If you followed the link in my previous post to Mary Anne Mohanraj’s FB post, you’ll see someone popping up in comments to recommend she self-publish: “Huge Howley(sic) was making 8,000 a month just on his indie published Wool.”

We all know how much Howey has earned because it was in the news, and the fact that he was in the news is a strong warning against trying to duplicate his success.

I’m not saying absolutely never ever follow Howey’s path. I’m saying that being in the news should be a mark in the “con” column when you consider trying to duplicate his success.

To analogize: You are a new college student who wants to make a quarter million dollars a year when you graduate. Do you pursue an MBA? Get a job as a Wall St. trader? Or do you read an article about a woman who found a priceless painting at a garage sale and think Oh, shit, I need to start hitting every garage sale I can find?

Nothing against garage sales, most of my furniture is second hand, but the reason a story like that hits the newspaper is because it’s a rare event.

Now, obviously, self-publishing success is becoming less rare all the time. Not long ago people wanted to be Amanda Hocking. Now they want to mimic Howey. What’s more, there are lots of self-published authors making decent enough money. That’s all fine and good.

There are also a great many writers earning good money through NY publishers, probably more than you think. The thing is, this doesn’t make the news any more than “Med student makes good living as surgeon after years of hard work” would.

Because it’s common.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t self-publish. I’ve self-published and I expect to again. I’m saying: Don’t point to news stories and tell people that’s a good path to success. I’m waiting for those success stories to be so common they no longer make the news.

No doubt many of you have heard that a dispute between Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble has led to an extraordinary curtailing of book orders from the vendor of S&S books. Orders of new books from big names are very light while orders for debut or midlist authors are at zero.

Stephanie Burgis is one of those midlist authors, and she has a new book coming out tomorrow. See here for her take on the fact that, as far as she can tell, no B&N in the U.S. will be carrying her book.

In a way, that’s nothing new. There have always been books that big chains passed on, books that had to sink or swim in the indie stores or online. Usually, that’s a sign that a series is doomed because sales are low.

That’s not the case here. As with Amazon removing the buy button for all Macmillan titles, this is a dispute involving contract terms: B&N wants things to be more favorable, S&S resists. The dispute will result in a short-term loss for both of them, but the long-term effects will be felt by authors with books coming out this month and next.

Remember back when Borders went bankrupt? They’d always ordered a fair number of my books, but when those orders disappeared, there was no new vendor to take up the slack. They shut down forever in July, CIRCLE OF ENEMIES came out in August. If you’re thinking that was a big hit to my sales, you’re right.

Maybe that seems unfair, but that’s the way it is. When an author’s sales figures come back, there’s no asterisk next to the number. There’s no footnote that reads: “Big chain collapsed”/”Contract dispute reduced orders”/”Global economic collapse” or whatever. There isn’t even allowance made for the errors the publisher makes itself, whether it’s a terrible cover or ebook price screwups or zero promotional work.

The one who takes it in the neck is the writer. No, self-publishing is not the answer, no matter how readily people jump in to suggest it. It’s not for everyone. (While I have issues with Charlie’s timeline there, his overall point still holds.)

We’re facing a great many challenges at the moment. Amazon, while offering a lot of selection and a (somewhat screwedup) distribution method for self-publishers, is still hurting the industry as a whole by operating at a loss. Barnes & Noble would be in a better position right now if they fixed some of their more egregious company practices (they ought to allow local branches to control their own orders, because duh. The local staff are the people interacting with their community), but at the same time the pressure from Amazon’s so-cheap-we’re-losing-money! discounts and the effects of the Great Recession are destroying the company, and who will be able to step in to take up the slack?

Not Amazon. Sure, their sales will certainly tick up, but like telecommuting, we’re learning that online book buying is making it difficult for readers to discover new work. (That link takes you to an Ursula K.Le Guinn essay, so go ahead and give that a click.) When you stand in front of a bookstore or library shelf, you’re presented with an amazing number of titles to look at; there’s no way Amazon or any other online seller could load that many covers in your web browser. It would be too much information.

It used to be that a new book in a series would be published at the same time as an earlier one would hit paperback, or get a small new printing. Now, the book pops up on a Tuesday blog post or status update as yet another new release. Maybe it appears in a stack of books on Scalzi’s blog.

It’s not enough. We need healthy book stores. Indies, yes, but also the big stores with the shelf space to carry midlist authors and a large enough enough staff that there’s someone drawing a paycheck there with knowledge of each of the genres. I like those big stores. I like browsing those huge, long shelves.

Barnes & Noble needs to become less ossified and decentralized. At the same time, Amazon needs to put the brakes on its competition-destroying business practices; if they won’t someone else will have to put the brakes on. Because it’s not the big corporations that are taking it in the neck. It’s the people who create the product those corporations sell.