The First 100 Books Are The Hardest
Originally Published in The New York Times, November 25, 1973
By LEONARD WIBBERLEY
9/21/2015
One day recently I received two blows, each of such severity that only an Irishman with an unshakable belief in the goodness of God could recover from either of them without resort to some kind of pill or other. The first, the most serious, was the elimination of the Los Angeles Dodgers from the National League West pennant race, by an utterly colorless organization called, I think, the Cincinnati Reds. The second, and less severe, was the receipt of a royalty statement from my agent enclosing a check for $204.04, being the amount due to me after deductions for taxes and agent's fees for six months' royalties on 20 of my books.
Now I submit to you that when a man has written 20 books he deserves more than $200 the six-month for his efforts. He deserves either to be taken by the neck to a public gallows and hanged, as a great waster of his own time and that of others and a horrid fraud upon the civil portion of the public, or he deserves to be given some kind of subsistence that would support him for the remainder of his life and perhaps discourage him from writing 20 more.
Two hundred dollars will not do. On me it has had the effect of making it necessary for me to write 20 more books, not one of them a whit better, I assure you, than the 20 the public has found so worthless. Indeed, I think I have written 90, and I may have written 100, and the only plea I can put before you is that, by God, I have to live.
Well, why not get a decent job, you might say? Why not go to work for an insurance company, or take a job in one of those mysterious and modern buildings that cluster around the Los Angeles airport, where highly skilled gentlemen with doctorates of every sort are examining moondust and making everybody afraid of the sun, which has been our friend for years?
The fact is that authors are unemployable. I have worked as a refinery operator and a farm laborer, a railroad ganger and a newspaper editor, a dishwasher, an employee-relations consultant, a ditch digger, a safety engineer, a street fiddler, and I can't remember what else. The only reason I never worked as a psychologist is that, as Voltaire said of priests, I cannot understand why when two psychologists meet in the street, they don't both of them burst out laughing.
In all these occupations I ranged from fair but willing to brilliant but bored. When I was a correspondent in the United States for an English newspaper, I got a letter one week saying that without my work the newspaper could hardly succeed. And I got a telephone call the next week saying I was fired because "I hadn't opened the door of a taxicab for one of the directors of the company visiting New York.
When I was a dishwasher, I put some of that commercial detergent into the thing that washes the dishes and filled the whole street for a week and a half with the loveliest bubbles you've ever seen. People were coming from 20 miles around to view them, and the publicity was enormous, but they fired me anyway.
So it has gone. I couldn't reasonably recommend myself for employment to any company seriously in business, and so I have to write books.
Now, let's have a look at the problem from another point of view. I've looked over that list of 20 that earned me $204.04 in six months of hard selling, and there are five of them that are bad books. Yes, five that I'd have to admit probably should not have been published at all. But those, hang it, are the five you liked best. And the others, which had here and there a twitch of merit you ignored altogether.
Well, you say, I didn't buy them, but I read them. I went down to the library, and I took them out, and I read them, and some of them were very good and made me laugh, and some of them were very good and made me cry. That's nice to know. That's very nice to know. When you went down to the library and got out one of my books and read it you made me very happy. But you also left me very hungry. I know you didn't mean to, but that's the way it works out. So you won't mind if I back my car up to your grocery store, or your factory, or your vegetable garden, or your cattle ranch and load it up with whatever I need. Or don't you believe in democracy?
Are you crazy, you ask? And to that I haven't any reply.
Well, it seems that to live I'll just have to write more books. Now let's see. If 20 books make $204.04 in six months that means $408.08 in a year. And it takes $20,000 a year to get by, so all I have to do is write 1,000 books and get them published and keep them all in print and I've got it made.
Leonard Wibberley is the author of The Mouse That Roared and, as he says, "89 or 99 other books."
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