My family looked at me funnily, but not for the first time. With a holiday gift card I’d ordered a book on the card game Authors that I’d blogged about recently. You see, there’s not a ton of information on it on the web, and it was a formative influence in my life and I wanted to know more. I suppose it’s typical for someone raised as a fundamentalist not to immediately think of evolution, but Authors has evolved over the years. And quite a lot. For one thing, you can’t copyright an idea and other game-producing companies made their own versions of the original game. And what I’d assumed had been the original (since it was the one I had as a child) was only one of many versions. The book even documents the Bible Authors game I’d mentioned. My real interests included that age-old question—did it ever include Edgar Allan Poe?
Today is Poe’s birthday. It’s fair to say that he’s one of the most recognizable authors in the world now. He also had a tough time being accepted. This book, which I haven’t read through—it’s more of a reference book, in any case—points out that Poe was indeed included in more than one edition of the game. He isn’t one of the strongly recurring authors (which include several of whom I’d never heard). This is the fate of writers. Reading about Dickens lately, I came to realize that even after several best-selling novels (at numbers that would make any modern publisher gloat), he was effectively living off debt until well into his forties. And he died at 58. He was famous, but until his final years not what you could consider wealthy.
Another realization dawned. Writing for a wider readership means getting away from academic publishers. I had an agent interested in my current book project for a couple of months before he decided it wasn’t for him. I’ve also come to see that several authors I respect, and whose books are priced below $20, have published with presses that aren’t part of the Big Five. And they earn some profit from their efforts (unlike academic publishing). In other words, becoming an author of either fiction or non, often involves book sense that I’ve been slow to gain. At the Easton Book Festival a few years back I met several local writers who were putting additions onto their houses with the royalties they earned. I’d published three books at that point and was turning my pockets inside out hoping for forgotten spare change. Authors is a game. Those who are included are those who figured out how it’s played.
