This morning, I received an email from my publisher, who kindly sends me quarterly updates regarding the status associated with the sales of my novels and a detailed report of the royalties associated with those sales. To say it made depressing reading was an understatement as in an instant all those plans for buying a spread on the cote d azure suddenly disappeared in a puff of smoke. 

When I set out on this journey a few years ago, I had had high hopes that this perilous career path I had taken would turn out to be an exciting experience and would provide at least enough cash to pay for the cat food. 

Sadly the cat recently passed on, dying I think from acute malnutrition. 

I recently read an article that quoted some source or other saying that there are over 2.5 million books published each year, not including textbooks! That’s a lot of literature for the average reader to consume, and sadly I have concluded that most of those readers are not turning to my weighty tomes for their reading pleasure. 

Lately, I have been considering changing, by way of deed poll, my surname to something with a bit more oomph to it. Hemmingway, Grisham, Patterson or some other non-de plume sprang to mind; something readers reach for when browsing the shelves of the ever-dwindling array of bookstores. Hopefully, I mused these unsuspecting readers would have forked over their hard-earned cash before discovering that I was not the ‘real deal’ to speak.

I pour over my recent novels and wonder why they don’t fly off the shelves, even after the two glowing reviews posted by my daughters. I naively believed that they would do the trick. (Actually, I wrote them myself and submitted them to Amazon on their behalf, as their reaction to my first novel was lukewarm, to put it mildly) Publishers these days are a little gun shy when it comes to investing in an unknown author, as are agents who obviously are swamped with requests and never get around to replying to carefully crafted letters designed to impress. 

While procrastinating the other day, I did a few calculations on expected income from a novel that, once released, an author can expect. For a return on an investment, the minimum wage in Bangladesh looks a lot more attractive.

Unless you are a ‘formula writer ‘ it takes on average six to eight months to write a tome of say 200,000 words. The edit might swallow up another four months. The production, book cover design and layout will conservatively eat up another two months and then allow about six weeks to get an ISBN and listed on the giant sites, i.e. Amazon, I Books and the like.

The author, (unless he or she has received a small stipend from the publisher) will work for free for up to ten hours a day for over a year. Once released, and once your parents, friends and other family members have bought a copy, you might receive a royalty cheque after approximately three months.

Now to the depressing part: add up the meagre amount, calculate the time spent between typing the first word of your novel and receipt of that first cheque and you will discover that you have been working for approximately eight cents a day!! Working in Bangladesh starts to become even more appealing.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. For example, the brilliant J.K.Roling trudged her manuscripts around numerous publishers for years before getting accepted and was promptly embraced by millions of young adult readers across the planet. Her salary increased from the mandatory eight cents a day to rival that of the Queen of England. (She deserves every penny) 

Fifty Shades of Grey was a book that somehow tapped into the psyche of every 30 plus woman’s fantasy and sold an astonishing eighty million copies in its first year! Bravo to the author even though the plot line, the characters and the entire premise was sadly lacking. …Well anything. Then again, who am I to judge as obviously eighty million readers can’t be wrong …or can they?

I am about to release a second anthology of short stories in the belief that readers are too time-poor to plough through an entire novel and so my thinking was to make it easy by writing fifteen stories that are a bite-sized read.

If you do pass the title while trawling that lone bookstore in your city or come across it while browsing the internet…why not give it a whirl. This gesture would be of great assistance to me as quite honestly the heat in this garment factory in Bangladesh is becoming quite oppressive, and I would love to resign!

Bali, Indonesia 2018