Biblioasis 

On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer

By Stephen Marche

Biblioasis/February, 2023

Reviewed by John Delacourt

March 7, 2023

A book from a widely published Canadian novelist and talented all-rounder about failure? Aside from his respectable backlist of novels, Stephen Marche was also a columnist for Esquire for eight years, and he has written widely and well on virtually any topic that has caught his interest. If there is anyone to compare to him, Marche is like a Canadian Geoff Dyer, whose distinctive voice (Marche has written well on that as a literary quality as well) and boundless curiosity make reading him feel like you’re enjoying a true performance, from paragraph to paragraph.

And yet, Marche has never felt like he’s broken through and found a wide audience. Now, he’s written about what it’s like to accept that he never will.

It’s a peculiar state for an author of his stature to be in, given all those reports of the booming sales of books during the pandemic, the countless local stories that highlight the plucky survival of the neighbourhood independent book shop, the lines around the block when a royal airs the family linen. In the U.S., the market expanded by 20 percent over the last two years. For Canada, things seem to be going swimmingly too; in 2021, approximately 54.6 million “units” were sold, generating a record $1.12 billion in revenues. And for the writer who might be toiling away on the margins of the digital marketplace, there are those breakthrough stories that keep them in the game, like Colleen Hoover’s. After years of self-publishing in the young adult and romance genres, Hoover has now sold over 20 million books and is bringing in barrels of money for Simon & Schuster, one of the majors still thriving in the marketplace.

While the outlook for the publishing industry looks sunny, for even talented writers, getting by on your words and your wits is not as financially viable as it once was. The most recent economic studies from the US, the UK and Canada all report dramatic declines in writers’ revenues. The Authors’ Guild in the US reported that writers had experienced a 46% drop in their book-related income in just five years, and that “80% of all authors earn less than what most people would consider a living wage.” In the UK, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society reported in 2018 that income for writers dropped by 43% in just over a decade. In Canada, the Writers Union, in its last report stated, “the work of writers fuels a two billion book industry in Canada, and yet more than 85% of writers earn an income from their writing that is below the poverty line.”

How has this disconnect between the state of the industry and the fate of the individual writer emerged? William Deresiewicz, in his book The Death of the Artist  has looked at the diversification of the market the digital utopians proselytized about with self-publishing, microtargeted niche publishing on Amazon (fan fiction, digital chapbooks, cosplay inspired novellas …) and he has the receipts: “with profit margins falling, the large commercial publishers (now reduced … to a big five) have slashed their lists, the roster of titles they carry, consolidating their catalog around the most popular kinds of books: fiction by the genre stars … pop-culture franchises … titles by celebrities … publishing is not immune from the blockbuster logic that dominates culture in the digital age. Big books sell more than ever; smaller books sell less. Which means that smaller books – and the authors who write them – also receive less from publishers: more parsimonious marketing budgets (which lead in turn to still-smaller sales) and even more dreadfully, lower advances.” The writers caught in this market niche are in “the realm of the mid-list, where most authors live.”

As Deresiewicz describes it, “the mid-list is also the dwelling place of nearly all the books that have something more than transient value, the ones that we refer to as literature.”

The disappearance of the midlist is the open secret nobody mentions in polite literary company here in Canada. As those Writers Union numbers would attest, most novels released here sell around 200 or 300 copies in their first year. And beyond that first year? I’ve got three novels out there and the cheque I get from the Canada Council every February will buy 10 of you dinner with me at a banquet table in the sketchy part of town. But my fourth novel, Provenance, about Nazi art looting, will be out this summer, so go ahead and order the garlic bread and that second glass of Romanian Pinot Noir. CanLit bestseller lists are representative of books that sell about 5,000 copies – and that’s inclusive of the ones the publishers have put significant marketing money and resources behind.

It is a testament to his extraordinary ability to read the field that Marche has not written a predictable cri de coeur about this state of affairs. Packaged in one elegant essay, he’s got a message for those content creators longing for the days when it was possible to “eventually” earn a six figure advance for a book of short stories: enough of your goddamned whining. On Writing is a meditation that takes the long view. Marche contends that our conception of the marketplace for literature is largely based on a moment in time (when the boomers reigned) that has all-but passed. For a brief period in our cultural history, the core group of chancers and burnt children that have always comprised the lifers in this trade (I say this as a proud chancer) were given a certain licence to vault above the dispiriting realities of the marketplace. The digital era — with the same fragmentation and content glut transforming publishing that has shifted the economics and therefore the power dynamics in the film business — has been responsible for, if anything, a market correction, a coming to earth.

I’ve got three novels out there and the cheque I get from the Canada Council every February will buy 10 of you dinner with me at a banquet table in the sketchy part of town. But my fourth novel, ‘Provenance’, about Nazi art looting, will be out this summer, so go ahead and order the garlic bread and that second glass of Romanian Pinot Noir.

As Marche sees it, that bygone cultural capital required institutional support and a print market swimming in ad revenues. “The peace and prosperity of the postwar era gave birth to an array of literary institutions that have been managed in decline ever since. Novelists were legitimate celebrities. New York was full of middle-class playwrights who wrote small excellent plays and somehow survived. Professorships were available; job applications were not hunger games. Magazines and newspapers had vast profit margins and pages to fill. And all this power, the money and the institutions, provided the writers of that generation with a sense of cosmic self-importance no one can rival today.”

Or, as Christian Lorentzen writes while admitting to slight exaggeration in the latest Harper’s about last fall’s hearings on the blocked Simon and Schuster-Penguin Random House merger, “The view put forth by the government was that the publishing industry was a market like any other, that its practices were routinized, that its players followed rules, and that its dynamics could be predicted by the scientific methods of economists. The defense presented it as a casino full of hippies gambling unlimited piles of money generously provided to them by multinational corporations happy to cover their losses, as well as their lunches, while coasting on the enormous revenues generated by the entire history of human thought and feeling. If the hippies generally lost, sometimes they won big, and their winnings went back into the house kitty. If they won really big (as Random House did with Fifty Shades of Grey), then it was Christmas bonuses for everybody from the mail room to the corner office.”

With new house rules at the casino and dramatically reduced earnings, who could blame the astute, ambitious young authors who are strategically curating their on-line personae, and writing to monetize their creative IP on a number of platforms? If the novel or even a memoir reads like the first draft of a screenplay, well, that’s the point. As Marche puts it, “I have seen the best minds of my generation devote their souls to business plans; even the smallest up and comer has a social media marketing strategy.” That may sound melancholic in tone, but Marche has written more than a eulogy. He has come up with a true essay in the best montaignesque sense, in that it is a try, or an attempt, to take this theme of writerly failure and wander widely and deeply, reflecting on the role of the writer and the reception of great works through history. From James Joyce’s failure to land a job teaching in a technical college – after writing Dubliners – to the great Chinese historian Sima Qian’s castration by the Emperor’s henchmen, Marche argues that the breakthrough narrative itself has always been a fiction. There is rarely an arc to the plot of a writer’s life that starts in obscurity and obsessive toil and leads to a sudden inflection point of critical acclaim and then a long coast into immortality. For the great majority of authors, the hit book is a blip, and the reversion to a hand-to-mouth existence and/or a day job has defined the writer’s lot since long before anyone ever presumed they could make a living doing it.

Marche sees his own identity as a writer defined by only one trait: perseverance. As he puts it, despite more rejections landing in his in box than ever before, it is all one can do to keep submitting. For Marche, this is the defining verb of a writer’s existence. As he states, “know this: if you’re writing well and failing and submitting and persevering, there is no more that anyone can ask of you, even yourself.”

On Writing and Failure is a slim little truth bomb I wish had been written when I first harboured notions of writing to be published. And it is one that I think should be required reading for anyone serious about the work – younger or older. It offers the writer, trying to make sense of their place in our culture, the only consolation possible: the deep pleasures of writing as a practice and an art form, and that simmering tension of inspiration that happens when one is reading – and re-reading – intensely. This is the source of the inexhaustible urge to put word after word, and to somehow try to play on the same field with the greats, regardless of who’s still around in the stands to pay for the show – and the Pinot.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt writes fiction that is both submitted and published, including the novels Ocular Proof, Black Irises, Butterfly, and, coming soon, Provenance. He is Senior Vice President of Counsel Public Affairs in Ottawa.