When I first signed with my agent, I joked that I wanted my advances to be paid in the form of solid gold toilets,1 and that’s been our code for good news ever since. When I get an email with the subject line “Gold Toilet Incoming,” I know we’ve sold something and a check is on the way.2 this was clearly the optimism of a young writer who still thought there was a lot of money in this writing game.3 But it was also representative of the way many of us writers think about this business as a zero-sum career where you’re either a bestseller or a failure, where you’re either getting a six-figure advance or it doesn’t matter.
the reality
