Pay Dirt?

Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer have finally released their novel, Don't Look Down.

In case you're lost, Crusie is a well-known romance writer, and Mayer is a well-known thriller writer, and they wrote a book together. What makes this news, really, is the huge, high-energy publicity around this book - book tours, TV commercials, newspaper ads, and a popular blog, written alternately by each author. Both the publisher and the writers seem to have been killing themselves over this. They want this book to be Big.

The book itself is getting mixed reviews, most of them lukewarm. I find this apt, as the book itself has never interested me. If a lot of us dared to be honest - come on - you'd admit that the book hasn't interested you either. What we're all interested in is watching the authors - watching their process, watching their ups and downs, and, for writers, watching two midlist colleagues pull out all the stops and try for the brass ring, the gold medal, of bestsellerdom. Will they do it? we wonder. Can they keep it up? And, for me, Is this the kind of torture it takes to make a good living as a writer?

I have never seen two people work as hard for success as Crusie and Mayer. They zigzag across the country, giving talks at conferences that they make up on the fly, signing books, giving media interviews, getting their pictures taken, blogging endlessly to thousands of readers, and trying to co-write another book the whole time. They are not always "on" - they have private lives, after all - but it's pretty frequent.

I couldn't do it. I wouldn't last a day. Most of us wouldn't. We're writers - introverts. We define the word introvert. If I had to give a media interview, I would have to sleep for a couple of days to recover. Speaking in front of a crowd? Yowza.

But a lot of us are getting the message. Buck up, suck it up, and learn how to do it, or you'll never make a living. You cannot sit and write books and retreat to glorious privacy like J.D. Salinger or something. Today's writer has gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. It's all part of the media machine, baby.

As part of our denial, we figure we'll just read about it, and that will be good enough. So we read the Crusie/Mayer blog. Every single one of us, waiting in anticipation, to see if they write to say it's worth it.

I'm rooting for them, I am. They deserve every success. And if they succeed, I'll hide in the basement and try not to think of what it means for the rest of us.

Abby