Craft Seminar: The Numbers Game: Anatomy of the Advance and Other Business-of-Writing Matters with Porochista Khakpour
Craft Seminar: The Numbers Game: Anatomy of the Advance and Other Business-of-Writing Matters with Porochista Khakpour
1 Session: Sunday, February 9
1:00-4:00pm ET
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of five critically acclaimed books (three novels, a memoir, and an essay collection), all from major publishers (Grove, Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Knopf Doubleday). She's taught creative writing and literature since 2003, moving mainly to online teaching since 2019. Her essays, criticism, investigative features, and profiles can be found in newspapers and magazines all over the world, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Bookforum, Elle, BOMB, Poets & Writers, and more. She's had fellowships from the NEA, MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Civitella Ranieri, and more. Born in Tehran and raised in the Greater Los Angeles suburbs, she currently lives in New York City.
Money-talk can be a nightmare in the arts, but I’d argue it can be at least somewhat empowering to understand some basic economics in our messy industry. Whether you like it or not, somewhere someone is calculating your worth with crude numbers game analytics. This seminar will look at everything from how to build a life doing what you live to the recent history of author advances to perspectives on harm-mitigation when dealing with the ugly realities of capitalism in the arts. How do we survive as artists in this world? How can we afford to live our dreams? How is everyone else making it look so easy? Why do some book sell for a few thousand dollars while others sell for a million dollars? Have the authors who prefer lower advances lost their minds? How do royalties factor into all this? Can certain agents get us certain advances? Is there a way to hack our way into riches? How do we stop worrying about this so we can start doing what we love again? Perhaps at the core of all these questions is the most fundamental one: can I afford to be an author in 2024? We will look at a variety of issues entangled in this expansive topic. While I will share my own stories after having published five books, I will also include stories and feedback from other authors, agents, editors, and other industry experts. I will also make sure to answer any and all questions.
Workshop Highlights:
A business-of-writing shop-talk to hopefully empower in this time of general economic instability
A community of people who share your practical concerns without having to think about craft for once
The opportunity to ask the "embarrassing"/taboo questions without judgment
Two full scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, January 31st.
Porochista Khakpour is the author of four critically acclaimed books, most recently Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Vintage Books, 2020), which Ploughshares called “fearless.” In 2o18 she published the memoir Sick (HarperCollins, 2018), which Kirkus Review praised as “lucid, eloquent, and unflinchingly honest.” Sick was named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by the Boston Globe, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Electric Literature,, Huffington Post, Bitch, The Milions, The Rumpus, Autostraddle and others. Khakpour was called one of Dazed’s “Top American Writers You need to be Reading,” and Open Road Media’s “10 Amazing Female Novelists Under 50.” Her next book is Teherangles, coming from Pantheon in 2023.
Her debut novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove Press, 2008) was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of the Chicago Tribune’s Fall’s Best, and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the “First Fiction” category. Her second novel, The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) was named a 2014 "Best Book of the Year" by NPR, Kirkus, Buzzfeed, Popmatters, Electric Literature and many more.
