Free Love and Other Expensive Writing Lessons

Writing that first novel can be quite the experience

It was Los Angeles in the 1960s — the valley was brimming with Volkswagens, hippies, weed, and free love. Love was free if you could find it and all the guys I knew were looking for it. I was a student and aspiring writer, sending manuscripts to Argosy Magazine, Readers Digest, and other magazines that accepted submissions.

My writing buddy, Jack Marlando, burst into my apartment one day with good news: we had received the green light to coauthor a new book for a book publisher called Genuine Publishing.

Jack and I thought the subject of free love was a perfect fit for Genuine Publishing because it specialized in selling paperbacks in racks near the check stands at Safeway and other grocery stores. The books were impulse buys, perhaps for women who wanted something different in life.

The titles alluded to spicy content behind the covers and were written by contract writers that churned out slim volumes of about 70,000 words — the manuscripts were sent to press with little to no editing and then boxed up and shipped to market. Books that didn’t sell had their cover pages ripped off and sent back to the publisher. If a store received twenty copies, for example, and sold five, it would pay for only the five it sold, proven by the fifteen covers it returned. It was a consignment deal, and the publisher didn’t have to pay for shipping on books that failed to sell. Genuine…