My basic view is that almost everyone is a failure at most things, and those who aren't are still slaves to entropy, always just on the edge of falling down.
In these regards, it's sometimes hard to be an anthropologist about your own culture. I probably don't have many insightful things to say about all of the multifaceted ways to fail at being a philosophy professor. However, I've been to just enough (and not too many) "writer's conferences"* to have a sharp eye for the various ways in which writers fail. Here's the hierarchy from top to bottom.
- Authored multiple best sellers- Almost certainly writes in a genre such as romance, urban fantasy, or police procedurals. Surprisingly, more likely than not to still have a day job s/he hates, just to handle the health insurance! If lucky, this is at a university. If doesn't have a day job, then still spends about twenty hours a week on "the business end" of writing.
- Authored one best seller- Will it be repeated? Probably not.
- Self published and built enough of a "platform" to move around 40,000 units. This has only happened a handful of times. . . The sharks circle and this person will find themselves elsewhere on this list in the next few years.
- Authored book(s) with good distribution, but last one not a best seller, so major press has passed on exercising option, back at the conference still pitching manuscripts with all the other mopes. Platform may or may not help. One person I met had three good novels published by three different presses and was still standing in line to do five minute pitches. It made me sad.
- Unpublished but won one of the contests supported by the conference. The agents and editors might be effusive in praise. But while they say things like, "this is quite possibly the next Confederacy of Dunces," their behavior will in no way be that of someone who really believes that. I mean, no matter what your list focuses on, you would still publish the next Confederacy of Dunces. You just would. The problem is, the industry is very small, and if it's even remotely possible the author might be a best seller some day, people will be very, very nice on the surface. But the corollary of this is that the overwhelming majority of people who win these contests still never get anything published.
- Unpublished but with no platform whastoever. You are a mope. Enjoy the buffet, alcohol, and life affirming talks.
- Self published, but didn't move appreciably more than 10,000 units. You are lower than the mope. The stench of failure on you is nearly suffocating, and your inability to realize this embarasses everyone else.
- Effing crazy person, almost always paranoid in subtley frightening ways. I don't know how agents do their job, listening to pitches by people like this all day.
- Memoir writers. A cut below that boring guy at work who won't shut up about that "really weird dream" he had last night. And nobody cares about the fact that your memoir is "Eat, Pray, Love meets X." And the contest to see who has the most effed up childhood is unseemly at this point. And stop titling books "The So and So's Daughter." It's horrible.
I won't divulge where I am in this hierarchy, other than to note that nothing I've written has yet been a best seller. On the flip side though, I don't write memoirs. That's worth something at least.
[Notes:
*writer's conference = hundreds of people drinking themselves silly in between (a) futile attempts to pitch manuscripts to a handful of agents and (b) new agey talks that fail to fortify the alcohol's wondrous despair blocking power.]





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