People who have only a passing acquaintance with the book world hear about the large sums that a few super-famous writers receive as advances and assume this is the norm. But the vast majority of authors of literary fiction and nonfiction know that if they were to divide the modest amount of money they receive from the publisher before publication by the number of hours spent working on the book, the hourly amount would be far less than the minimum wage—maybe as little as a few pennies.
So why do we keep writing? Because we must, because our lives seem empty if we are not sitting at a keyboard for at least a few hours a day, trying to make more headway on our book. We tend to be micromanagers of our work, perfectionists who can't resist returning to tinker with sentences and paragraphs that still don't work as well as they should. While we're working we don't think about "making a profit" or "breaking even." Our minds are too wrapped up in the details of what we're doing to worry about the number of hours we're putting in.
Publishing companies, on the other hand, are businesses that need to make money to stay afloat and—increasingly, in the age of corporate ownership—to satisfy shareholders. The recent spate of mergers has resulted in leaner staffs populated by younger, less experienced people whose university English classes were heavily theory-based, who tend to lack interest in traditional narrative forms—and who can be hired for much less than the middle-aged people who formerly held these positions.
What was once, at best, the undivided attention of an expert editor deeply invested in the author's conception of the book and a skilled production staff patiently working on the cover and interior design has devolved into a much more slapdash enterprise. Editors on their way out bequeath their books to the next hire, a person primarily committed to authors she has chosen herself. Manuscripts can remain in limbo for months. Photographs can be reproduced at a fraction of their original size, rendering them nearly unreadable. A jacket design can be too similar to other books on different topics, in an attempt to capture the attention of readers in a particular demographic.
At the same time, increased automation of activities that once took many hours has streamlined the publication process. (Not that this is necessarily a good thing. An ideal index, for example—the kind that contains not only proper names but also entries for subjects like "feminism, opinions about" or "religious beliefs"—can be compiled only by a human being familiar with best practices in this field.)
One aspect of trade (commercial) publishing that has not changed is the lack of fact checking. While nonfiction published by university presses is subjected to "peer reviews" by specialists in the field who point out factual errors and faulty generalizations, trade books make their way into the world with their errors serenely unchallenged. The editor is primarily looking for a clear and lively writing style likely to be enjoyed by the largest possible readership. The copyeditor is looking for typos, grammatical errors, agreement with house style, and so forth. If a writer is lucky, the copyeditor may know some useful facts—say, that Cole Porter's song is "Night and Day," not "Day and Night"—and make the necessary correction. But no one is double-checking dates or questioning why the author reports that a person is doing something years after that person has died on an earlier page.
While a book is in production, the wheels of promotion begin to turn. Any book that is not judged to be a big seller is likely to receive cursory treatment: a few likely podcasts are proposed; a list of bookstores that host author events is presented; copies of the Advance Readers' Copy (ARC) are sent to media outlets. Biographers with the requisite financial resources try to spin the PR wheels faster by hiring their own publicists, at prices ranging from the low five figures. Some of us apply to be presenters at book festivals, where we wind up sitting in glum solitude behind a stack of our biographies, watching the long lines of readers waiting to have Famous Authors sign their books.
I think the only way we can carry on is to care only about being true to our biographical subjects, giving them the most scrupulous and heartfelt treatment possible. Biography is not popular today; fewer people want to read about lives that cannot properly be understood in contemporary terms. As Patrick Joyce writes in his new book, Remembering Peasants, people today consider the past to be "simply a continuation of the present backwards" and "do not recognize its radical otherness."
But for biographers, delving into hitherto unknown lives remains a great challenge and a great joy, and we can only hope that some readers may be interested in what we have written.
© Cathy Curtis 2025