Author: Donna Levin

You send a manuscript to New York agent.  The agent sends it to an editor who buys it for a lot of money.  Soon your book is on the New York Times bestseller list.

A dream? Well, as Bloody Mary sings in South Pacific, "You gotta have a dream/If you don’t have a dream/How you gonna make a dream come true?"

Time for some different, but no less marvelous dreams.

In a recent post I warned that self-publishing on Kindle was not a ticket on the bullet train to success. But everyone from the editor-in-chief at Random House down knows that the publishing landscape is changing rapidly, and that the power is shifting to the people.

On a busy New York street a young man stops an older passer-by.  "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?"

The older man puts a hand on his shoulder.  "Practice, my boy.  Practice."

Old joke; just as true today.

More titles are available than ever before, thanks to affordable self-publishing, and print on demand ("POD"), among other technologies.  This is a great blessing for both those who read and those who write: there are no longer just a handful of gatekeepers at the entrance to bestseller Heaven.  That doesn’t mean, though, that You Can Become a Rich and Famous Novelist without Really Trying.