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Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/saltmag/public_html/display.php on line 24 A Portrait of Yo Mama as a Salt Contributor -- 03/27/2005 KR: Did we? Huh. SALT: Tell me about the process of co-writing a book. A lot of people are wary of working with collaborators. What was the collaborative writing process like for you? KR: I would say that it's both awesome and a nightmare at the same time. What you're working on is constantly getting filtered by two people. The way that we wrote. Each of us would write our jokes, or each of us would write our pieces, but then there was a lot of mutual . . . I don't even want to call it fine-tuning, there was coarse-tuning of everything. Because we were doing that throughout, there were a lot more stages than there would be generally if you were writing something by yourself. It's a pretty cool way to write your first book, because you have someone to commiserate with. AB: Yeah, I agree, it's fun to be in it with someone else. I think the book took a lot longer than it might have because Kent and I are crazy. I would caution anyone who is thinking about writing a book with another person. I think Kent and I do and always have respected each other's talent, but even if that's the case with someone you're wanting to write a book with, you should consider this situation where you maybe don't want to work on the book anymore and yet something is really, really irking you, whether it's a wording or even, like, a comma, and you don't want to bring it up . . . but then either you do and the other person gets to bring up one of their things, or the other person brings it up and it sort of becomes this game about who's going to blink first, and both of you are writing your first book . . . KR: And it's a discussion as opposed to, "All right, I'm deleting that comma right now." SALT: You said something in an email to me, Kent, I think it was, "the vast majority of books fail quietly and miserably." KR: This is Andrew's wording largely. I don't know exactly what it is, just to take a guess, I don't know about the average book, but I would think that most books sell less than 30,000 [copies], like 20,000 or something like that? Is that the idea you have, Andrew? AB: I don't know about the numbers, but I think I read that most books do not earn back their advance. KR: Which would suggest 20,000 or even less. Which means you're making less than minimum wage for writing the book, definitely. SALT: How was working with the editor at Crown? AB: We worked with two editors, actually. end of page 3 [ 3 ] read more ... [ 4 ][ 5 ][ 6 ] |
