This year marks the emerald anniversary of my first professional sale and publication as an author. I’m not sure why, but I’ve never taken stock of my whole writing ‘career’ (if that’s the right word), which began in earnest four years before that sale, and two decades seems an appropriate (if extremely tardy) time to ask myself whether I’ve succeeded or failed at it. If nothing else, the answer might determine what I do with the next two decades (or, more realistically, whatever part thereof is left).
From one point of view, it’s been a success. By this summer, I’ll have authored twenty books (divided evenly between academic monographs on culture, crime, and politics and small press pulp fiction novels and collections) and three hundred shorter works (including several as editor). While I’d be lying if I said I was proud of every single long and short piece published, I’d defend one of the monographs and one of the short story collections as being right up there with the best. Though two good or better books and a few good articles and short stories isn’t much in twenty years, I’m happy with it. A slight change of perspective, however, tells a very different tale. None of my long or short works have ever been published by the Big Four or elite university presses such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, or Stanford or in periodicals with more than a few thousand readers so I may well be overrating the quality of my oeuvre. A quantitative evaluation is nigh mortifying: none of all those publications made me more than £1,000 and most of them didn’t earn anything at all. Forgetting about the money for a minute, which no professional writer can afford to do, with a mere two exceptions, my estimated readership has been in four figures (or less) for each. If the lack of quantity reflects a lack of quality, then I have indeed overrated myself.
Put like that, I’d have to say I failed, but it’s all too easy to compare oneself to the best-known writers – Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, James Ellroy, China Miéville, etc. – when the reality is that they constitute a tiny percentage of the profession. Let me try a different tack: what was my goal when I set out? To earn a ‘modest’ living from writing fiction and nonfiction which, for reasons I can’t remember, I set at £30,000 per annum in 2006. Given the various financial and cost of living crises since, that would probably be £50,000 now. The latest statistics suggest I set the bar outrageously high. At present, more than four in five novelists in the UK support themselves with other jobs, their median annual income from writing is £7,000 (less than a third of minimum wage), and the income of the top 10% is disproportionally high compared to the rest. I haven’t made £30,000 from writing in twenty years, let alone each year, which simply confirms my failure. In mitigation, in 2006 there was still a ‘mid-list’ of novelists, a host of magazines accepting article or story submissions from unknown authors, and readerships were expanding rather than shrinking, meaning my goal wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds in hindsight. All that has of course changed several times over, courtesy of the digitisation of everyday life, shifts away from reading novels and watching films to online gaming, and the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Perhaps, after all, there is some success in still being able to publish and still getting read, even if by only a few hundred people each time?
Or perhaps I’m asking the wrong question and the issue at stake isn’t success or failure but why I started writing for publication in the first place and why I’m still doing it two decades later? I didn’t start in 2006 to earn £30,000 (I was already making slightly more than that) – I started to earn a modest living by writing. Notwithstanding the failure of that goal, I managed to keep up a steady rate of publication (a book each year and a short work each month) in spite of never having more than 50% of my working week to write, edit, and research. Let me change tack one last time. If, as seems highly likely at the moment, that 50% drops to 0%, what will I do? I’ll do what I did from 2002 to 2006, write on weekends, holidays, nights…whenever time permits…which implies I’m doing it for pleasure. Call me naïve, but when Stephen King writes ‘I did it for the pure joy of the thing’ in On Writing, I believe him and I don’t begrudge a single cent of the many millions he was talented and lucky enough to earn while he was enjoying himself. If the ‘right’ question to ask is why I have spent so much time writing for the last twenty years, then the answer is for the pure joy. And spending that much time doing something enjoyable, something whose product a few thousand other people have enjoyed, is worth doing for as long as time permits.
All of which is why I collected seventy-five of my short nonfiction works in A Pulp Memoir: Essays, Reviews, Interviews 2006-2026. Is it a memoir? Not really, but it does include both my first and most recent publication, spanning the full range of the two decades. There are also autobiographical reflections on my experiences as a writer in the introduction and conclusion, in the three interviews (one from 2009 and two from 2024), and in the essays about my two novels (published in 2009 and 2017). Perhaps I should have called the collection ‘A False Memoir’, except that Jim Harrison beat me to that title fifty-five years ago with Wolf: A False Memoir (which, if anyone is interested, has absolutely nothing to do with the film Wolf, whose screenplay he wrote twenty years later). If it isn’t really a memoir, is it pulp? Most definitely. The essays, reviews, and interviews are divided into four parts, one each on crime, fantasy, weird, and climate fiction. While I don’t regard the popular distinction between artistic and genre fiction as either accurate or useful, as I mention more than once in the collection, much of what I’ve written about would be classified as pulp fiction by most critics, including: Sherlock Holmes across the centuries, the Lone Wolf gamebooks, H.P. Lovecraft’s legacy, and Sharksploitation movies. The earliest pulp fiction character I discuss is H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, who first appeared in King Solomon’s Mines in 1885 and the latest is Ice Cube’s Will Radford, the protagonist of the 2025 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which might just be the worst film I’ve ever seen. And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’m not sure what will…
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