When people who are not writers envision the writing life, misconceptions invariably arise. From the glory age of Hemingway and Kerouac, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, we think of endless bacchanals of sex, travel, and copious drinking, coupled with disdain for the ordinary obligations of other mortals. Fast forward to the heydays of Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susann, Michael Crichton, and other mega-brand names, and we envision Hollywood glitz, leopard-print couture, and cocktail parties galore. Then we reach today, where a few big names, like J.K Rowling, Stephen King, and a handful of others, continue to dominate the bestseller lists, with the occasional debut author making a heady splash in their midst. Yet the reality remains that for most writers, the writing life is no bed of roses. Or much of a bacchanal. Alas.

Writing is a passion. Publishing is a business. The two must meet for a writer to be published, in the traditional / legacy approach, but they are rarely simpatico alliances. Publishers pay authors an advance to acquire their novel - I'm focusing on fiction here, because that's what I know - and in exchange, the author agrees to give the publisher the right to publish and distribute the book, according to specifications outlined in a contract. The advance is not mad money: it must be paid back, in the form of a percentage of royalties earned on sales of the novel. Not the entirety of the sale price, mind you, but from the percentage accorded to the author per the contract - which means, before the author sees a single extra payment in royalties, he or she must first earn out their advance in sales. Advances vary in fiction, but by and large, very few novelists get rich off their advance. Fiction is notoriously challenging to sell and publishers base the advance on an average estimate of how many copies they think the novel might sell, and that's a lower number financially than what non-writers think. If the book sells more copies and the advance is earned out, great for the author. If it sells less copies and money is owed on the advance, it might not be so great for the author. Advances dictate an author's fiscal price in the publishing marketplace, and while many authors do not earn out their advances, the fact that they don't can be, and often is, cited against them when it comes to negotiating the next book contract. Sometimes, if the publisher overpaid on the advance in the mistaken hope that the book would sell much better than it did, the author could be denied a new contract and find themselves out in the cold.

Publishing has always operated on a thin profit margin, if you take into account operating costs and percentages of sales that bookstores and distributors must earn to keep their doors open. Depending on the advance, a book might have to sell a lot of copies - tens of thousands or more - to be profitable, though e-books have changed the game somewhat because there are no warehousing or printing costs associated with an e-book. Nevertheless, the print edition contains those costs, and so e-books are not a panaceas. And authors don't make as much on e-book sales due to an unfathomable industry standard that would require a separate blog post.

Suffice to say, if you add in the diminishing space for book reviews in newspapers and other media outlets - which are fast going extinct - and the collapse of major chain-stores like Borders, you get a perfect storm for authors. A tsunami of novels are still published every year, but the ability to reach readers and create a bestseller, let alone a modest success, is becoming more of an obstacle course every day. With publisher marketing budgets slashed to bare bones and so many authors to promote in any given year, most fiction writers are left on their own to drum up awareness of their books. It's the cruelty of economics: people can't read a book they've never heard of, yet publishers can't promote every book they publish. Advertising is very costly and man/woman power at the publishing house is limited. Bestselling authors get the lion's share of the publisher's attention because their advance requires it; some debut authors get support because the house thinks their book will be a hit. The majority of other authors do not.

What this boils down is the fallacy, or illusion, that writers lead a cushy existence. We sit in our pajamas all day at the computer spinning stories and downing cups of joe, without a care in the world. We cash our royalty checks and indulge in luxury. The reality is, most of us work far more than 40 hours a week. We not only write our books - a feat, in and of itself - but then we must market them: managing our own social media accounts, hiring freelance marketing firms, if we can afford it, to buy ads for us - which usually entails, no new shoes or a vacation for us that year - and trudging to and from bookstores, hoping to entice readers with our often disheveled but earnest talks on why we wrote our book. It's not easy and it's not glamorous, though I'll readily admit it's not standing in a rice paddy with a pole on our back, either. It has its perks. But most writers I know, myself included, write because it's our vocation. We can't NOT write. Trust me, I've tried. There are days when even pole-dancing seems like a better option.

As marketing at publishing houses continues to fade and readers are seduced by bargain e-book sale prices, as other forms of entertainment divert attention from the written word, and we complain about how our favorite author's latest novel failed to meet our expectations, it's important to remember that most writers don't write to get rich and go to Cannes with cabana boys attending them on their yachts. Writers write out of a need to tell a story, a compulsion that keeps us at it day after day, month after month, and year after year. We write because we must, because life is pale without it. We want you, the reader, to love our work, but we also want you to know that even if you didn't, we depend on you to continue writing. We don't set the prices on our books: that's a publisher decision. We usually have little control over our final cover design, as that, too, is in the publisher purview. We sometimes don't even have much control over our subject matter, because if we have to put food on our table and our publisher says no to an idea we love and propose, then we have to come up with another idea the publisher will like and want to offer on. So much of our career depends on readers, who buy our books, and therefore we need you as much as we hope you need us.

Next time you're in a bookstore and wonder how this all comes about, and perhaps shake your head at the price of our latest hardcover, remember that there's a person behind that printed object. More than one, in fact. An entire group of persons who worked to bring that particular novel to the marketplace, but only one who's not on salary: the author. We have to earn out our advance to keep writing, so if you enjoy our work, know that your dollars spent are directly benefiting us in our pursuit to entertain you. We'd love to keep telling you stories and we never mean to offend or waste your time or money.

What we want is your support. Your trust in us. Because we're mostly just like you: working hard to support ourselves and our families. And we have good days and bad days in this job we call the writing life.