1) Be a spoiled-rotten child of privilege.
2) Live selfishly and dangerously.
3) Get a book deal worth $500K.
Works every time.
From Buzzfeed:
Cat Marnell has reportedly sold her memoir, How to Murder Your Life, to Simon and Schuster for $500,000.
Marnell, the drug addict ex-beauty editor of Lucky and, more recently and infamously, xoJane, has written at least part of a forthcoming book detailing her chemical-fueled exploits. The rumored advance is outrageously high for a first-time author, especially one pursuing a personal essay-based creative nonfiction project. Books of personal nonfiction are lucky to earn $50,000 advances, much less half a million dollars (and according to her agent, that wasn’t even the highest offer she received).
So, outside of her tabloid-friendly name, what makes her book worth the extra hundreds of thousands? BuzzFeed has obtained the complete proposal her agent submitted to publishers; while it doesn’t include traditional book proposal components like chapter summaries or a bulleted explanation of the title’s market appeal, it did include a picture of Marnell with a coke-snorting friend in a nightclub bathroom.
Oh, do click over for selections from her winning book proposal. And do treasure how semi-literate it is. And then reflect on all the ways in which you, as a creative person, have failed to live up to Marnell’s example.
As a serious writer, doesn’t this woman’s actions and rewards want you to throw up your hands in despair?
Did my sarcasm fail to come across? :->
Sorry, I didn’t catch it. I just read the article and felt despair for the human race. Maybe I take things too seriously.
So I wonder who’s going to write this book?
What a publisher wants is cash flow. (The ones which didn’t are no longer in business. Yay capitalism.) Actual authors make them nervous; people whom they’ve met at expensive parties are known quantities who are under the same lack of illusion as the publishers about how the game is played.
(This is a grotesque and unfair oversimplification.)