In the summer of 2023, a few weeks after the first portion of my advance for my next two books arrived via direct deposit in my checking account, I bought tickets to Adele’s Las Vegas residency concert. I booked a hotel room with a tub and upgraded myself and my then-boyfriend, now-husband Bram to premium economy. Quiet in the back of my mind was how quickly I was making these purchases. But I had told myself, shortly after my agent had let me know that we had closed a two-book deal with my publisher, that I would use some of the money I received to do something nice. That, and save the rest. Which I’m happy to say that I did.
I had accomplished something I had never let myself dwell too much over, not during my MFA, not during the submission process for my first novel two years earlier, or at any other point in my career thus far. I had been paid a substantial amount of money for my writing, substantial enough to give rise to that frightening question: had I made it ? Could I quit my day job? Had I reached that threshold in which cobbling together an income solely as an author could sustain the life I wanted? As we descended into Harry Reid International Airport, I still hadn’t decided.
I wondered whether I was now beholden to a different set of responsibilities in my writing work, now that my writing work had become in part a business.
While settling into our seats in the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, I felt a deep dread. The costs involved in making the minor dream of seeing my favorite singer live a reality were terrifying. I couldn’t shake the guilt. There were a million better uses for this money, and here I was, having blown a small but not-insignificant portion of it in Vegas, a bastion of bad decisions.
I started thinking about the person I was before my agent had called with the first bit of good news a few months earlier: that a short while after my second novel, I Leave It Up to You, had been submitted to its first batch of editors, one of those editors liked it enough to get on a call with me. Before that, I was a person whose first novel had taken seven months to sell to a publisher, the only publisher who had made an offer. I was also a person whose total earnings from writing over the 4 or 5 years it had been since I’d begun submitting work for publication amounted to a month’s rent, if not a little less.
I wondered whether Adele, raised by a single mother in Brixton, who played guitar with friends in London’s Brockwell Park, whose runaway single “Chasing Pavements” was written about slapping her ex boyfriend in a club and running away to stalk the streets alone, thought about her work differently now that she lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills, now that a private jet ferried her from that home to the concert venue each weekend. I wondered whether I was now beholden to a different set of responsibilities in my writing work, now that my writing work had become in part a business—encompassing sales, marketing, yearly projections, return on investment—worth more than half of my financial footprint.
The fiscal responsibility of it all is a new and uncomfortable reality. I earned out my advance for my first novel relatively quickly. The path towards the same result was not going to be so easy this time around. I thought: did anybody still care what I had to say? Would readers who enjoyed my first book, a science fiction thriller, enjoy the second, a comedic family drama about a sushi restaurant? It’s somewhat disappointing to learn, along the path toward the publication of my second novel, that my more modest advance for my first was a much larger influence on my mindset than I thought.
My first novel had exceeded expectations in every way. Its collection of primarily positive reviews, its inclusion on anticipatory lists, and its eventual awards contention were icing on the cake of my debut journey. Conversely, the bad news—bad reviews, stung less. The stakes were lower. The question of whether to leave my day job was a laughable non-issue.
Writers are responsible for so much outside the task of writing. It can feel cruel, how much has nothing to do with any measurable effort we can place toward good numbers, good marketing, and the like. I’ve entered a new phase of my career with this book, one in which these things matter more than ever. I am not only an artist but an investment made in part by a corporate conglomerate whose profits and losses largely decide the health of the publishing industry itself.
Earlier this year, I sat down to revise a new novel. I had a thought that I’d never had before while deciding whether to keep a passage or cut it: would this make a reader mark me down a star on Goodreads? Would this make a reader return the book to the store? Would this prevent a reader from buying it in the first place? Does this passage hit a buzzword that a library or independent bookstore may use to fill their lists? Or have I thrown a promising sales avenue away because I’ve chosen wrong?
I can’t help but understand, intimately, just how much rides on the potential financial performance of my creativity these days.
The thoughts are poison, and still, I’m human. I can’t help but understand, intimately, just how much rides on the potential financial performance of my creativity these days. Whether I’ve chosen right with this new novel, or the next, remains to be seen. For the most part, I enjoy having a day job unrelated to my writing. I appreciate the partitions of time and focus it creates in my life. I’ve kept it for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is fear.
The show, of course, lived up to my sky-high expectations. I cried at a number of moments, hanging onto Bram’s arm and sobbing the hardest during the second song of the set, “Easy on Me,” a song so devastating that I had resolved right then and there, listening to it while on a walk a year and half earlier, to see Adele live in concert by any means necessary. The final song that night was “Love is a Game,” a Supremes-coded ballad about one’s own helplessness in the face of love and its pitfalls, the idea that our human nature compels us to love, again and again, despite it feeling foolish to do so.
It’s the song that plays in my head, in my imaginary score of I Leave It Up to You, during the final chapter, when my 32-year-old sushi chef protagonist Jack Jr. begins a lonely walk away from the man he loves most. When Adele vanished from the stage in a shower of pink rose petals, the words ‘THE BEGINNING,’ rather than ‘THE END,’ gleamed across the walls in front of us.
The next quarter of my advance will be delivered to me when the manuscript of my third novel is accepted for publication. With luck, that will be sometime this year. I expect to face the same difficult questions about what to do with the surplus, though with Adele on a professional hiatus, I don’t see much reason to spend so generously again. We pay for the memories, in one way or another.
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I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
