The Vorkosigan Companion by Lillian Stewart Carl, John Helfers Page B

success any book can obtain is set before anyone reads it. If orders are low, the book will never have a chance to find readers through store placement, or ever get near any best-seller list. It's like a glass ceiling; breaking through it seems almost impossible. If a book—or rather, its packaging and the sales numbers of previous books by that author—fails to pass muster at the stuffing-in end of the pipeline, no reader (or very few) will ever learn of its existence in order to ask for it. Reader input is limited to an expensive and wasteful negative—readers can (and do) reject books they do see, but they have no way of asking for books they don't see.
    Such was the hair-tearing state of the business up to the middle of the Nineties. Then along came the Internet. And publishers' Websites such as Baen's Bar. And Amazon.com, with shelves that never get too full to hold More Stuff. And, most critically—word of mouth got hyperdrive through chat groups and e-mail. Word of mouth got faster, even, than the system's book-removal rhythm.
    And suddenly, publishers had an economical way of getting the word out to the excluded people in this process, the actual book readers, of their books' existences—totally jumping over the unfortunate book-blocking nature of the distribution system. Instead of trying to push books through the pipeline, this intelligence network potentially allowed a thousand or ten thousand actual readers to line up on the other end and pull the books through—the books they wanted, not the ones some desperately overworked distribution exec imagined would sell. It was briefly very exciting and hopeful—until the Internet filled up. Still, those new lines of communication are solidly established now.
    It is at this point still unclear to me what the Internet will do in the long run to publishing. It's certainly a boom time for readers: more books are simultaneously available in more formats, more readily accessible, than ever before in history. MP3 downloading of audiobooks over the Internet is a new market that looks very promising. So far, e-books seem to be falling into a supplemental niche just like audio books. Tree books are mortgage money; e-books are (still) pizza money, although as the generation comes up for whom reading off a screen is the default norm, and as reading devices improve, I expect to see more e-books sold, or at least downloaded. But I'm not sure how much this will help the economics of individual living writers, as given the infinite shelf space in such e-book stores as www.fictionwise.com (who are adding upward of a couple of hundred new titles a week ), writers finds their books competing for reader attention not just with one season's releases, but with a century's worth of offerings. The glut has been shifted from the publishers' laps to those of the readers. Time in which to read is still only issued 24/7, a hard limit. You do the math.
    That said, people still want to write, for reasons that have little to do with publishing economics. I have concluded by experiment that teaching writing is not my strength—teaching is a different, complex, and underrated skill—but I get asked how-to questions anyway. My writing methods have a lot of intuitive elements that I can't even analyze, let alone articulate and transfer, so all my tips tend to cluster around problems I've had to solve for myself, which may or may not be the same problems a learner is having. I suspect one could trace most writers' own problem spots just by the advice they give. With that warning, here's a bag of things I've learned or observed along the way.
    If you want writing time in your day, you have to take it—no one will give it to you. Often, you can only take it from your own alternate activities; writers' lives tend to get rather stripped-down for that reason. Nowadays, I have more control over my own time, and the limiting factor isn't writing time per se, but the speed with which I generate and refine