In mid-1974, my third trade book [“trade” means produced by a traditional publisher], Selma 1965, came out from Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Scribner’s had published Hemingway, Edith Wharton, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Stephen King, and lots more bigtime writers – and now, me.
Scribner’s, I figured, had done & would diligently do “everything” even promotion — and had paid me an advance for my labor.

I thought I had now made it as a writer. Or soon would.

But “soon” was, shall we say, premature. (“Making it” wasn’t even “imminent”, to borrow a term misused by a notable election fraud prosecutor in Atlanta.)

I have no beef with Scribner’s, but quickly learned a few hard lessons: the first was that, even as a relatively small house, they still published scores of books a year. Thus, unless my name was Stephen King, the promotion effort allotted to mine came to about one day’s work for an overloaded PR assistant; who then had to move on to the next non-Stephen King title.

That policy didn’t mean all publicity for the book had to end; just that the work (& the time and the costs) then all fell on me. And PR was a whole different thing from writing, a field about which I knew — basically squat.

To make my plight clearer, a bit of pre-Google digging turned up the fact that in those days, U. S. publishers put out something north of 50,000 new book titles a year. That meant, in the same week Selma 1965 appeared, at least 1000 other new books cascaded into bookstores and reviewers’ inboxes. (BTW, those numbers are paltry compared to 2023, 49 years later; we’ll come back to this point.)

But wait — I had two kids (later, four), other articles to write, and bills to pay. Sometimes I even had to sleep.

Thus, long story short, the book, my main side project for much of four years, came on the scene like a mild passing thundershower, with a handful of rumbles from reviewers, a couple quick flashes of interviewer interest, and a few sprinkles of reader feedback.

Then it was gone from the bookshelves, it seemed in a blink.

Before long I heard those dreaded words, “remaindered,” and  “out of print,” which meant Scribner’s was selling off cartons of the book to wholesalers at steep discounts, turning the rest that didn’t move into pulp, and moving on.

Again, I had and have no beef with Scribner’s; business is business. Publishing a book, then and now, is like buying a lottery ticket: a few hit the jackpot, but most (even many that publishers spend big promotional bucks on), don’t.

Yet in fact, looking back, it’s clear I was already in the company of “successful” writers: after all, I’d published a book, and been paid for it. I was still neither rich nor famous; again, like most other published writers. Most of them had day jobs too. (This doesn’t include trust fund writers; but I was never one of them.)

(Actually, Selma 1965 was my third book. The first two were issued by a smaller but respected non-New York house, dealt with other aspects of the civil rights movement, and earned a bit of money too. But we can only nod to them in passing here.)

This matter of occasional glimmers of (some) reader & public attention lighting up an ongoing grind of having “day jobs” to pay bills, was far from my goal. I didn’t yearn to get rich, but for me, a “successful writer” was one who met two key criteria: first, they got to work at it full time (aka were able to pay their bills while writing); and second, they wrote  about their major passions or interests.

How far was I from that vaunted full time status?

Consider: it took me about nine months of full time work to research & write Selma 1965. That’s 36 weeks; at 40 hours per week, around 1440 hours. Scribner’s advance was $2500. That works out to about $1.75 per hour. Hardly a living wage for a family, even in the ‘70s.

Another hard lesson: selling a book to Scribner’s looked good on my résumé; but it didn’t guarantee any future book contracts. Especially if a writer’s interests or (in Quaker tribal jargon, leadings) take them in what many editors politely call a “niche direction.”

Which, in fact, mine soon did.

More on that tomorrow. . . .

Part 2 is here. . . .