Quote

In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

I started my blog in 2002. That was pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook. That was back before newspapers realized they were going out of business. That was back when no one gave any credence to Internet writers.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

I wrote eight full-length adult novels in my twenties. None of them were published.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

Blogging got the concept of personal publishing, but it didn't really take advantage of the network.