The Five People You Meet in Rehab
After a close encounter with those outstretched fingers in a book store recently it occured to me that authors need a new payscale. The inverse ratio between quality of prose and size of paycheck is based on the perspective that the audience craves inferior work. I didn’t get that; I had fallen into the trap of believing that you got paid for quality. Now that I’m turned around and facing front here are some suggestions to reform an entire industry.
Salary Cap: This won’t be popular among branded authors, but come on. You’re not even writing your own novels anymore. Call it the Dan Brown Rule: cap that income at two million a year.
Sign and Trade: Publishers can sign a branded author and then trade the rights for fifty unknowns. The gross sales from the unknown fifty will be divided by 24, the exact number of months in a two year period during which the unknown writers will have to make coffee for everyone else. If any of the fifty break out, the old deal will gave way to the New Deal.
Sticky Icky Maudlin Degenerate: this will appear on the cover of the book with a silver seal as a quality control designation. SIMD books will claim to devote a portion of their profits to charity although it isn’t clear how that might work. This goes double if the five people you met in rehab are all dead.
Popular voting for major literary awards: throw the National Book Awards open to the public. Informal polling in Wellington Leg reveals the likely winners: Carmen Elektra, James Frey and Macauley Caulkin. These people are accustomed to the spotlight and will provide hours of entertainment attracting a cable network deal and generating millions of dollars. Publishers will reinvest those millions in developing the careers of unknowns, ever mindful of the salary cap and the sign and trade potential imbedded in the deal. Show us the money, baby, the coffee pot is on.
March 27th, 2006 at 11:21 am
This one’s so good, you’ll have to put it in your Blook.
March 28th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Hello