That would not have been easy to do.) But Perrin's was full-time, and I held it nearly a year. I was almost sorry when it came to an end. I told my boss, in a rare conversational exchange, that sooner or later I was planning to leave, and he took umbrage. If I was that disloyal to the firm, I should be fired right then, he said, and so I was.
By that time I was beginning to earn a few dollars here and there from writing.
You must understand that when I say a "few" dollars, I mean so few that each separate one was an event. There were many people who were earning pitifully small incomes in the late 30s, but not very many who earned less than I. The next step below my annual income was zero.
But the difference between "nothing" and "almost nothing" is very large. And it got bigger as I went along, jumping almost an order of magnitude a year. A few dollars in 1937, a few tens of dollars in 1938, a few hundred in 1939—well, boy! If that rate of economic growth had only continued, I would now be earning, let me see, something like $10 40 this year, or roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the gross global product.
It has not worked out that way. But I had established the principle that money could somehow be earned out of the writing business; it was only necessary to increase the flow. Writing was unreliable, and I had not yet aspired to editing, but I had heard of the existence of such a thing as a literary agent.
I had never seen one, and had no very clear idea of what anybody needed one of these creatures for, but the theory seemed simple. You persuaded writers to give you their stories, and you sent them out to editors. When an editor bought one, you then sent the check to the writer, deducting ten percent for your trouble.
That seemed as if it should be easier work for the dollar than writing. I calculated that if I had nine clients and sold an aggregate of a thousand dollars' worth of their work, they would each have averaged one hundred dollars net. And so would I! That was a fascinating revelation. It meant that if I had nine writers as clients, I would be earning as much as if I were a writer myself. (I have always been good at figures. * )
* Less good, maybe, at making them come out in the black.
I knew that a literary agency was a business, and a business needed printed letterheads and cards. That was no problem. Johnny Michel's father had remarried and the new wife sort of preferred Johnny out of the house, so he had come to live in the spare room of our apartment and brought his Kelsey 3x5 flatbed printing press along. He taught me how to set type, and so I set up and printed my own letterheads and even business cards. I was all set, except for the lack of any clients.
My first client was myself. I could see that it didn't look good for an agent to be peddling the work of only one writer, especially if he was the writer, but I devised a way around that. I had always thought it a romantic notion to write under pseudonyms, and I could have ten instant clients simply by signing ten of my stories with different names. It didn't matter particularly that I did that. None of them sold, anyway, in those years.
Then there were the Futurians. They didn't like wasting money on postage stamps any more than W. L. Perrin and Son, and most of them were willing to let me risk my efforts on the problematical results. Out of their collective resources I made one or two tiny sales. At the time of the first "convention" in Philadelphia, I had met a young fan named Milton A. Rothman, just out of high school and torn between colleges. He had won a science scholarship to Penn and a music scholarship to Juilliard: did he want to be a physicist or a pianist? He finally settled for physics, but what he really wanted to be was a science-fiction writer. He gave me a couple of his stories. I didn't just market them, I actually rewrote them (we had agreed on a twenty-percent share for me in the event of
By that time I was beginning to earn a few dollars here and there from writing.
You must understand that when I say a "few" dollars, I mean so few that each separate one was an event. There were many people who were earning pitifully small incomes in the late 30s, but not very many who earned less than I. The next step below my annual income was zero.
But the difference between "nothing" and "almost nothing" is very large. And it got bigger as I went along, jumping almost an order of magnitude a year. A few dollars in 1937, a few tens of dollars in 1938, a few hundred in 1939—well, boy! If that rate of economic growth had only continued, I would now be earning, let me see, something like $10 40 this year, or roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the gross global product.
It has not worked out that way. But I had established the principle that money could somehow be earned out of the writing business; it was only necessary to increase the flow. Writing was unreliable, and I had not yet aspired to editing, but I had heard of the existence of such a thing as a literary agent.
I had never seen one, and had no very clear idea of what anybody needed one of these creatures for, but the theory seemed simple. You persuaded writers to give you their stories, and you sent them out to editors. When an editor bought one, you then sent the check to the writer, deducting ten percent for your trouble.
That seemed as if it should be easier work for the dollar than writing. I calculated that if I had nine clients and sold an aggregate of a thousand dollars' worth of their work, they would each have averaged one hundred dollars net. And so would I! That was a fascinating revelation. It meant that if I had nine writers as clients, I would be earning as much as if I were a writer myself. (I have always been good at figures. * )
* Less good, maybe, at making them come out in the black.
I knew that a literary agency was a business, and a business needed printed letterheads and cards. That was no problem. Johnny Michel's father had remarried and the new wife sort of preferred Johnny out of the house, so he had come to live in the spare room of our apartment and brought his Kelsey 3x5 flatbed printing press along. He taught me how to set type, and so I set up and printed my own letterheads and even business cards. I was all set, except for the lack of any clients.
My first client was myself. I could see that it didn't look good for an agent to be peddling the work of only one writer, especially if he was the writer, but I devised a way around that. I had always thought it a romantic notion to write under pseudonyms, and I could have ten instant clients simply by signing ten of my stories with different names. It didn't matter particularly that I did that. None of them sold, anyway, in those years.
Then there were the Futurians. They didn't like wasting money on postage stamps any more than W. L. Perrin and Son, and most of them were willing to let me risk my efforts on the problematical results. Out of their collective resources I made one or two tiny sales. At the time of the first "convention" in Philadelphia, I had met a young fan named Milton A. Rothman, just out of high school and torn between colleges. He had won a science scholarship to Penn and a music scholarship to Juilliard: did he want to be a physicist or a pianist? He finally settled for physics, but what he really wanted to be was a science-fiction writer. He gave me a couple of his stories. I didn't just market them, I actually rewrote them (we had agreed on a twenty-percent share for me in the event of
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