When I told my agent that I had written a book, she said to me: “Hey, if you want $800, I’ll give you $800.”
But I published it anyway, and though she was wrong in the specifics, she got the general gist of the compensation right. Put it this way: That book got a nice reception, but it didn’t give me any tax trouble.
My publisher was based in London, and I liked the classy sound of that. I’m published primarily in Great Britain. They “get” me, overseas. I’m really more of a sophisticated, continental voice.
The real reason I was published in the United Kingdom is because they’re the only people who asked me. Look, I’m a writer: If you ask me to write something and you offer to pay me, I’ll probably do it.
But the fun of writing a book is the book publicity tour, where for five or six solid days, a writer, a person who usually lurks around the house in a robe, grumbling and muttering to himself, is treated like, well, an actor.
Not like a star, obviously. More like a fat but beloved character actor, the person who plays the leading man’s best friend. But still: There are events — signings, book parties, radio interviews, that kind of thing. For five or six days, people ask you questions about your work that suggest that they have actually read it and that they actually care about your answer. And then, someone gives you a sandwich and a drink. It’s nice.
In England, though, it’s even better because everything is pretty much based in London, so it’s easy to shuttle around to various studios and events. And because it’s Britain, someone is always offering you a drink, and because of the long tradition of British writers, no one expects even the mildest amount of sobriety, or restrained behavior at all. So, when you politely decline their offer of a beer or tankard of wine by pointing out, politely, that it’s 9:30 in the morning, they’re thrilled because it means that you might actually make it through the interview, unlike the last (British) writer they had on the show.
And also: British journalists and critics are so reflexively withering and nasty toward every successful British person that they reserve all of their fawning adjectives for visiting American hacks.
Which is nice, if you’re one of those.
My book was a memoir about my early years as a television writer in Hollywood. And as it happened, my book tour overlapped with the tour of another American writer who had also written a memoir about his early years as a television writer in Hollywood.
The books differ in a lot of ways, but in this way in particular: There’s no heroin addiction in mine. My book takes place mostly in my office at Paramount Studios and at various sunny lunch spots around Los Angeles. His book takes place in gritty drug dealers’ apartments and various crack dens. Our life experiences, in other words, were very different.
It was purely coincidental that two American television writers had written two different memoirs and were touring on overlapping dates. But a small, local London newspaper somehow sloppily got the books mixed up, and so, the piece they wrote about me opened this way: “While Los Angeles burned in the riots of 1994, twenty-three year old Cheers writer Rob Long was in South Central LA, scoring a dime bag of Mexican brown junk to slam between his toes, the only thing that enabled him to write lines for Woody, Sam, and TV’s beloved Norm.”
Full disclosure: I actually was out of town during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. I was fly fishing in Northern California. (See above, re: different life experiences.)
But libel laws in the U.K. are awfully strict. If you say something about someone that’s false and damaging, even if you did it without malice, you’re liable for some hefty, hefty damages. And when everyone at the publisher realized that a dreadful mistake had been made, a realization that came merely by glancing in my direction — I’m so obviously not cool enough to have ever been a heroin addict — they contacted the editor of the mistaken paper, who, after changing his trousers, offered up a lot of compensatory goodies: free ad space for the book, a profile, that sort of thing.
I settled for a framed copy of the article, which I hung on my office wall. I would notice, during meetings, when people would glance at the article, then back at me, then back at the article. I would let them wonder. One or two times, I really felt like having that article on the wall gave me more leverage in whatever meeting was taking place. Libel, I discovered, is not always a bad thing.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
