,000 didn’t come cheap, despite my best efforts to find car-rental coupons, to use frequent-flyer miles and hotel points, to stay with friends and relatives wherever I could, to use public transportation, and to eat one or two meals a day when I was on the road rather than a full three. One positive was that all of my reporting took place in the U.S. One unexpected negative: Sometimes interviews would come through at the last minute, so I didn’t always have the luxury of planning ahead, which jacked up the cost of plane tickets.
$6,000 for publicity – I wrestled with whether to hire an outside publicist to supplement the one that HarperCollins provided. It turned out to be one of the best investments I made. My Harper publicist did his best, given that he was juggling multiple projects at once. But it was the wonderful Gretchen Crary at February Partners who was willing to take me on. Because I couldn’t afford a full-scale PR campaign, we agreed on something extremely tiny and targeted compared with her normal gigs. Still, she secured Frank Bruni in the New York Times a few weeks before the book came out, the Diane Rehm Show a few days before publication, and then the PBS Newshour segment with Ray Suarez after.
$800 for work space – I can’t write at home. There are always dishes to be washed, floors to vacuum, bad TV shows to be watched, and any number of other things to distract me from my work. Most of my book was written at a little café in Park Slope called Café Martin. Most writing days, I’d get one double cappuccino ($3.75) and a couple of hours later, a green tea ($2.75) with countless refills of hot water to make that one tea bag last the afternoon. $800 is my rough estimate of what I’ve spent at the café—where I’m also writing this post—since the beginning of 2011, which isn’t too bad considering that desks at writers’ spaces here in Brooklyn start at a few hundred dollars a month.
$5,000 for web design – My publisher told me that I needed to have a website for the book. “Okay,” I said. They wanted me to have something dynamic, a living thing rather than a static one. When I was searching for a web designer, I didn’t want to cheap out, under the hypothesis that you get what you pay for. At the same time, I couldn’t splash out for the fanciest, whiz-bang site there ever was. I worked with Jonathan Liss, a Chicago-based designer who had done work that I’d admired and seemed both more affordable and more flexible than New York designers I approached. He was gentle and patient, and did a fine job with my site—stellar if you count holding this Luddite’s hand through the process.
$3,700 and counting for touring – When I wrote to congratulate my friend Lisa Takeuchi Cullen on the publication of her book (Pastors’ Wives—buy it!) and tried to commiserate with her about the difficulty of publicity, she shot back, playfully (I think), “Honey, don’t you sympathize with me … You’re getting the full-on traditional book tour! You don’t have to hustle as hard.” Ha! I replied to say that, actually, HarperCollins made clear well before the book came out that I wouldn’t be sent on a book tour. (“You’re not Daniel Silva!” one person told me.) I’ve paid for almost all of my own touring. In the months since the book came out, I’ve visited Seattle, Tacoma, San Francisco, Pasadena, Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Atlanta, Asheville, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Iowa City, Cape Cod, and Houston. A few strong early reviews produced a dividend in the form of plane tickets for my West Coast swing (NYC-SEA-SFO-LAX-NYC), a rental car in Seattle and another in L.A., and a couple nights in a hotel in L.A., where I spoke at the L.A. Times Festival of Books. Other than that, I’ve covered the costs myself—and slept on a few too many futons for my liking. But the markets I visited are also the ones where I’ve had the strongest sales, and the time I’ve had face-to-face with readers has been one of the biggest blessings of these past six months. This fall, I’ve got stops in D.C., northern Virginia, Kutztown, Syracuse, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, and Miami planned. I have a bunch of frequent-flyer miles socked away, so I’ll do more if and when I can.
This is the first time I’ve run these numbers, going back through credit-card statements and my tax returns to see what’s what in sum. I didn’t realize I’ve spent more than $30,000 on this thing. It hasn’t become a best-seller, and who knows if I’ll ever get a royalty check? Even after you factor in my advance (after, of course, my agent’s cut and those pesky taxes), it’s doubtful I’m doing better financially than if I’d just stayed at my day job.
But as I said earlier, this isn’t the kind of book you write to make a lot of money. The strongest return on my investment hasn’t been financial at all. The rewards pile up daily. People I’ve met. Stories I’ve heard. Readers I’ve corresponded with. I count my compensation in testimonies, thank-you notes, hugs, new friendships. And how do you put a price on that?
