No, she's not. She might be a good writer; but her books have not necessarily sold well in the past and judging from her comment that her latest advance was half that of her previous advance, I'd guess that her sales have not been good at all.
I said this because her last novel was described as a "bestseller", so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt. If we could get hold of the actual sales figures for her past novels, that would be useful and illuminating. You may well be right about this.
Writing articles and so on requires a completely different skill-set to writing fiction. Many writers can do it, but many others can't.
If you turn it round, and suggest that someone who can write a decent article must therefore be able to learn to write a decent novel, then perhaps you'd see the problem here.
Good point. Maybe article writing wouldn't work for her.
She states in a current post - "There's something important I forgot to say to all of you. It was Joe Konrath who ENCOURAGED me to duke it out with the publisher. To not give in."
Yikes. I suppose Konrath is going to help her repay her advance and cover her living costs now?
And I guess why I'm sort of chafing under the comments here. "She will just have to buckle down and get a job. She should just write another book." Easy to say in theory, harder for an individual to execute in real life when the wolf is at your door.
I can't speak for anyone else, but here's my take: when I look at this situation, I see an author who has three books pro-pubbed over the space of several years. So I'm thinking, in those fifteen-plus years, why did she never sit down and go "Okay, I'm going to need to write a book a year if I want a regular income." Did her agent never suggest this to her? Maybe she got such big advances that she thought "Hey, I can afford to be slow."
The advice to write a book a year and keep doing it isn't an immediate fix - it's what I think she should've decided to do about ten years ago. That seems to me the professional approach to take, especially if you've got a novel deal with a publisher. Keep writing those books, keep sending them out. She didn't do this; now ten/fifteen years down the line she's struggling and it takes her five years to write a novel and she has no money.
I don't have a quick fix solution. Get a job? Well, good luck with that. Pen some freelance articles and sell them? If you can, it's worth a shot. Maybe. Money's tight for everyone and I can sympathise with this woman being in a tricky situation, because we all are. But here's the kicker:
she had a way out. A pro-publisher offered her an advance for her new novel. Money! Financial (semi)security! Bills paid, food on table! She lost that advance due to her own behaviour. She had the opportunity to capitulate and play nice with the publisher and thereby keep her money. She decided 'duking it out' with EVUL Pubber was much more important, and now she's lost her advance.
I only have very limited sympathy for people who bring their problems upon themselves.
