This is, in retrospect for those familiar with the history, hilarious:
Looking above at my novel advances, I see four distinct eras in them:
Debut: The $6.5k and $2k advances, signed when I was brand new and no one knew what would happen;
Developing: The $13.5k, $25k, and $35k contracts, after Old Man’s War hit commercially and critically and Tor realized there was possible headroom to my career, but I was still building an audience;
Established: The $100k and $115k contracts, when I had hit the bestseller lists, won awards, and had a series (Old Man’s War) that was spinning off serious money;
Franchise: The $3.4M deal, when Tor decided to go all in and lock me up long-term, both to continue momentum in new releases and to extract value out of my profitable backlist.
Now, at this point, it’s almost uniformly recognized by anyone who has read both of our works that I am a much better novelist than old Johnny Con. Whereas I can credibly write everything from 4-panel comics to movie scripts to 900-page epics, he struggles to put together a 250-page novel without ripping off one or more better science fiction authors. If you don’t believe me, just read a few reviews of our works, then compare short story to short story or novel to novel.
But what is amusing in light of the long-running SF-SJW “envy” narrative, to say nothing of the ludicrous “awards” metric, is that this talent gap was obviously recognized by our mutual editors from the very start. As it happens, I was getting paid more to NOT write books than Scalzi was getting paid to write them at the same time that his fan club was insisting that I was envious of his “massive success”. But his literary success turns out to have been the same sort of manufactured charade that his “extraordinary amount” of blog traffic was.
My first two novel advances were $20k and $20k, or nearly five times more than Scalzi was paid for his first two novels. And here is the punchline: writing has never been anything more than a pasttime for me. I still don’t consider myself to be a writer; I am first and foremost a game designer. It’s also a bit amusing to see him labeling himself a franchise writer, especially when we’ve got multiple film studios inquiring about the availability of everything from Alt-Hero and Avalon to Vampire Lords (not the actual title).
The lesson of John Scalzi is this: ruthless self-promotion, shameless dishonesty, and genuine hard work can pay off, as long as you can find the proper victim for your con artistry. His literary career, to the extent that one can even call it that, is nothing more than a house of cards constructed on a color-by-numbers basis.
And speaking of writing, the new Hypergamouse is up. It’s a good one.
UPDATE: Comments are closed. Quelle surprise!
