When I left New York City to move home to California, and left my ex-girlfriend, Florence, behind, my father comforted me with this: “At any given moment, there are a hundred amazing things going on in New York, but even if you are there, you can only go to one of them. So, at any given moment, you are only missing 1% more than Florence is missing while living there!”

I thought of this the other day in conjunction with the overwhelm sweeping the world. Do people go to events any more? Do they buy things or take classes? Or is there so much out there that is free that it’s hard enough just to get noticed? So many books being published, so many blogs, so many online communities, messages, ideas, conversations, products, newsletters, notices . . . Aaaaah!

But what if turning on your computer is just like going to live in New York, except you don’t have to pay a stupid broker’s fee? New Yorkers–well, transplants, I mean–learn to live with the chaos, the thousand faces going by, the million opportunities, the overload of information. You have your people. I remember riding the subway with my friend Lisa, a long time New Yorker. She bumped into several people she knew, between 42nd Street and the Upper West Side! Crazy. But you make your way.

There’s a sort of honor in the fact that when you read at Bluestockings, five famous authors are reading at the 92nd Street Y and Woody Allen or Bill Clinton is playing saxaphone at a local pub and Jamaica Kincaid is delivering a lecture at Columbia while Kate Bornstein has a play premiering off-Broadway and fifteen amazing bands are performing here and there, and several dance and opera companies, as well as that Chekov production in the park staring Meryl Streep. Not to mention the movies, the galleries, the museums, the cafes, the restaurants, the gyms, the writing groups and cocktail parties and marches and rallies . . . And yet, a swath of folks show up for your reading. Maybe even more people than there are chairs. Because New York is a big city, man, and there are a lot of people choosing where to go based on mood and distance from apartment and who else is showing up there.

New York has cultivated loads of culture and the explosion of possibilities hasn’t short-circuited anything. Sure, if you live in a rural town in Indiana, everyone in town will show up for your book publication party. But everyone in town is about the same number of people as the 0.0000001% of New Yorkers who will show up for your book party there.

All I’m saying is that the internet might turn us, each and every one, into city slickers.

My father also said that we humans are accustomed to seeing only faces that we know, and that it confuses our brains and our biology to see so many unfamiliar faces everyday. But in New York, you learn not only to “mind your own business” but also to be willing to fall a little in love with any face you pass on the street. My father, it should be noted, was a New Yorker who fell in love with strangers on a frequent enough basis.

I confess, I prefer the bracing weather and the cramped sidewalks and the noise and smells and rats and roaches and architecture and history and parks and flesh-and-blood people of New York to the bits and bytes of the internet, but still, thinking of New York reminds me not to panic. There’s much to be gained from crowded spaces.

Everything is changing. This much we know. People lament or exalt the Kindle, perhaps via Facebook or a Tweet. Yes, it’s a different world than the one where your morning newspaper (what’s that?) landed with a thump on your doorstep and you put a thumb between the pages of your book to call out to your kid to bring it in the house. These days you might be reading a book at Google while your “newspaper” is scrolling across the bottom of your screen. Your kid probably can’t hear you with all the electronic media plugged into him. Okay, that’s a grim view.

The key, though, is that with all this change it’s hard to get a grasp of what the heck is actually going on. Here are some recent articles and blogs that help us make sense of the new publishing landscape.

“Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business, Part 1″ is the clearest view I’ve seen. Definitely worth a look.  Part one of a long series, this really lays out what is going on as digital everything hits the publishing world.

If you are wondering how the brave new world might effectively promote reading–and not just spell its demise–check out, “Spotlight on: Social Media: Twitterpated: Religion Authors Dive into Social Media.” With all the examples of how Twitter and Facebook are being used to promote books, you’ll want to jump right in with your own giveaway, guessing game or wild new idea.

And seriously, if you are out there trying to make your name in 140 characters or less, here’s a fast and easy lesson on how to create content that’s worthwhile for your followers. “Fourteen Types of Tweets” will be helpful for newer Tweeters trying to figure out what will give the people what they want . . . and might offer a shot of inspiration even for old hands. (How old a hand can you be?)

Finally, a bit of news from the real world, but the big, bad, corporate real world, one that is touting good books! “Target Can Make Sleepy Titles Into Best Sellers” talks about how many folks are buying books alongside their detergent, diapers and plastics whatevers. Target is picking unknown authors to sell to their shoppers, and it can really turn sales around for these books. Good books, too. The article mentions my friends the wonderful writers Meg Waite Clayton and Michelle Richmond.

Shop at your local bookstore, if you have one anymore, and read your old fashioned actual-paper paperback, sure. Fight the good fight. But if you need a quick introduction to the ways technology and marketing and literature are co-existing and cooperating, take a look at these articles and let me know what you think.

I’ve had an epiphany of sorts lately, or at least a turn-about in my perspective that I would describe as radical. In short, I’ve embraced the effect of market forces on the arts, and on writing in particular. Heretofore, I’d stubbornly held onto the idea that writers were creating a private vision, nurturing a subtle relationship with an intimate muse. More to the point, I disparaged the market, oh cruel, unappreciative, capricious market, forcing writers to live and work in anonymity but with integrity. Something like that.

I certainly didn’t see the writer as a business person. Why should the writer, who must daily summon the courage to dredge her soul–and that of her neighbors–also worry about marketability, profitability, and spreading the word about a product so worthy as the book?

All this has changed, and more.

Think of Michelangelo. He didn’t wake up one day with a vision to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This was no quirky artistic impulse, some sort of installation project. No–it was a commercial job, an assignment. Nonetheless, he created immortal art on the job, prone on scaffolding, painting the hand of God. People have lain on their backs for money and done worse.

Raymond Carver produced many a short story because he had a wife and kids and had to pay his rent in Chico, California. Do we wish he’d had the leisure to forgo that writing?

I’ve mentioned that I’m taking a marketing course, one that has integrity and even love writ into its principles. I’ve been studying how you think about what you do, how you talk about what you do, whom you serve, how what you do addresses the urgent needs and compelling desires of your clients. Then I’ve been thinking about how all of this business sense applies to fiction.

Are writers service professionals?

I pose this question and all my old objections surface: the originality and honesty of the writer must not be compromised by some sort of base grappling with supply and demand.

But Charles Dickens rewrote the ending to Great Expectations to please his editors and the audience of this serialized tale. Shakespeare stooped to greatness to garner a laugh from the rowdy crowd.

The parenting angle of this rant is this: I am solidly out of the self-centered musing and exploration of my solitary youth. Everything I do is in relationship. Demand and supply. Demand and supply. It’s humanizing. The expression “navel-gazing” itself might remind us that we were, each of us, nurtured into being from somebody else’s body. That very belly-button of solitude is the site of our first and most dependent inter-relationship.

What happens to a book when its author is concerned with attracting readers?

First, it means the characters must be fascinating, the plot enticing, the language compelling, the world drawn so that the reader is drawn in. None of this is bad for art. If we are modern-day Scheherazades, tale-telling to save our lives, our lives dependent on the continued interest of our listeners and their insatiable curiosity–fed by our craft–to know what will happen next, does this repel the intimate muse? Is she the sort who will not let you take her out in public? Who will not kiss you on the dance floor? Beware the finicky muse. She will not supply your bread and butter.

David Mamet said, “If you have something to fall back on, you will.” And yet by setting the writing to one side and the money-earning, world-facing self to another, we force ourselves to fall back on something else. The most prolific writers I know have a working-class work ethic. Work doesn’t surprise or offend them, and they understand that writing is work–making it and selling it.

A cousin of my great-grandfather invented the heating and cooling system for the Ford. My great-grandparents moved into a small apartment with this man and his wife, so that they could live inexpensively, and they all worked–my great-grandmother made hats and sold them door-to-door–so they could invest in the company that would make these heating and cooling systems. They became very rich, and it’s taken three or four generations to turn that fortune into the exhaust fumes of family bickering.

But what if the inventor of the heating and cooling system had felt that the effort of thinking of the thing was enough, was all that he could be expected to do? What if my great-grandmother made hats but did not want to sell them, wanted them to sell themselves by dint of their beauty and worth?

My communist, trust-funder grandmother may be rolling over in her newly minted grave as I extol the virtue of market forces on art, but if she’d been forced to complete her decades-long project, a screenplay about the Haymarket martyrs, the world would be a better and a richer place, both. If she’d been hungry not only in her soul but in her stomach, she’d have accomplished more.

It is a false luxury and a disservice to imagine that you do not have to peddle your wares if what you make is art. If you were making a better spark plug, you’d have a business plan. It’s time for writers to do the same.

One final note: perfectionism is the bane of really good writers, and market forces do a funny thing. They force you to get your best work out in front of people. They support greatness and push against perfectionism. This is a gift no writer can afford to turn down.

For a long time, I disdained the people who focused on getting published. When I was in graduate school, great writers came to talk to us and teach us: Denis Johnson, Ethan Canin, Francine Prose, A. M. Holmes, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucille Clifton, to name a few. (Wow, name-dropping is fun!) Inevitably, the questions that came would be peppered with concern about publishing. I always wanted to know about craft and about sustaining the creative part of a writing life, and to be honest with you, I felt pretty good about myself for that attitude.

When FSG published my first novel, this seemed a validation of my focus on craft over career. Because my novel contained lesbian content, and FSG had not published a book with lesbian content before (except, funnily enough, in their YA division, where they’d published Nancy Garden), people at my readings often asked me, over and over, how I’d gotten my book published. I had no answer for them beyond the hard work I’d put into making it strong.

Pretty quickly, though, my naïveté about publishing and marketing caught up with me. I didn’t know that there was a three-month window after a book is published for it to “succeed” or “fail.” I had no idea what I might do to promote the book. In fact, in the months after my book was published, I was packing and moving across the country, leaving behind all the connections I had to local writers and bookstores.

The head agent at my agent’s office met me and told me that the only advice she could give me was to have fun. I understand why she said that–it was Zen good advice. But seriously, folks, if you are a novelist–and this is more true now than it was then–you are a small business owner or you have a hobby. Those are your choices. You might get published once or twice if you have a hobby of writing books, but you cannot sustain a viable career unless you make it your business not only to write books but also to sell them.

(As an aside, I would like to mention that if you are a writer or anyone who cares about textual storytelling, you’d do well to make it your business to buy books, too, and to promote other people’s books and the world of books in general. If you never buy a new, hard cover book, you are going to have a heck of a time believing other people should buy yours.)

It is still a pet peeve of mine when people who have not written one polished, lovely book are hyper focused on selling it. The truth is that while “bad” books are published all the time, the one best marketing tool you can have is an excellent book. That’s why my motto is: If your readers can’t put your book down, they’ll have to buy it. This implies that you’ve written an irresistible story.  You’ve worked on it until it’s powerfully strong.

But my motto also implies that you’ve then gotten your book into the hands of some readers. These are the two parts to our business, and they can feel antithetical to one another.

In the privacy of your office/ bedroom/ café table, you reach into the depths of your mind and scale the rocks and hard places of your soul/ high school experiences/ life, and you come back with a story. The cadences, whether borrowed, stolen or invented, are yours. The sentences and the images and the characters are all yours. Yours the way a baby you birth is yours. And then you have to put the squalling, fragile creature of your heart out into the world, and what’s more, you have to promote it.

Terrifying.

Absurd.

Reprehensible.

But true.

Here’s the good news: I’ve been studying marketing, marketing with integrity and heart, and . . . (drum roll) it can be fun. You want to get your voice out into the world. You have something to offer readers, and you know this because books have been your lifeline, your pleasure and pastime. Right?

So let’s start here, with your commitment to be what Michael Port calls fully self-expressed. And here, there’s more:

I am teaching an exciting new course called Technique. Set goals, write and master the craft.

GIVEAWAY ONE: TONIGHT, I am offering a FREE CLASS BY TELEPHONE. Email me for a space and information about how to call in.

GIVEAWAY TWO: Post a comment on this blog post this week to enter a random drawing to WIN FOUR WEEKS of the Technique Course (value: $150) Winners announced Monday. Please check back and include an email so I can contact you!

FINE PRINT: Class meets by conference call on Wednesdays, 6 – 7:10 p.m. PST. The only charge will be whatever your phone company charges for the call. (You can use a cell if you have free minutes.) If you enroll now to ensure a space or are already enrolled, you will win an extra four weeks after your paid course runs out.

I have been all charged up about some recent finds I want to share with you.

One is Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid — a book, audiobook and system for marketing and building your business that takes that brave journey away from crass, haranguing, uphill effort and turns it into connecting with what you love and sharing it. That sounds simplistic, but it’s not. His book is packed with information and a powerful approach. These are times when many of us are shifting around our economic models and tracks, and if you are building your own business–including writing-related businesses (such as being a published author!), I cannot recommend this highly enough.

The second find is thanks to author Cornelia Read, and this is a series of blogs on craft written by Alexandra Sokoloff. You can find Sokoloff and the amazing craft blogs at Murderati.com or at thedarksalon.blogspot.com. Scroll down the right margin and you’ll get to a list of “Writing Articles.” She’s trained in theater and screenwriting and writes suspense–all of which contain keys to any writing, even the most poetic literary flights. Her blogs are immensely readable and incredibly clear. They make me want to try things in writing, always a good sign.

Alexandra Sokoloff, in turn, recommended reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (subtitle: And Other Survival Signals that Protect Us from Violence). I’m in the middle of it and it is amazing. Besides that it should be required reading for anyone who might encounter violence (which is, as he convinces you quickly, anyone) and especially women (who too often choose not to be rude over listening to their instincts), it’s great reading for anyone interested in understanding human behavior. Everyone, more or less, should fall into that last category, too, but especially writers. That’s what we’re doing alone at the keyboard, no?

This is some of what I am jazzed about right now. What are your latest finds?

Yesterday my family played ball together. This sounds trivial, but it was the first time, really, that we’d tossed a ball around: Charlie to Mommy to Mama to Leo to Charlie . . . It took some doing to convince the boys to play. Leo, especially, wanted only to hold the ball, as if it were a teddy bear, and Charlie was willing to throw, but not to Leo, since that seemed too much like handing the precious commodity over to his brother wholesale. In fact, Leo went off to play with sand, and we ended up forming our rhombus around him. Angie and I taught the boys that the great good fun of playing ball is in letting it go, again and again. It seems obvious to adults, now, but why, when there is so much meant to be held close, does this toy create more fun when you keep pushing it away?

As we cheered the throws and attempted throws, it occurred to me that there is a parallel here–as there usually is–to writing. So many people want to write, and I think it is because reading a great book makes you want to toss it–and maybe your own addition–right back into the world. The story exists between the reader and the writer, just as the fun with a ball exists between the players, not in grasping the object itself. Movement, energy, force, intent, connection, misses. Zoom. Leap. Catch. Throw.

It’s a funny thing. People take drawing classes and painting classes without long portions of the time given over to discussions of how to interest galleries in your work or get into the Whitney Biennial. But I don’t think that writers are so much more commercially oriented than other artists. I think the sometimes crass focus on “getting published” has to do with the desire to throw the ball. After all, your family probably wants to leaf through the pictures you’ve drawn in your live nudes class. But do they demand that you read your latest novelistic efforts at the dinner table?

There are multiple layers to the application of this metaphor to writing. You throw the ball when you take an idea and toss it onto the page. You throw the ball when you edit this work and renew it, and again when you show it to someone else, and again when it bounces out and back to various publications, agents, editors. You throw the ball when you blog, too, or comment on a blog. It’s a handy little game of catch, not the World Series, but a friendly back and forth while you chat about what is going on in your life.

I’ve been listening to a book on tape that Angie stuck onto my MP3 when I was going to London. It’s called Book Yourself Solid, and it is amazing if you are a service professional building a business. Maybe someone who hates marketing . . . It’s made me excited about thinking about the language that describes what I do. I work with people who love books and want to write them. I assist in transforming people into writers, ideas into manuscripts, manuscripts into books. I’m interested in clients who have a way with words or an amazing story or a powerful work ethic. If you have any one of these, I can get the other two up and running. If you have more than one . . . watch out, baby.

Okay, this is in the rough stages. Probably too early to share. But I like the bounce that comes from throwing something out into the world. I like the joy on my boys’ faces when they lobbed the ball away from themselves, learning that holding on tight is not the only, or the best, way to play.