25
06
A wise and well-respected
writer once said, “Nobody
knows anything.” Listen to him.
William Goldman, legendary screenwriter of such clas-
sic fi lms as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the
President’s Men, had an axiom about Hollywood: Nobody
knows anything.
I have often said to writers that the publishing busi-
ness should not even be called a “business” from our side
of things. In business, you can do market research and an-
ticipate a certain amount of return for a certain amount
of effort.
Not so the writer. There’s no guarantee of any return
on our investment of time and effort.
And while for the publishers it is all about the bot-
tom line, they aren’t guaranteed a hit every time, either.
What makes a successful book or career is something
of a mystery. Every now and then some new writer hits it
big, and everybody tries to fi gure out why. But that’s only
after the fact. Trying to make it happen again almost
never works.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep was published with a
low advance and low expectations. Then the thing sold
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