Review: Some Writers Deserve to Starve
The book isn’t new, but it’s a useful, easy read for anyone who wants to get their writing into print: Some Writers Deserve to Starve: 31 Brutal Truths About the Publishing Industry (by Elaura Niles, Writers Digest Books, 2005).
Some of the information, especially about the ever-changing electronic world, is already a little bit out of date, but most of it is evergreen. Niles’ truths range from Truth #2, “Putting Words on a Page Does Not Obligate Anyone to Read Them,” to Truth #8, “Most Publishers Won’t Consider a Manuscript Twice,” to (gulp) Truth #31, “Many of Us Won’t Make It.”
My favorite bit of Niles’ sometimes bitter truth is #30: “The Writing Is Never Done.” I like this for the practical truth of it, the fact of ongoing revision after you think you could never get your manuscript any closer to right than you already have. But also something Niles doesn’t say: that writing is a vocation, and it keeps going. If you’re a writer, you keep writing. And revising. And revising again. And, in the end, writing some more.
This book is a marketing marvel, which is, to my mind, one of its downsides, but also inevitable. It was clearly intended to be eye-catching and pocket-sized. It’s formatted like, for lack of a better term, a bathroom book–a small book with short, punchy sections, suitable for picking up and putting down for short reads.
I find its emphasis on packaging fairly off-putting–I could never tolerate all the cutesy typesetting if I had to read it cover to cover. But the information is solid, and the emphasis on facing the market realities is bracing.