Strictly speaking, unless your last name is Grisham or King, Steele or Rowling or any other scribbling royalty lurking meaningfully on or near the of the NY-Times best seller lists, life is bleak and full of frustrations. And also very short of people who are nice to you as a writer and welcoming to you and your books. No wonder so many of them turn to drink, or otherwise crash and burn. Even the flash in the pan overnight successful ones fall to this -  Grace Metalious, anyone?

Those of us at the bottom, toiling and marketing in obscurity take our little successes where we can, lonely beacons shining in a dark and generally frustrating world. Everyone who reads the Book and loves it, or recommends it to a friend, or drops a favorable comment in an on-line forum; that's a light like Erandil in the dark places of the day. Not quite up there with royalty checks in three figures, but the trick to being happy is to be happy with what you have.

A couple of months ago,  I found a comment in a discussion forum about off-road vehicles; a contributor quoted a bit from To Truckee's Trail about storage arrangements in Dr. Townsends' wagon and drew a very neat parallel between that, and how modern off-roaders now install storage for long treks -  that just about made my evening. Such crumbs as do nourish the writers' ego on these long winter evenings after looking at my ranking on Amazon.com. ( All my books are available in the Kindle format, by the way, for those who love expensive toys - but none of the reviews for the printed editions carry over to the Kindle version.  No idea from the admin responses in the author forum as to why -  just another way that the non-royal scribblers are incessantly kicked in the teeth by a cold and unfeeling world.)

Ah, yes -  reviews; absolutely necessary to obtain,  in order to market your book. Think of them as word of mouth made solid and permanent in print. In the grand halls of the literary industrial complex, competition is fierce to review the books of the scribbling royalty and the well-connected commentariat; even so, it will take months. Almost always, the book is made available to a select few way in advance, and rumor has it that sometimes reviewers are paid and quite healthy sums too. It's a necessary step in marketing the book, think of all those lovely complimentary quotes on the back jacket, or in the first couple of pages.

At a lower level - naturally the one occupied by other indie authors  - reviewers are also paid ...  by getting a free copy of the book. It's one of those nice little freebies available to those in the loop and I confess to having scored a nice little collection thereby. (I asked to review a book a couple of years ago,  for no other reason that I looked at the description and thought what a wonderful Christmas present a copy would make for a certain friend.) The suspicion is, however - that many sooper-high-powered reviewers for certain outlets are getting tons of copies of books, working up a cursory review from the cover copy or the information kit that came with the book, posting that review, and selling the books. Not cool - at least I have read the books I review, cover to cover.

It took months and months over the summer of 2007  to assemble my collection of reviews, for Truckee's Trail, which pushed back my marketing plan by a considerable period. Good thing that it was a POD book, as a traditional publisher would have pulled the plug by the time one single fiscal quarter had passed. Oddly enough, even though I am not doing that much to market it, these days - it still sells respectably. On the other hand, a traditional publisher would have been able to squeeze a review out of the San Antonio Express News, whose book editor informed me snottily that their policy is not to review POD books of any sort, not even by local authors. Don't know what their reasoning is, probably afraid of getting literary cooties or something. God knows there are some simply dreadful books out there, but last time I looked, quite a lot of them came out of the traditional publishers. Indie writing may be the next wave, just as indie movies and indie music have offered an alternative to the traditional Hollywood blockbuster and the manufactured and wholly synthetic mega-hit. And most writers these days have websites, and sample chapters posted - at the very least, the "Search Inside" feature on Amazon. com - so, figuring out if they are good writers, or at least OK and you want to read more -  is not this great insurmountable challenge.

Gosh, it's fun, being on the cutting edge!