1. You’re not going to get rich. You’re probably not even going to be able to pay your bills. In fact, money is going to turn out to be the last reason to do this. I know—you guys hate it like blazes that I keep telling you this. (Huffington Post). But keep reading (or skip ahead) to 7, anyway.
2. Your friends and family will LOVE IT. They’ll start following you everywhere, waiting for famous people to accost you so they can be the shy, self-deprecating second person, blushing and elbowing you and saying, “I’m just the sister. Really—we always knew they [pointing] were a genius.” Humorous, eye-rolling, palms-up shrug. This will be fun for awhile and then become intensely annoying, especially when the famous people never materialize. Your grandparents will keep your book on their coffee table until the day they die (when you will inherit it back).
3. Your book will have a really strange reaction to publication. It’s going to open itself up in the middle of the night the night before your publication date and rearrange all the words to make you look like an idiot. It will choose one obscure paragraph in one chapter to arrange exactly the opposite—so beautifully and profoundly and perfectly that, as god is your witness, you know for a fact you did not write that. The rest of it. . .yeah, it kind of sounds like you.
4. You will spend at least a week in an alternate universe in which your entire head is bigger than your body and your hair is actually bigger than your head. You will have eyes like a fly, facing in all directions at once. Your neck will be a thin string tied rather inexpertly to the base of your head. Although the view from up there will be extraordinary, the bobbing up & down will be so disorienting that it will affect your ability to speak clearly.
5. You will come back from this alternate universe a humbler and better person.
6. You will suddenly hate your book, hate everything about your book, hate everybody else’s books, too, and lock yourself in your attic with your dreams and your words and your vision and begin the real task of writing what you know you can write, what you’ve had inside you all along. You just needed the self-confidence of getting published to bring it out.
7. Your boss will call you up at home and tell you to get back to work or you’re fired. And you’ll go—but you’ll still be thinking all the time about what’s going on in your attic. Eventually it will occur to you that this is also how you were living before you were published. And that’s the reason to do this. . .because this is a wonderful way to live.

100. I don’t know a hundred other things about being a published author. A commenter said readers like really big numbers, and I thought I’d roll with that. But even if I did know a hundred other things, you guys would never read them all, much less remember them. And how helpful is that?

GO WRITE.

Have you guys been following what’s going on with the London Book Fair?

A volcano that erupted in Iceland has whited-out British airspace, making it almost impossible for folks to get to the Book Fair from elsewhere in the world. Not only that. But it’s also making it impossible for the ones who made it to get home again.

Publisher’s Marketplace today quotes White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, upon being asked if the US would follow the example of the UK’s Royal Navy and try to bring citizens home by boat, as saying, “We’ve got some big ships, but that would be a pretty big ship.” The US Embassy estimates 40,000 Americans are stranded in London.

Here’s a tip while you’re waiting for release, guys—don’t go in any tea shops and ask for an “English muffin.” They’re pretty testy about that over there. (Instead, I highly recommend whiling away your time engaging Brits in conversation about Stonehenge so you can tell them, “We’ve got one of those, you know,” and show them Carhenge. I once sent a postcard of it to my friends in Wiltshire, and they kept it on their fridge for years.)

Publishers Weekly (PW) has released its list of 2009 best sellers compiled from information submitted to them by publishers. It would behoove you to check it out.

In particular, take a good, hard look at the author names in the top thirty hardback fiction sellers:

Dan Brown. John Grisham. Kathryn Stockett. James Patterson. Nicholas Sparks. John Grisham. Janet Evanovich. Stephenie Meyer. Stephen King. Michael Crichton. Patricia Cornwell. Sue Grafton. Patricia Cornwell. Alyson Noel. James Patterson. Clive Cussler with Dirk Cussler. Pat Conroy. James Patterson. David Baldacci. James Patterson. Vince Flynn. James Patterson. Nora Roberts. Dean Koontz. Charlaine Harris. Danielle Steel. David Baldacci. Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. Clive Cussler. Mary Higgins Clark.

Look at them again:

• Dan Brown—MEGAFAMOUS (puzzle thrillers, series protagonist, first 3 books mediocre sellers).
• John Grisham—MEGAFAMOUS, 2 times on this list (political thrillers, politician-turned author, first book $5k advance).
• Kathryn Stockett (1960s retro-historical fiction with severe racial tension).
• James Patterson—pretty darn famous, 5 times on this list (murder thrillers, ad salesman-turned-author, described by Stephen King as “a terrible writer.”)
• Nicholas Sparks—pretty darn famous (Christian romance).
• Janet Evanovich—pretty darn famous (bounty hunter thrillers, series protagonist).
• Stephenie Meyer—pretty darn famous (young adult paranormal romance, series protagonist, poor writing).
• Stephen King—MEGAFAMOUS (horror/suspense thrillers, great writing).
• Michael Chrichton—MEGAFAMOUS (technothrillers).
• Patricia Cornwell—pretty darn famous, 2 times on this list (crime thrillers, series protagonist).
• Sue Grafton—pretty darn famous (murder mysteries, series protagonist, decent writing).
• Alyson Noel—famous enough (young adult paranormal romance, series protagonist).
• Clive Cussler—pretty darn famous, 2 times on this list (technothrillers).
• Pat Conroy—MEGAFAMOUS (psychological melodrama).
• David Baldacci—pretty darn famous, 2 times on this list (political thrillers).
• Vince Flynn—pretty famous (political thrillers, series protagonist).
• Nora Roberts—pretty darn famous (romance, over 100 novels written, founding member of Romance Writers of America).
• Dean Koontz—MEGAFAMOUS (horror/suspense thrillers).
• Charlaine Harris—famous enough (paranormal mysteries, series protagonists).
• Danielle Steel—MEGAFAMOUS (romance among rich folks).
• Robert Jordan (with Brandon Sanderson, because Jordan died)—famous enough (fantasy, series).
• Mary Higgins Clark—MEGAFAMOUS (murder & romance among rich folks, poor writing).

Look at them in the context of top mass market paperback sellers:

John Grisham. James Patterson. James Patterson. Nora Roberts. Janet Evanovich. James Patterson. Patricia Cornwell. David Baldacci. David Baldacci. Debbie Macomber. Debbie Macomber. Iris Johansen. James Patterson. Patricia Cornwell. James Patterson. Dean Koontz. Charlaine Harris. Nicholas Sparks. Janet Evanovich. Catherine Coulter. Mary Higgins Clark. Charlaine Harris. Janet Evanovich. James Rollins. Iris Johansen.

Only four new names out of twenty-five, and all the rest straight off the hardback best sellers list (yes, twenty-one repeats!).

• Debbie Macomber—famous enough, 2 times on this list (romance).
• Iris Johansen—famous enough, 2 times on this list (crime, series protagonists).
• Catherine Coulter—been around forever (political thrillers, series protagonists).
• James Rollins—pretty darn famous (technothrillers, series protagonists).

What does this tell us, folks?

First and foremost, it tells us that the top 44 1/2 million books sold in the U.S. in 2009 were all written by the same tiny handful of twenty-six people. (Notice John Grisham, Stephen King, Vince Flynn, and Mary Higgins Clark all decline to report their sales. According to where they stand in the list, they can safely be assumed to account for another 4 million on an extremely conservative estimate, bringing that up to 48 1/2 million).

You read it right: that’s 26 writers responsible for the vast, vast bulk of what sells in this country, barely two dozen human beings, all of whom have been on this list many, many times before throughout careers spanning decades, the majority of them already established best sellers long before the publishing industry turned into the Mr. Hyde it so recently turned into.

Only one lonely little writer who has, apparently, never appeared on this list before. ONE.

Are these the luminaries of our era? The brilliant writers we all long to be? The greats who will go down in the American canon?

Well, at least one of them is hell of good when he wants to be: that’s Stephen King. I read The Shining when it came out back in the Cretaceous Period and thought, Wow, this guy’s a real writer!

So I’m inclined to believe him when he says James Patterson is a “terrible writer” who produces “dopey thrillers.” This opinion was echoed by Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post, who apparently called Patterson’s work “the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing.” Does lowest common denominator assembly-line writing sell? Patterson’s got five books on the top thirty hardback fiction list, more than twice as many as his next competitor. So, yeah, it looks like it sells.

I’ve read virtually none of the rest of these authors, except a tiny bit of Stephenie Meyer, whose Twilight series is being critiqued chapter-by-chapter by the Twilight Snarker; Sue Grafton, whom I analyzed when I began studying mystery structure; and one novel by Mary Higgins Clark, which made me pound my forehead on the floor until I saw stars (which is what it took to get that dreadful excuse for a book out of my mind). So I can’t comment on the quality of the writing, only assume that if an assembly-line-writing ad salesman can climb to the top of the publishing money machine then quality is not exactly the deciding factor in who wins this particular game.

What else does this list tell us?

Well, American readers really like series protagonists. They like reading about the same character over and over and over and over again. Does this character change and grow throughout the series? I’m guessing not. Otherwise they’d lose their ability to placate their legions of hypnotized readers. They’d have to age, make choices, settle down into lifestyles, eventually get old and start dealing with health issues. . .and it’d no longer be the same old story happening repeatedly forever.

Also, American readers REALLY like thrillers. Technothrillers, political thrillers, horror/suspense thrillers, puzzle thrillers, murder mystery and crime thrillers, even bounty hunter thrillers. Anything that makes your hair stand on end. Not only must it be the same old character and the same old story, but it must be the same old freaky story.

Give us a series of novels—not even particularly well-written ones—about the same character going through the same kinds of thrillers over and over and over again, and we’ll mortgage the farm for ya. You bet.

If you can’t do that, then give us a series of novels—ditto—about the same character over an over and over again, only paranormal.

Or novels—ditto—about rich people having sex.

Or ditto about ANYBODY having sex. If they’re teens, pretend they’re not having sex, they’re just having lunch off each other’s necks. (Hickies to die for.)

But even if you can do all that, you still have to make sure that before you try to give us anything you are already so famous we know not only your name, but where you’re from, where you live now, what you look like, and how to join your fan club.

And if you can’t do that. . .well, I’m sorry. I just hope you’re Kathryn Stockett.

My husband follows the maverick financial advisors Motley Fool (two brothers whose parents taught them about the stock market when they were teens), so I was interested this morning when they cropped up on Publisher’s Martplace’s Publisher’s Lunch writing about the Kindle. I looked them up and found an article from December, 2007, blasting Amazon for the Kindle’s $399 pricetag and the disingenious marketing technique of claiming to have sold out in six hours. They predicted the Kindle price would be slashed to $199. Going price right now? $265. So they were 3/4 right, which is pretty good when you’re prophecizing on a brand-new phenomenon from a major industry player. Of course, we all know all about the Kindle now. . .but in December 2007 it was still just St. Elmo’s Fire.

But while we’re with them, let’s read the Motley Fools’ expert opinions on such ereaders as the iPad. The Kindle vs. iPad. The Nook. Sony & Sony. Google’s GPad. The Courier from behemoths Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard. And. . .Nintendo?

Are they right? Are they insane? And are there other ereaders out there they haven’t covered yet?

Some people want to abuse you. Some people want to be abused.
—Annie Lennox

And now Colin Robinson of OR Books reveals a little something more about Amazon’s relationships to publishers in yesterday’s Huffington Post. You’ll see a parallel here between Robinson’s approach to the Amazon monopoly and the growing indie publishing industry’s approach to traditional publishing. “We have a simple message for publishers being menaced [by Amazon] in this way: You are in an abusive relationship.”

It’s a very catchy line, and it’s getting some very catchy coverage. Almost as good as the coverage of OR’s book, Going Rouge: Sarah Palin—An American Nightmare.

I like this guy.

Jason Pinter’s talking today over on the Huffington Post about publishing and social media.

He’s saying that’s where the industry is going on now: on Twitter, especially, where agents, acquisitions editors, and publishers can talk either one-on-one or en masse to readers and authors, bringing the audience down out of the stands and onto the playing field. Pinter points especially to John Sergent’s blog, which he started in response the Amazon-Macmillian fracas (only Jeff Bezos’ first public tantrum of the year). It’s an amazing idea, and it’s true that what we considered business-as-normal only three years ago is practically medieval today. But at the same time we’ve been talking here about where you find time to write. . .and there’s no question that the blogosphere is a major stumbling block (Twitter—my god! It eats your life).

So how do you balance it? DO you?

You’ve got to give Jeff Bezos credit for cojones, if not business savvy. The guy still hasn’t learned to stay off the trapeze without a net.

Motoko Rich of the NY Times and Christina Warren of Mashable both report this week that Amazon is back to swinging wildly from the highwire with a club, demanding a three-year contract from publishers and a guarantee no other bookseller gets better prices. For “other bookseller” you can, of course, read “Apple.” And Bezos isn’t asking nicely—he’s on the offensive.

Well, Apple has the same sentiments about pricing. Nobody wants to be underbid.

But Bezos appears oblivious to the bad fall he took only a few months ago pulling a high-profile stunt like this. Has he forgotten. . .um, he LOST?

And whether or not Amazon and Apple get the Mexican Standoff they want, guaranteeing neither wins the pricing game, that time-lock contract is one spangly costume blowing in the wind. A three-year lockdown? In this technological climate? Is Bezos joking?

Even in Silicon Valley, they don’t know where they’re going to be in three years. There’s Super-Top-Secret Classified stuff going on everywhere, NDAs popping buttons in all directions, deadly competition for marketshare with very real, very heavy millions of dollars hanging in the balance. Lock into three years of emerging technology with one company? I wouldn’t sign a that kind of contract locking me into a high-paying job.

Steve Jobs has five of the six big publishers onboard with him—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin—and he’ll have Random House before he’s done. They’ve got the money, he’s got the time. He’s a wheeler-dealer. That’s what he does.

It’s not about bullying, Jeff. It’s about making someone an offer they can’t refuse. (Although it’d be nice if someone could teach Steve to pull his legs in and stop blocking the sidewalk in front of Palo Alto cafes, where he likes to do business on his cell phone.)

BUT. There is the possibility Bezos will succeed in splitting the market into Big Pubbers and Small Pubbers if he can offer small publishers deals Jobs isn’t interested in offering. Bezos is already courting the small pubs/self-pubs people. And, I have to say, that would be a fascinating development, reconfiguring Amazon’s rather tarnished persona as the “indie friend.” (Writers are indies, too, and they don’t necessarily appreciate seeing their already laughably-minimal profits chiseled even further just to promote Bezos’ stock.)

But are there enough nickels and dimes out there to balance the Ben Franklins? (See this article about The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004—oddly retro for only five and a half years ago.)

And what about the reputation of a lot of what’s being self-published right now? Would Amazon come out looking like the champion of mom-&-pop businesses against the big box stores? Or just a franchise of cheap dimestore head shops?

Kathryn sent in this NPR piece by Lynn Neary on ebook pricing, which references this even more detailed and in-depth NY Times piece by Jason Epstein.

I’ve been looking into ebook pricing. Kindle, of course, is racking up “best sellers” that turn out to sell for $.99 or even go out free, screwing with the playing field beyond all reasonable comparison. Smashwords allows buyers to set their own price on some books, presumably at the author’s discretion—I’m sorry, these are obviously amateur “published authors,” not serious writers (you can tell by the blurbs), folks who don’t need either editors or designers, just to see their name on a book cover in the wild hopes that they’ve somehow accidentally written a best seller. Innocence beyond innocence.

eBooks.com has a more realistic range of prices, from $3.95 to $30 in the Fiction category. Sadly, the classics are the cheapies. Jane Austen is $3.95, actually cheaper than a modern rip-off about Mr. Darcy. Even Agatha Christie is priced higher. Anna Karenina goes for $4.95 on the same page as a collection of Tolstoy’s stories for $28.95. Novels priced over $20 tend to have the word “erotic” in their descriptions. For Whom the Bell Tolls for $15. A “re-imagining” of the Brontes’ life during the writing of Jane Eyre for $15. While Wuthering Heights itself goes for $3.95? I’m sorry—I can’t read any more.

Over in the category of Literary Arts & Disciplines (it’s not broken down any further in the main menu, although, oddly, Science Fiction gets its own category as distinct from Fiction), under Composition & Creative Writing, we find 346 titles in a range from essays by nineteenth-century giants like Samuel Butler, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, and Mark Twain for less than $10 to the whopping $60 for a tome on writing about avatars. Wait—$64.95 for one on medical writing. Here’s $79.95 to learn how to write narrative and $80 for a book on comedy. Whoa—$115 for a book on information design (how to make things complex?). I don’t think the $125 book on composers counts toward literature. But there are lots more books in the $50-80 range. Oh! A book on point-of-view for $140! Something from the Edinburgh Press on writing fiction in general for the fabulous price of $164.99. And the queen of them all, an instruction book on writing prescriptions for (hold your breath) $229.95!

You can even buy an ebook on greetings for $6.95.

These are all ebooks, people.

My head is reeling.

Now, I have to give an award for this title: I’m Not Eating Any of That Foreign Muck, apparently fiction mis-categorized here.

And In the Too Weird to Be Real arena, it appears that Neil Gaiman wrote Beowulf. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve always thought that was the first known fiction in English—between a thousand and thirteen hundred years old.

The things you can learn on the Internet.

I should have asked you guys your opinions a long time ago. You have been really amazing about the whole book cover issue. I’m sorry—I’m a slow learner. I promise to do better in the future.

So today I’m going to ask your opinions on a subject discussed intelligently and at length by a guy named Craig Mod in Tokyo: the disposability of print books.

Craig was brought to my attention—and a lot of other people’s, as well—by the NY Times.

Is it true? Are there more cons to print books than there are pros? Is the digitizing of books a boon to humankind that writers and designers alike should be embracing, an opportunity for our skills and talents to blossom in ways that print books simply can’t handle? Is our attachment to print books an emotional attachment to familiarity rather than artistic common sense? And what about all those dead trees, anyway?

I love print books. I just bought 11 volumes of Thackerey with leather spines and corners, which—so far as I can tell—were probably printed in the 1890s, and they are absolutely the apple of my eye. I don’t own an ereader. I don’t have any plans to acquire one.

There is a concreteness to physical books that’s deeply tied to my identity, my sense of myself. I grew up in a house where bookcases were important and books embodied respect for the intellectual mind. When my parents bought an old Victorian in Bellingham to renovate in the early 1970s, almost the first thing my father did was build a wall of bookshelves across the study, finishing it with care in old-fashioned trim and staining and oiling it to look like it had always been there. He filled it with his books from his college days. That was the world in which he learned the marvelous flexibility of thought, curiosity, creativity.

My mother reads novels. Not cheap crap, but really amazing works by the great wordsmyths of the English language. Those books were around the house throughout my childhood, so I grew up on the nineteenth-century masters, as well as the wonderful language in books written in the early twentieth-century, the Moderns and Post-Moderns. Virginia Woolf’s experimental short-short stories were a part of my childhood experience. She taught me to look meticulously before writing and to choose words to match that meticulous eye.

The smell of those books has been with me since I first learned to read. The beauty of language and craft is tied intimately in my brain to the beloved smell of words.

Now, I’ve seen gadgets come and go for decades. I know how to write computer programs and recently spent a weekend commiserating with a friend who’s a programmer at Apple over the eternal superiority of Unix and C. I live in a house with more computers than media outlets. I could try to be a Luddite, but what would be the point? I work on computers cobbled together by my husband.

I have not been bowled over by the advent of ereaders. “We already have readers,” I say. “I’ve got stacks of them by my chair even as we speak.”

But Craig has really got me thinking about this. Is he right? Is it time for us writers and readers to quit clinging to dying illusions and move into a vibrant new literary reality?

Is that what you’re doing?

I’m reproducing here a blog post I wrote about indie pubishing as a guest blogger on She Writes. You’ll all recognize the reference to Pamela.

I spent yesterday morning in a fascinating conversation, a twenty-minute interview that ballooned into an hour and a half. I was talking to She Writes member Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, author of the independently-published Silent Sorority.

Indie publishing is at an extraordinary crossroads. Right now—today, this minute—it’s evolving out of the old vanity press model, through a veritable tsunami of slush that couldn’t get accepted by traditional publishers, into a radical new paradigm in which excellent authors deliberately choose indie over traditional publishing. They’re carving out a new publishing world, and as the stigma of self-publishing slowly disintegrates, authors can now publicly admit to their excitement over the flexibility and creative possibilities in going independent.

The truth is I’ve always kind of hankered after publishing my own work.

I’ve been writing for so long, and I have so much background in the actual mechanics of publication from my years in the composing departments of newspapers, that I’ve never been able to totally convince myself traditional publishing was worth all the effort. You pursue agents, so they can pursue acquisitions editors, so they can pursue their colleagues, so they can pursue distributors’ reps, so they can pursue booksellers, and maybe, somewhere down the line, you can sell a book to a stranger.

And, besides, I’ve been traditionally published. I know perfectly well how little an author makes. I’ve gotten used to nice, fat writing paychecks in the technical industry, and it never made any sense to pin my hopes on a career path that obviously couldn’t compare.

And now publishing houses are laying off editors in droves, agents are scrambling to make up the difference, and even award-winning publishing authors are losing their publishers. Coincidentally, the technology of ebooks and ereaders has suddenly become mainstream, along with POD and self-publishing. Six years ago, when I wrote my first annual chapter book for my son, my husband and I had to find a local bookbinder to hand bind a single copy. Now we can get it done professionally for a matter of a few bucks.

In only the last year, the independent publishing industry has exploded into an incredible primordial soup.

I began researching and blogging on this phenomenon a year ago, when I first began professionally editing fiction writers in the online community. At that time, serious professional writers were hiring independent editors, but not very many of them and not right out in front of everyone. Even six months ago agents were still telling aspiring writers, “You don’t need a editor.” (Some of them still do.) And I was blogging about the similarity between that moment in history and another moment, not so many decades ago, when publishers told aspiring writers, “You don’t need an agent.”

“The smart agents,” I said, “are going to start sending clients to independent editors.”

And now agents routinely send us aspiring writers. “The market’s very, very tough,” they’re saying. “Get all the help you can.”

In the same vein, a year ago traditional publishers were telling aspiring writers, “Don’t self-publish. No matter what your actual motivation, we will take it as incontrovertible proof that no other publishers would take you, and we won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” Six months later I was hearing from top acquisitions editors they were buying self-published books. “They’re proving through sales they’re really good!” Now, this morning, I heard about an author who turned to indie publishing after he’d not only been accepted by an agent and one of the big-name traditional publishers, but assigned an editor, for whom he waited quite awhile before discovering she’d been laid off. His traditionally-publishable book was dead in the water, and rather than waste any more time and energy he went with Smashwords. Any author can now hire an editor and designer, get their own ISBN and copyright, and collect all their own royalties.

I can make my book anything I like. I have complete control over my title, my cover, my design, and my words. (That’s my hand-built desk in the cover photo! That’s my irascible cat!) My book doesn’t have to fit the standard model of a likely best seller by which traditional publishers make their decisions. I can promote it however I like. I can say whatever I like.

I can go renegade.

This is one of those wild-cat moments in the history of an industry you can’t plan for, you can’t deliberately create, you can’t even always recognize when you find yourself right smack in the middle. But you can look back on it later and wish you’d been a part of it.

Indie publishing.