The battle wages on in the dialogue between aspiring self-publishers and dyed-in-the-wool traditionally-published authors. Well, perhaps I’m overstating the situation to call it a “battle,” since all sides seem to coexist magnanimously at the moment. Though who can say what the future will bring? One need look no further than the U.S. Department of Justice’s recent decision to bring an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the industry’s leading publishers to see that the pressure is steadily building.

Here on the Fictorians blog, we’ve periodically discussed the pros and cons of either approach, and indeed, in the following weeks and months we’ll be devoting even more column inches to the subject of self-publishing. And that’s only to be expected, since most aspiring authors are in that awkward in-between stage of deciding whether to go it alone and start uploading our manuscripts to the Kindle Store or hold back in the hopes of securing a lucrative (or limiting) deal with a New York giant.

Noted this past Sunday in our blog’s weekly Sunday Reads feature is a thoughtful article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, in which she draws several compelling analogies to explain the current state of affairs in the publishing world. Her position is sound (at least, to my own sensibilities) and her composition lengthy (hard to be helped), and I recommend you set aside a few minutes to peruse it.

After painting an elaborate and persuasive picture of the virus threatening traditional publishers (which is scarcity thinking, and if you don’t know what I mean by that, clearly you didn’t follow my link in the previous paragraph), she comes to a familiar premise. Instead of working tirelessly and placing high expectations on one manuscript, one should produce and release as large a backlist as possible. Instead of one book selling millions, you may end up with dozens of books selling hundreds or thousands. Ultimately, it’s a numbers game and the more titles you have to your name, the better.

I’ve heard this counsel before, and theoretically it’s great advice. Especially if you’re already an established or midlist author. If you’re just starting out in your career and have no (or few) readers outside your immediate friends and family, it goes down about as palatably as a wheatgrass smoothie. “Well,” one might say, “sometimes the truth hurts.”

Why does it hurt? Isn’t this good news for new writers? Well, this is a case where Rusch isn’t really talking to me, the new writer. She’s in the desirable position of having an existing readership… and I think she’s more or less speaking to her peers this time around. That’s her perogative! After all, it’s unavoidable: sometimes advice from established writers doesn’t speak directly to newbies. The truth is the truth, and it caters to no one. If an established author like Rusch never manages to write another bestseller in the remainder of her writing career, a long backlist of titles will indeed keep her afloat, selling hundreds or thousands of copies in place of a million-dollar golden egg. Rusch argues that it’s not altogether important to hard-sell a manuscript upon initial release, or reach a big audience, because if the book is worthy the audience will, eventually, come to you. The speed of a book’s success isn’t paramount, even if that success is inevitable. It could take fifteen years. Or much longer. She calls it “understanding the long tail.”

I agree with her. I respect her opinion and can find no basis to quarrel with it. She’s almost certainly right on all counts.

Which is, unfortunately, a little disheartening, because for fresh-out-of-the-gaters like me, speedily finding an audience remains a priority. It must, or else becoming a successful full-time writer is even further away and out-of-reach than ever. Can I wait fifteen years or longer for my dream to realize? I just released a book this year that I’m certain is good enough to secure an audience-but I really need that audience to find it now. I’ll be thrilled whenever they find it, either this year or in the summer of 2030, but if it takes until 2030 I’ll still be mired in my day job. Alas.

Mind you, I’ll never give up on this dream, and I’m not threatening to. I’m just saying that my day job really gets me down sometimes…

It always baffles me that more people don’t get excited about Leap Day. It’s not a holiday. In fact, this year it’s just a typical Wednesday. The morning shows might make some casual reference to the calendar oddity, but apart from that it will go largely unremarked upon by the world at large. A much bigger deal will be made of Groundhog Day, which is pretty mind-blowing when you stop to think about it. (Yes, I’ll say it: Groundhog Day is ridiculous.)

Maybe I’m just overly intrigued by calendars in the same way that I’m overly intrigued by maps (I could stare at them for hours, flipping through a 50-State Rand McNally American Road Map like I flip through a hair-raising novel). I mean, think about it: it only happens once every four years!? This is like violating the laws of physics! Every day happens once a year, but for this one awesome exception…

Silence. Crickets.

See, not a lot of people get excited about this. We get really excited about Christmas, which happens annually, like almost everything else in the calendar year does. Shouldn’t Leap Day, by extrapolation, be four times as awesome as Christmas? As New Year’s? As your birthday? And of course, if your birthday happens to fall on Leap Day, that makes it extra anticipatory. Take a moment to raise a glass to all those extraordinary thirty-two-year-old eight-year-olds.

Who’s with me? No takers, huh?

The thing about Leap Day is that it almost doesn’t count as a real day, right? February 28 is the last day of February and March 1 is the first day of March, case closed, but every four years we briefly fall into the twilight zone of Leap Day. I think of it as a day to experiment, to take time to work on or achieve something that might very well fail spectacularly. If it does, well, we’ll pretend it never happened. Kind of like Leap Day itself.

So, shelve that work in progress! Churning out a 200,000-word fantasy doorstopper? Take some time to write a few pages of comic fluff. Be eclectic; try your hand at crafting a stage play. Eke out that Babylon 5 Londo/G’Kar slash fiction you’ve had on the backburner for ten-plus years. Channel your inner Louis C.K. and piece together a stand-up routine.

Remember: what happens on Leap Day stays on Leap Day.

As for me, I’m going put the final touches on my plans for that big quadrennial Leap Year party I’ve been hotly anticipating for the last 1,460 days and leap myself into oblivion.

Archives. Backlists. As writers, we’ve all got “em-at least for those of us who’ve been pounding away at our keyboards for untold years. These early projects have allowed us to grow as writers, and maybe even as people.

These projects do not, however, showcase our best work. Am I the only one who wrote a first novel while still in elementary school? Surely not.

My sixth-grade effort is pitiful in the extreme. To make it all the more embarrassing, it happens to be a spec Star Trek novel. A large part of me is eternally grateful I never got around to submitting it, since the safest place for this manuscript is most definitely a cobwebbed binder in the bottom of a box in the back of that storage compartment I never, ever visit.

Well, a few days ago I happened to be cleaning out some junk at the bottom of the storage compartment in question. The box was open in front of me, filled with all sorts of childhood knickknacks and old report cards (oddly enough, that “A” in fifth grade Language Arts still makes me proud). And at the bottom of that box was a bright red, doodle-ridden binder that made my heart leap out of my chest.

While I’m in admission mode, I should also reveal a second discovery at the bottom of that box. I had almost entirely forgotten about its existence, but stored in a taped-together cassette holder was a childhood project even more humiliating. At the age of twelve, apparently I thought it would be a good idea to record an audiobook version of that first novel. Miracle of miracles, I happen to still own a cassette player. What a trip it was to hear my own prepubescent voice stumble over those awkwardly written sentences! I have a bad feeling that if I don’t burn those tapes today, they might one day make an ominous appearance at a future wedding toast. (Note to self: Never get married.)

So why am I writing about all this? Nostalgia. Nowadays, I hem and haw over writing deadlines and daily word count minimums. I’ve been told countless times, by people who really know what they’re talking about, that the best way to pursue literary success is to treat writing with all the persistence and professionalism as my day job. Hence deadlines. Hence word count minimums.

But back in the day, when I wrote that Star Trek novel, I don’t remember being concerned about matters of productivity. I wrote because that’s what I felt like doing. Now, if I only ever wrote when I felt like it, I wouldn’t be very productive at all, and yet that first novel truly was the laudable result of a twelve-year-old burst of creative passion.

Nostalgia can be both a beautiful and ugly thing, but today it feels especially beautiful. The memory of that book caused me to write several thousand words this evening, words that flowed as quickly and effortlessly as the mighty Amazon.

A lot of the time, looking backwards results in regret and anguish, but every once in a while it reminds me of who I am and encourages me to keep going.

What kind of nostalgic efforts do the rest of you keep hidden away in your proverbial (or not so proverbial) abandoned storage lockers?