Stacey Abrams' 2021 Is Starting Well
Democracy saved, the bestseller list looms on the horizon...
I’m writing this shortly after midnight, and the news out of Georgia is that it appears reasonably certain Rev. Raphael Warnock will be dislodging Kelly Loeffler from the U.S. Senate—and not as certain but highly probable that Jon Ossoff will able to pull off a victory against David Perdue. If both things happen, the Democratic Party will regain control of the Senate, which (coupled with their majority in the House of Represenatives) will free the Biden administration to actually govern this country for the next two years instead of being stymied by Mitch McConnell.
If this comes to pass, it will be in large part due to the grassroots organizing of Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s Democratic candidate for governor just two years ago. She should be the governor, but the voter suppression tactics of the Georgian Republican Party were successful enough to thwart her. Afterwards, people told her she should declare herself a candidate for David Perdue’s Senate seat.
She rejected that advice, and decided to work on getting as many Georgia voters registered and ready to take part in the 2020 elections as possible. As the head of Fair Fight Action, she laid the groundwork for Joe Biden’s win in Georgia last November… and for a first battle between Perdue and Ossoff that became so closely fought that they had to do it all over again yesterday. Plus, once the dust had settled in the free-for-all over the Senate seat Kelly Loeffler had bought with her contributions to the GOP, the get-out-the-vote drive was a key factor in keeping Rev. Warnock competitive.
So, as we watched the numbers coming out of Georgia, people were saying, as Charlotte Clymer did, “Whatever Stacey Abrams wants moving forward, make sure she has it.” And here, I promise you, is where I remember that this is a newsletter about cultivating a meaningful writing practice.
You see, Stacey Abrams has a novel coming out in five months, While Justice Sleeps. It’s the first novel to appear under her own name, after eight romantic suspense novels published as Selena Montgomery between 2001 and 2009. (She chose the pseudonym because, at the time, she was also publishing academic law papers.) This new thriller is already one of the most anticipated books of early 2021, and will probably enjoy significant commercial success when it comes out—because a substantial bloc of romance writers and readers already love Stacey Abrams, and the numbers there alone would probably be enough to get her on the bestseller list for at least a week or two.
Anyway, when somebody asked on Twitter, “What do we give Stacey Abrams? And how can we thank her?”, this is what I told them:
“Well, [she] does have a novel coming out in May, and every copy you buy could put approximately $2.90-$4.35 in her pocket. (After she sells enough copies to earn out the advance, that is…)”
I don’t know the exact details of Abrams’ contract with her publisher, but let me explain how I hit upon those numbers. The suggested retail price of the hardcover is $28.95. In a typical book contract, the author will receive a 10 percent royalty on each of the first 5,000 copies sold, and I’m going to round that up to $2.90 rather than $2.89. The next 5,000 copies sold will earn the author a 12.5 percent royalty, or $3.62, per copy, and from that point forward, the royalty on every hardcover sold is 15 percent, or $4.35. (Well, really, $4.34, but I rounded up again.)
You could also factor in the royalties from ebook sales, which are generally 25 percent of whatever the ebook sold for, but I wanted to keep the math as simple as possible. Not to mention that it’s nice to buy physical books at independent bookstores when you have the option and the wherewithal to do so!
Of course, as I said in that parenthetical remark, Abrams has already received a no doubt substantial amount of money from her publisher for this book. I don’t pretend to know how much money, so I don’t know when she’ll have earned out the advance, although I’m certain that by the time it happens, she’ll be making $4.35 on every sale.
So I put that idea out there, and then a couple people asked, wow, where did Abrams find the time to write a novel along with everything else she’s been doing these last two years? My reflexive response was this:
“I don’t know [her] specific time management secrets, but when you have a story you want to tell badly enough, you make time for it. Sometimes that means letting things that don’t matter quite as much to you fall by the wayside.”
Then I thought about it, and I wondered: Has she said anything about how she managed to write that novel? So I looked it up, and the answer is somewhat more mundane than I anticipated: “A decade ago,” she said when the book deal was announced last October, “I wrote the first draft of a novel that explored an intriguing aspect of American democracy—the lifetime appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.” So, that’s how she found the time—she did it ten years ago.
Okay, in all fairness, I don’t know anything about how Abrams took a ten-year-old manuscript and sold it to a major publisher. I don’t know why she didn’t land a book deal for it back then, or whether she even pursued one. I don’t know how much rewriting she did to prepare it for publication now, although I assume she did some. It’s entirely possible that she’ll speak about those things in the future, but I haven’t found any interviews where she’s done so yet, and though I have some thoughts, I think I’ll just wait to see what she’s willing to tell us, when she’s willing to tell us.
I do suspect that it’s easier to sell a ten-year-old manuscript when you’re, you know, Stacey Abrams, but keep in mind that in order to pull that off, you’d have to spend ten years doing all the work it takes to become as big as Stacey Abrams, and to care about what you were doing as passionately as she cares about voters rights and social justice.
Frankly, it seems like it would be easier for you, and well within your power, to go over your manuscript again, if you’re determined to share its story sooner rather than later. Or to let it sit for a while until you can come to it with a fresh perspective.
Perhaps the key thing to remember is that even if you aren’t focused on a particular story at a particular moment, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed to tell that story. It just means you haven’t finished writing it yet. You might not bring it to as successful a conclusion as Stacey Abrams appears to have brought While Justice Sleeps, but you are still capable of finding it within yourself to finish, whether it takes you ten years of full-on effort or whether it comes to you through a sudden insight.
However you’re progressing, hang in there.
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(Photo of Stacey Abrams on the campaign trail in 2018 from Wikimedia Commons)