Reality Often Doesn’t Match Plot for Struggling Writers

Most of us in this dodge are incipient novelists. That’s why I read Dennis McLellan’s Saturday accounts in this section about the success stories of local writers. I like to project the novels I now have in my head into best sellers, movie sales, book club selections--that sort of thing. Like an inner-city ghetto kid reading about Magic Johnson’s latest contract.

I’ve been around long enough to know that most of it is gauze. I’ve written two nonfiction books with a fair potential as big sellers. One sold out its original printing of 10,000 and was never reprinted, despite pleas from me and my agent that even included an offer to buy it back. The other died from total lack of attention on the part of the publisher, stillborn as it were.

But this isn’t the stuff of which dreams are made. Time and again, I’ve spoken--mostly as a magazine writer--at writers’ conferences in which agents appear on the program to describe the housewife who wrote a novel on the backs of grocery sacks from midnight till 2 a.m. for five years and is now a billionaire. The attendees lap it up. That’s what they want to hear.

Gauze is much easier--and more fun--to spin than dross. And most of the people listening will never write a book anyway, so it is probably better that they be allowed their dreams.

Yet, those who do should have some handle on reality, and the reality is that making it big with a book--even for a very good writer--faces about the same odds as winning the lottery. That isn’t going to stop me from trying it because a book isn’t a product of chance. But the market into which it is born and the way it is promoted are very much influenced by chance. And so even the winners, more often than not, turn out to be losers.

No one can attest to that better than Gordon McAlpine, who appeared in McLellan’s column almost a year ago when his first novel--an enchanting fable about how the flight of a magic Ruthian home run affected the lives of a disparate group of Americans in the 1930s--was published by E.P. Dutton. The book had been well reviewed, McAlpine was doing readings and interviews with the local press, and there were great hope and optimism.

That was a year ago.

I had lunch with McAlpine last week. He had been my student at UC Irvine before he was accepted for the MFA program there which has produced a steady succession of successful novelists. In my class, McAlpine wrote a delightful piece about the residue left behind by baseball crowds and the people who clean it up. He sold it to a regional magazine.

From the beginning, he was a superior writer, and I never had any doubt of his success. He was sensitive and imaginative and a fine craftsman. Still is.

He started “Joy in Mudville” as his MFA thesis and had it about half finished when he graduated. While he worked as a script writer for a firm producing educational videos, he outlined the rest of the book and shopped it to publishers himself--a difficult and usually dismaying task. He got three turndowns, but two publishers encouraged him to finish the book and send it to them. So he quit his job and did. And both of the publishers who encouraged him rejected it--with high praise--as not “commercial” enough.

So he began free-lancing scripts for TV game shows for eating money, and one of his associates read his book, liked it, and sent it to his agent. She liked it, too--and took it on. It took a year to shop it around. Then the Dutton people wrote a glowing letter, saying that they wanted the book if McAlpine would do one more rewrite.

“I hadn’t looked at it for more than a year,” he recalls, “but once again I quit my job and spent nine months rewriting. And this time Dutton bought it.”

The up-front money was a modest $5,000, which probably figured out to about 50 cents an hour and is much more common for a successful first novel than the six-figure advances we too frequently read about. The book was to be published at the opening of the baseball season last year, and review copies were sent out. The reviews McAlpine saw were very good, but the people who read them couldn’t buy books. And Dutton missed its delivery deadline to bookstores by almost two months.

From there, things got worse. “Dutton put no promotion behind the book,” McAlpine says. “They sent out a press release that was badly written and full of factual errors. That was all.

“I remember how discouraged I felt when I saw a full-page ad in The Times for another Dutton book that had gotten terrible reviews right after my good ones. But the ad gave it commercial credibility, which my book never had.”

McAlpine’s first--and only--royalty statement showed the book selling out its first printing of 3,000 copies, but when McAlpine called Dutton about reprinting, his editor told him: “Don’t get excited. These are initial orders and don’t reflect returns, so don’t take them too seriously,” and added: “You know the publishing business just isn’t very efficient. Sorry, but you should be glad to be published.”

And that was it. No paperback or movie sale.

“For a while,” he recalls, “it seemed that something was happening. The good reviews, my picture in the papers, books in the stores. It never occurred to me then that someday the book would be out of print and would disappear. I made the mistake of trusting Dutton because what could I tell an experienced publisher?”

Until recently, it has been very difficult for McAlpine to talk or even think about the fate of “Joy in Mudville,” but now “I’m finally coming around to realizing that my book is good, and it suffered the publicity vacuum through no fault of its own. I could have become jaded or defeated, but what I have to do is write another really good book.”

So he’s doing that while he teaches writing students at Irvine Valley College.

“My students,” he says wryly, “read these success stories, too, and they want to talk more about six-figure advances and agents than about writing. I try to make them see that they shouldn’t focus on the end result but on the process. All they should think about is being a good writer.”

That’s where Gordon McAlpine is focused, and we’ll be hearing from him again. But next time, he’ll be a lot wiser.