I am a regional book publisher. Jane Austen Doe's articles are informative and interesting. I have two comments. 1) The reality is that in any business, sales are important. The entire business is run by sales numbers. If there are no sales, there is no way to sustain publishing or any other business. Just like any publisher, I accept or reject manuscripts based on their potential sales. Often I am wrong in my guess about a manuscript's sales potential, but I haven't found a better way than tossing the coin and seeing where it falls. In the end, publishing is a gamble and one hopes to bet on winners. 2) Contrary to Jane Austen Doe's assertions, I, as a publisher, do not find independent bookstores friendly. They are locked into large book distributors' computer systems and are not flexible at all. I no longer market my books to independent bookstores -- except to those in my neighborhood -- and I find better acceptance of my titles and authors at big chain stores such as Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million.

As you know, the book publishing industry is going through major changes. If Jane Austen Doe has the courage to take the risk, she can be her own publisher! However, my observation is: It is easy to publish a book and a lot harder to sell it!

-- Rao Aluri

OK, before I make out my check to Jane Austen Doe to support her flagging career let me first say: Omigod, how dare you?

There are imprisoned Chinese poets writing poems with their own blood on toilet paper and thousands of others short of that who rise at 5 in the morning to slave at their craft before they have to get behind the wheel of a forklift or school bus and you're for a moment complaining about a $150,000 advance?

Have you no perspective whatever on the privilege you've been awarded? I read your story. I understand that you were attempting to elucidate the conditions of 21st century publishing, but no amount of rhetoric about harsh media conglomerates or the kindly editors-of-old can distract the reader from the shrillness of your whining.

Complaining that you can't make it as a novelist is like complaining that you can't make it as a movie star. It's a rarefied, fickle profession, and any degree of success should be relished. Suffer something honestly and then stand yourself up and write a book from absolute necessity -- otherwise your bitching will have no truck with me.

-- Sam White

I want to thank Jane Austen Doe for spreading the word about the way publishing has changed over the years. It is no secret to most aspiring writers. If the trend toward blockbuster publishing (and targeted promotion) continues, it will not only squeeze the present Jane Does out of publishing but also prevent new ones from attempting publication.

This trend of treating art as big business is affecting all mass-produced art forms, not just book publishing, and we all need to fight this in every way possible -- not for Jane's sake but for our own. If we can't encourage new writers to find their voice, who is going to write for us in the future?

-- Tapati McDaniels

I work for a big publishing company. Those of us in the rank and file here and at other publishing companies could tell similar stories to Jane Doe's, had we the eloquence, only from the other side of the coin.

Most of us came to work in publishing because we loved books and the written word but realized our own writing talents were too meager to be authors ourselves. We wanted to be part of it somehow, however. We knew we wouldn't make much money in this field, but that wasn't important.

The joke's on us, though, because it has become a corporate world like any other, except that we still make salaries we can barely live on. The executives are doing very well, but most of us still are scraping by, all the while being treated like corporate wankers by increasingly mistrustful authors.

I do shop at indie bookstores and go to readings and do what small things I can to promote original and intelligent writing. But I can't just say no to the big boys crunching the numbers as Jane Doe suggests. I would get fired for that, and you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get a low-paying job in publishing.

-- Name withheld

I'm sure you've received lots of critical e-mail from authors who want to comment on Jane Austen Doe's midlist writer article. I'm not an author; I'm a reader, so you'll hear a different perspective from me.

I don't buy books to support midlist authors. I buy books I want to read. I attend readings by authors that interest me. And I need no one to tell me to read, enjoy culture or think.

Honestly, your writer suggested I could help midlist authors by "thinking." Do you want to know what my second thought was upon reading that? (My first: "How condescending.") I thought I wouldn't be reading your magazine again anytime soon.

-- Harry Connolly

I guess you could call me a lowlist writer, because I never suffered from the delusion that I'd be able to support myself with my book sales. In all honesty, reading Ms. Doe's article did not succeed in eliciting pity from me. She actually got an advance? She had an agent who believed in her at one time? Talk about a jackpot. Shallow and unimaginative as bestsellers must seem to her, midlist writer fare seems equally calculated to me, albeit in a suburban, middlebrow, eggshell-striding yuppie sense. Sadly, that only makes their dilemma in the publishing industry that much more frightening. If even milquetoast Oprah book-club authors are having that much trouble, then there's obviously no chance for an old-school literary degenerate like me.

Having said that, though, allow me to invite you to check out my latest book here.

-- T.G. Fleming

It's pretty hard to sympathize with someone who enters a profession synonymous with frustration and poverty and then complains about the lousy pay. Yes, with the exception of the very talented and very lucky, being an artist is a terrible, terrible life. That's because if all writers/painters/musicians were lavishly indulged by benevolent patrons who cared only for the art, dammit, and not the bottom line, everyone would join the creative class and there'd be no one left to feed the chickens.

-- Danyl Mclauchlan

I am another midlist writer, though unlike this author, I write trash. Mass-market bestsellers, or to be specific, historical romance novels, bodice rippers, soft porn for the ladies, whatever. I've written 10 of them to date, though I finally had to quit. (I started having fantasies of killing off my heroines -- in really dreadful ways.) In any case, the commercial midlist writer is no better off. I sold high midlist -- 150,000 copies, sell-through rate of 80-plus percent -- and the most I ever earned was about $40,000.

The point? Writing for money is naive; there has to be another motivation.

-- Jennifer Horsman

Boy, do I have an immense amount of sympathy for your anonymous, underloved, highly published writer. What the fuck does she want besides being able to publish books? A star on the Walk of Fame? Writers write. Writing does not equal making money. People who want to make money should go into investment banking. People like me want to publish books that loyal readers, if only a handful, buy and bring torn copies of for autographs to underpopulated readings. And if people like me ever, ever got the opportunity to do that, we wouldn't complain about having not made any money off it. We wouldn't complain about going out of print. We would go gaga every time we thought of the first 150 grand we got, and the look in that man's eyes when he said he loved our book. We would not bitch and moan, at least not as much as this woman has in her interminable pity party.

Yes, publishing is a dirty business, and also one that has gone sadly south as corporations eliminate the possibility of taking a chance on unknown writers, but business has always been business. The author casually mentions the joy that came from writing various books. Since when is joy, like, so not as important as, like, "Good Morning America"? Maybe her daughter needs some Payless sneakers. God knows someone needs a value rearrangement.

-- Julia Green

What "emerging" writers (writers who dream of an editor actually speaking to them) often find ourselves believing is that all the rejection will one day pay off after that first "big" publication. But no, it seems I can expect to be periodically gutted by the rejection knife until, well, infinity. Now what the hell am I supposed to do? Oh, I know, I think I'll go throw up.

-- Mary Meyer

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