The Palin Advance

OK, I don't want to be snide or ungrateful (lately a few choice projects have been going my way) BUT when I read that Sarah Palin is reportedly being offered $7 million to write a book AND that Joe The Plumber is close behind, well, I can get pretty nasty, pretty quickly. But just to show you that I am not the only one who is OUTRAGED at this ridiculous state of affairs in the publishing industry, I offer you Erica's Heller's take on the same subject. Erica is the daughter of Joe Heller, author of Catch-22.

"Aah, but the literary world was not always so whorish, swinish and unrepentant," she notes on the Huffington Report. (Told you we could get nasty. . .) Her father worked on his first novel, Catch-22 for 8 years, "evenings and weekends, since he had a full-time job, wife and small kids to support. It was a labor of love and although his belief in it was absolute, there was no guarantee of a publisher, an audience, an advance."

In fact, she relates, Catch-22 got off to a very slow start and poor reviews from a lot of influential publications. And then slowly it developed a following by word of mouth and the book ended up selling millions of copies. For all of this, Heller was paid an advance of $1500.

To add insult to injury, Ms. Heller notes the following truths: Palin's and the Plumber's "memoirs" are "certain to be ghosted by some unsung schnooks" and these manuscripts will be "comprised mostly of little more than bragging, lying and recycling some vary stale air."

My point, of course, is that with $7 million going to NON-WRITERS like Palin and who knows how much to the plumber, is it any wonder there is nothing left for those who actually ARE WRITERS???? And what kind of a recession might we be in when a plumber earns millions off a memoir based on his fifteen seconds of television fame?

Far better, as Heller suggests, to consider how some of that money might have been spent: "For their efforts, they will be awarded gargantuan advances, piles of money that could feel several Third World nations for some time. or OUR nation since there are still so man hungry, weary, homeless, and wanting."

Or to note that "Not all of us are plucked from obscurity, wrapped in Valentino or held up as a poster-child for the working man. Some people have to actually work at it and at times, there is even talent, skill, and a magical, indefinable creative spark magnificently ignited in the process."

Shame on you publishing industry. Joseph Heller and Sarah Palin do not belong in the same business.