What next?

Our lovely fall weather continues this week, and the sunshine eases the pain of hearing the daily churn of nonsense from the House and Senate. Today, at last, it may end, at least temporarily, and for that we can all give thanks. Our social security payments will continue to arrive in our bank account until at least January 15.

My morning walks are a relief from such extraneous matters; instead I can ponder the quiet, or the trees, or the many deer that wander the local paths. Yesterday the air was so still and quiet that even the pine needles were motionless. No breeze swayed the ponderosa branches, nor shuffled the deciduous leaves that lay on the path. Even the Aspen leaves, always in motion, yesterday hung in silent repose. It felt almost sacrilegious to be moving amidst this silence.

It is always my goal to use these walks as a kind of meditation. Mostly I fail at that, but I do get a good deal of thinking done—sometimes it's productive. Lately I've been focused on the details that arise when publishing a book; both for myself and for students of a workshop I'm teaching next week.

The number of people who are self-publishing grows daily, and so do the number of people who write and sell advice for self-publishers. (Or, like me, offer workshops.) There are books and ebooks, blogs and columns, tweets and Facebook posts, PDF handbooks and downloadable booklets. I could spend all day every day reading advice on how to self-publish, and if I lived long enough to work my way through all of it I'd just have to begin again on the newest thousand entries. That's a version of hell that Dante missed.

One would like to assume that the growing number of published books means a growing number of readers, and perhaps that's true. The statistics I've been able to find aren't consistent—maybe because everything in publishing is in flux—but according to a Pew study cited by Malcolm Jones at The Daily Beast, one in five Americans read an e-book in the past year, and the average e-book reader claims to have read 24 books in the last year. This far outpaces the statistics for print books (an average of 15 a year).

All this interests me, since I'll soon have two books on the market, but what I'd much rather be thinking about during those long walks is my next project—and I don't have one. Since I'm happiest when writing, I need to come up with something soon. But when I ask myself the question, "what next?" my mind is as silent as the hanging aspen leaves. And that's very disconcerting.

Electronic dithering

My writing time has been consumed lately by trying to get the digital version of Tea & Bee's Milk up on a site called Smashwords.com. Even though I've been using computers since the 80s and feel more than competent, the exacting process had me tearing my hair. Fortunately one of their techs took pity on me and I can now say with confidence that the book is available here in nine formats, with more to follow in a few weeks, including iPad, Nook, Kobo, Sony Reader, Adobe, etc. So if you haven't read it and have an e-reader, now's your chance. And if you like it, go to Smashwords.com and write us a smashing review.

The publishing world has changed dramatically since I started writing in the late 70s. And it continues to change at a blazing pace. Digital, on-demand printing broke down the doors, and e-books are assailing  the walls. While editors and agents search for celebrity names and multimillion dollar titles, more and more authors are turning to self-publishing and e-books as a way to get their words out cheaply and quickly. Economist Robert Reich's latest, for example, Beyond Outrage, is currently only available in e-book format—and it contains videos. What next?

I am too much of a traditionalist to give up on paper books, but I admit there is an advantage to being able to download and read a book anytime, anywhere. Those ten weeks in Costa Rica wouldn't have been nearly so much fun without the mysteries I downloaded. Not to mention the tree I saved.

But now I come to the crux of this post. The excruciating detail of electronic submission is complete and with it my not-writing excuses. The book in my head is demanding to be written, so I'm finally going to dig out the old audio tapes of our 1977 five-week camping trip through the Soviet Union and start listening. Then I'll reread our diaries, skim through the photos, and begin. It was a fascinating, out-of-time experience, and I hope I can do it justice. But as Tom Stoppard has so succinctly said, "The hard part is getting to the top of page 1."