That Stupid Bint In Today’s Salon…
A few folks have emailed and IM’d me, asking about my impressions of the lead story in today’s Salon.com: The Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author, in which the psuedonymous “Jane Austen Doe” (ugh.) whines incessantly about her misfortune of having only made somewhere north of $255,000 over the past 10 years of her writing career. (Probably significantly more, since she admits to having ghost-written a best-selling celebrity bio, but doesn’t tell us how much she was paid.)
Poor fucking baby.
Aside from the mediocrity of the writing in this particular whine-fest, the one thing that struck me as I read this article is that the author is a grade-A idiot when it comes to business sense and marketing. The most glaring example: Despite the fact that she says that she’s burned bridges with the two largest publishing conglomerates already, she writes this article for Salon under a psuedonym.
Hell, I’m a hack writer for a niche speciality market, and even *I* know that if you’re facing closed doors at the two biggest houses, you’ve got nothing to lose by using your real name…and by using her real name, she could’ve gotten a significant spike in sales from well-wishing, sympathetic readers clicking-through to her books on Amazon. The publicity surrounding her name and the spike in sales might’ve even been able to serve as a selling point to get her further book deals through smaller publishing houses looking for any angle they can to increase their shelf-share.
But no. Instead we get, as Warren Zevon once sang: “poor, poor, pitiful me.”
This poor dear even now has to get a (*gasp!* Shock! Horror!) DAY JOB!!!
Won’t somebody help this poor woman?