"Am I too old to get a book deal?"
Age-related anxieties are among the most common I field from people trying to sell a book. Here's my...uh...let's call it vaguely Buddhist counsel.
Breaking from The Wall Street Journal: President Biden, age 82, just sold his memoir to Little, Brown for “roughly” $10 million.
Roughly. That word might hit your ear a little differently than mine. For me, it’s a scrape of steel wool across the sternum, an elegy in two syllables—not just for our last president, that gentle and tragic man, but for the entire human condition, the vanity of vanities, the yearning to keep meaning something, the yearning that never leaves us alone…or at least any of us who write and publish books, even if our last job was in the White House.
As an agent, I know what roughly means: Biden’s advance was almost certainly not anywhere near $10 million. The rules of rounding being what they are, the true amount might be as low as half that, although probably not that low—$7? $8?
Roughly accounts for a world of bonuses, escalators, plausible deniability, and kindness: additional advance payments due if the book earns out in year one, perhaps, or a second book all parties know in their hearts the President won’t write.
Amortized across five payments—and at that level, it’s likely five—such an advance is…I don’t know. It’s stupendous money for anyone who isn’t the immediate past President of the United States, you know? Sigh.
To be clear, I have no earthly clue what Biden’s deal terms actually are—but I know how euphemisms function, and I have a pretty good instinct for why and when they appear.
For example, euphemisms might bloom in an environment where the talent longs to hear he’s still an eight-figure man in the hearts of the American people—right up there with the Obamas and their $60+-million combined deal, the Clintons and their respective $14 and $15. They might bloom wherever an imprint wants to say “our wallet is open, and we’re spending big, baby!” roughly a year after they significantly reduced their nonfictive editorial workforce. Euphemisms bloom at the Boolean overlap of love, ego, and fear.
Roughly is a world in a word. Life begins, proceeds, and most often ends roughly. Numbers—dollars, years, polls, presidential terms—shouldn’t matter to the meaning of a human life or the calculations of a human heart, but they do, roughly. You know this. I know this. We all do.
Which is why, I think, over the years, I’ve heard so many authors ask some version of this question, frightened and sad: “am I too old to get a book deal?”
I’ve heard this from people as young as 27, bless them, although most often from people 40+: “will publishers ever take a debut from someone my age?” “Are young MFA grads getting all the deals?” “Who is going to want another retiree memoir?” “With all these ‘30 Under 30’ awards, what is the point of even trying?” And on and on and on.
I’ve had those fears too—not just as an agent, but as a writer. I want to write a book someday, I think, although I haven’t even started making any progress in that regard. And I do wonder—albeit more with respect to robots than to my age, which is 40—when will it be too late?
Still, though: I can’t bring myself to regret not having written a book yet. Anything I might’ve written before ~35 would have been cringe beyond belief. Like many neurotic, feelings-avoidant, approval-gobbling people-pleasers, I couldn’t even begin to develop emotional depth until I became too exhausted, overwhelmed, and out of shape to outrun much at all.
Like artisanal yogurt, I need to decompose to have even minimal flavor. And while I remain scared of my own immaturity—of how long it takes me to understand anything subjective worth understanding—I’m sure I was never ready in my youth to share my understandings.
To be a literary agent is to come in contact every day with the tenderest parts of the human heart, whether observing them from afar in former presidents or up close in struggling authors and recently laid-off editors—or me. We are all, one ventricular contraction at a time, roughly losing the battle with mortality, and we know it. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.
Yes, and—imagine me sort of motorboating this into your face with one of those horrible distressed-cursive barndominium signs: from roughness, all beauty.
In the rock tumbler of life, there is no gleam without grit: trying and failing and colliding and breaking and getting a little nauseous as all the same shit goes around and around and aROUND.
With all that in mind, how far should you personally let your mortality fears creep into your writing life? As the clock ticks on not just your career but the chambers of your heart, the alveoli of your lungs, the synapses of your brain, is it still worth trying to write your first book? Your second, third? Who gets to debut, come back, come forward? Who gets to stay?
Truly I tell you—
