Thank you Connie, A.S. It's been a couple of days now, so I'm going to go back and work on it. I'll keep what you said in mind Connie.

If I ever get this desperate, shoot me.

>[link]

Do you realize that the time it takes for an author to make a book sale, to sign a contract, and to finally get the first portion of the advance check, may be anywhere from 6 months to a year or two? And in the meantime, the bills pile up and the taxman does not wait? Would you tolerate working for someone for promised money without getting paid for weeks and months?

Do you realize that for every book sale, we collect hundreds (yes!) of rejections from publishers, and that no single sale guarantees the next sale, or the next?

Do you realize that the real reason why you frequently do not see the sequel to your favorite book series is not because the author is lazy or has stopped writing, but because the publisher is unable to buy and publish that sequel, often due to "poor" sales figures on the previous book -- sales figures that may not be bad in themselves, but are not enough to justify the publisher's budget allocation?

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My book is a mythic philosophical fantasy novel, a quaint old-fashioned book written in a style reminiscent of the 19th century, a book for dreamers and lovers of fiction of the imagination.

This sounds awful. Really, really awful. Ten bucks says that Mary Sues lurk within.

If she took herself less seriously, I think I'd be more inclined to think kindly of her.

Actually I know Vera Nazarian somewhat, from online at SFF.Net, and she's quite a nice person. I haven't found her stories outstanding, but they don't suck either -- in past decades, she would have been able to make a respectable living as a pulp/paperback writer. She's a bit of a self-promoter, but in the honorable sense -- she'll show up at a convention, push her latest publications at all the panels she's on, but also tries to make informed and non-self-serving contributions at those same panels, and works hard on giving her best performance at a reading. She also does her best to 'pay forward' to other writers.

She may well be a very nice person, but she's ranting in public, and she's badgering the wrong persons -- the readers. It isn't the reader's fault advances have been static for 20 years, for instance. And she's yelling at people who visit Amazon -- who are presumably book-buyers!

I can sympathize with her frustration. Did you know when you go into a Barnes & Nobels or a Borders that most of the books face out in the high-profile displays near the front are there because the publisher paid a bribe purchased a display slot, and that in fact, a lot of the "Featured Selections" that Amazon Recommends or features on the front page are also paid promotions? The book market is seriously out of whack because of it.

Darn -- what's the quick-edit for strikethrough text? I thought it was 's' but I see I'm wrong.

I make a point of facing books by my favorite authors whenever I'm at a bookstore. Guerrilla marketing.

I can more than sympathize with her frustration; I find her manner of expressing it unwise. There are horrible things going on in publishing. But the book reader has no control over any of those decisions except whether to buy, and, as I said earlier, Amazon browsers are probably likelier to buy than most.

[There doesn't seem to be a quickedit for strikethrough. You'll have to say t strike explicitly.

She also does her best to 'pay forward' to other writers.

That does cast her rant in a more positive light, IMHO.

I do agree that the current atmosphere in the book selling/publishing atmosphere is not author-friendly. It's also not very nice for smaller publishers, as they can't afford the deep discounts and higher level of organization that book resellers (Baker & Taylor) want.

Amazon is interesting in that while they accept paid promotional placement (say that three times fast!) they also encourage buyers to create Lists, recommendation pages, let the user followup on what people "like you" bought, let you peek at what circles of interest are buying. So they're rather kind of Spike-with-a-soul grey.