Fiction Factory

Wanna write a novel for a $250 advance?  Apparently a lot of people would.

There are these organizations in our business called fiction factories.  They are run by people called “packagers,” who basically operate very much like Hollywood producers.  They come up with an idea for a book, or more likely a series, then sell the package to a publisher, hire a writer to do the actual work, and then collect something like half of the earnings.   They also try to sell the package in other media.

When I was coming up in the business, the premiere packager was Lyle Kenyon Engel, who packaged two hit series written by John Jakes: the Kent Family Chronicles and North and South, which were not only huge best-sellers, but television miniseries as well.

I remember one amusing afternoon I spent at a coffee shop with Victor Milan and Melinda Snodgrass at some point in the early 1980s.    We had all realized we had more ideas for fiction than we could possibly write in our lifetimes, and we thought we could maybe become packagers: hire other people to write our ideas for us, then sit pretty on a 50% commission.   Eventually we decided we didn’t have the contacts in publishing to pull this off; nor— as we were barely keeping ourselves afloat at the time— did we have the money to hire other writers.

As a writer, I’m not a fiction factory sort of guy.  I don’t write fast enough, for one thing.  If I worked on a automobile assembly line instead of on a word processor, I’d still be polishing my first 1978 Camaro, and the company would have gone bankrupt and sent everyone home.  Not that they haven’t managed that without me.

But now there’s a new fiction factory making the news, one bossed by the “thrilling, condescending, rude, empowering, and haughty” James Frey, who made headlines as the author of A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of his recovery from alcohol and drug addiction that turned out to be substantially fictional.  The result was an angry on-air confrontation with Oprah,  who felt she’d been betrayed by his lies, and a lot of headlines (and a lot of copies sold).    Frey apologized, on air and in print.  Frey was dropped by his literary manager, and his publisher backed out of a multi-book deal.

Frey got a new publisher and a new best-seller after that, and Oprah eventually apologized to him for being so mean.  Frey himself is no longer in an apologetic mood, and promotes the notion that truth itself is a fiction.

Not that this flexible view of reality doesn’t stop him from holding forth.

Frey delivered his opinions on the memoir genre (“bunk,” “bullshit,” a marketing tool that didn’t exist until several decades ago); fact and fiction (there’s no difference); truth (it doesn’t exist, at least not in the journalistic sense); Europe (where he turns for validation); America (which is obsessed with honesty and raises people up only to tear them down); the best writers (Mailer, Vonnegut, Hemingway, Baudelaire, Henry Miller, Cormac McCarthy); documentary (“a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet”); Oprah (“I should have never fucking apologized”); the kind of writer he wants to be (the most controversial and widely read of his time); making literary history (he’s in it to “change the game” and “move the paradigm”; he won’t write anything that doesn’t change the world); self-editing (a trap for young writers); mistakes (part of the spontaneity of a work of art); and, most important, how to write (“don’t give a fuck”; sit for ten hours a day, 600 days in a row; “write what you want to write, and make sure there is one hell of a disclaimer at the beginning”).

I find a certain amount of chutzpah admirable— I can’t object to an author being ambitious, and unapologetic in the way he plays the publishing game in order to earn himself fame and a ton of money.  It’s the way Warhol played the art market— he manipulated the reality of the market to produce the outcome he desired.   If I could play the market that way, I would— but if I tried, the publishers would just laugh, turn away, and go on dropping millions of dollars on turkeys like The Historian.

But apparently Frey’s decided that being a rich, famous, bestselling blowhard of a novelist isn’t enough— he’s decided to run a fiction factory producing best-selling YA fiction.  And he’s decided to do it by preying on the most vulnerable of wannabe writers, MFA candidates who are desperate for a sale to justify the tens of thousands of dollars they’ve invested in university writing programs.

This is not the place to discuss the colossal worthlessness of most MFA programs, which cost a fortune and which prepare most of their students only for a lifetime of minimum-wage jobs in the food service industry.   (Despite all the MFA programs in the country, there are only about 100 tenure-track creative writing positions in the entire USA for all these programs to fill.  As to how many MFA graduates actually go on to have writing careers outside academe, apparently no one’s keeping track.  Perhaps the numbers are too embarrassing.)

At any rate, Frey is soliciting MFA students who want to go into commercial fiction, specifically for the young adult market.  The students come up with the ideas, preferably for a multi-book series.  Frey orders edits and polishes in order to make the work more commercial and pays the student a $250 advance with a further $250 on completion.

Frey buys all rights.   The contract allows him to publish the work under someone else’s name, or to take his victim’s ideas and have someone else write the books.   The author is not allowed to take public credit for the book, do publicity, or speak about the experience of writing the book  without incurring a quarter million dollar penalty.  Frey promises to pay 40% of any profits to the author, but there’s no means by which the author can audit the books to find out if he’s being paid the proper amount.  And in any case, “profits” means after expenses.

Or, as Conrad Rippy of the Author’s Guild put it:  “It’s an agreement that says, ‘You’re going to write for me. I’m going to own it. I may or may not give you credit. If there is more than one book in the series, you are on the hook to write those too, for the exact same terms, but I don’t have to use you. In exchange for this, I’m going to pay you 40 percent of some amount you can’t verify—there’s no audit provision—and after the deduction of a whole bunch of expenses.” He described it as a Hollywood-style work-for-hire contract grafted onto the publishing industry—“although Hollywood writers in a work-for-hire contract are usually paid more than $250.”

You can read the actual contract here.

Frey knew better than to go after experienced writers with a track record, because we’d tell him to take a flying jump off the Chrysler Building . . . and maybe give him a shove to get him started.  Even inexperienced writers with a sale or two would know better to accept this deal.

But not MFA students, apparently, because they’ve already shown themselves to be incredibly gullible just by virtue of being in an MFA program!

Plus, these victims seem to maintain a touching faith in the notion that genre writers can make colossal amounts of money.  (While some writers certainly do, I suspect you might have better odds of becoming a player for the NFL.)

And not only that, I have to wonder where these students’ teachers were when this was going on?  Nodding and smiling down at the rectory while they were introducing Little Jimmy to Father McSpermy?

I mean, didn’t any of the teachers feel it was their place to warn their students about such a blatant and obviously one-sided exploitation of their talent?

I guess not.  Simple business advice seems not to be the province of your MFA prof.

Now here’s an exercise for you.  What is wrong with this setup, other than the onerous contract?  What is the basic problem that  would make these writers victims, even if the contract was fair?

Okay, here’s the answer.  If you have writing skill and a great, commercial idea for a YA series . . . what do you need James Frey for? Why can’t you write it and sell it yourself, and keep all the money?

If you’re thinking about sharing your money with anyone other than an agent, you are— “‘ow do you say thees in y0ur Eenglish?”— a chump.

So here’s the upshot: James Frey is a predator.  Stay the fuck away from him.