Participant A is my yet-unpublished novel, THE IDIOT’S TALE. I know you won’t take my word for it if I told you it’s a good book, so I’ll just say that by my own measures, it is a manuscript that I will still be proud of in ten years. Much like an intergalactic space probe, it is traveling through a great silent void known as the New York publishing industry, and we hopeful scientists can do nothing but wait a long time for word of its happy landing somewhere.

Participant B is my soon-to-be-printed THE EDITOR’S LEXICON: ESSENTIAL WRITING TERMS FOR NOVELISTS. It is a very brief dictionary of writing terms meant for fiction writers who have not studied writing in school, and early reviews by other editors and writers are strongly positive. I have decided to publish it independently, as an e-book through Smashwords, and as a print book through Lightning Source. My sole companion on this journey is my friend, client, and now publisher, William Campbell of Glyd-Evans Press.

As a writer, my three main goals are to (1) dedicate as much of myself as possible to a craft without losing my sanity, (2) be read, and (3) make a living at it. Therefore, this experiment will take many years to complete. It will compare ease of publication, the effort and expense to promote each book, profit, and my overall satisfaction with the final result—in other words, “Was it worth it? Should I have done it differently? Do I feel like I’ve connected with an audience? Which route would I recommend to others?”

Right now, I can only collect data from Participant B. I will be posting it over the next few weeks, as THE EDITOR’S LEXICON approaches its publication date. As for Participant A, it has entered a shaky orbit around one particular agent, but it’s traversing the dark side of that moon and we can only hope that a positive signal will reach our satellites by this time next month.

Technocrati: It is my understanding that if you have a blog, listing it on Technocrati will increase your traffic and web rankings. Once you create a profile, you’ll get a claim code (like this: P9MM9PVRFXT7), which you post on your blog (as I am doing now), by which they’ll verify your blog and eventually include it in their databases. It is also my understanding that Technocrati is valuable enough to make the long wait for verification worthwhile.

Website Grader: The tool scores your site on a 1-100 scale, and tells you what you need to do to make it easier to find, push it higher in Google’s Page Rank system, and communicate better with your audience. (Yay, Julia Stoops of BlueMouseMonkey.com, who designed this site! It got an 87 right off the bat.)

Twitter: OK, obvious one. But I’ve found that 15 minutes a day of sharing useful content, and hash-tagging keywords (e.g., #publishing), will accrue relevant followers and also turn up helpful articles, depending on whom you follow. Not sure how some people gather followers who number in the thousands, but I get two or three new followers every day by using Twitter moderately. I’ve found that I’d rather limit my Twitter-time to the book industry, and save Facebook for chatting with friends.

SPANnet.org: If you have a book out, join this free and growing community of authors. Most are self-published. In concept, this is what needs to happen next in publishing–authors need to start working together more to promote each other (rather than themselves), and connecting directly with readers. SPAN may not be there yet, but it’s a step along the way.

***Also recommended by a fellow editor and web-savvy colleague: Google Analytics, which provides free and thorough traffic data for your site.

On e-books:

[The digital books marketplace] will be very large, very diverse, and very surprising: its cultural impact cannot be imagined. E-books will be a significant factor in this uncertain future, but actual books printed and bound will continue to be the irreplaceable repository of our collective wisdom.

On creativity:

Works of genius will emerge from parts of the world where books have barely penetrated before.

On selling one’s work:

As conglomerates resist the exorbitant demands of best-selling authors … these authors, with the help of agents and business managers, will become their own publishers, retaining all net proceeds from digital as well as traditional sales.

On booksellers:

With the Espresso Book Machine, enterprising retail booksellers may become publishers themselves, like their eighteenth-century forebears.

On the necessity of the publishing industry:

It is fair to say that book publishing is more than a business. Without the contents of our libraries—our collective backlist, our cultural memory—our civilization would collapse.

On books, morality, and censorship:

The industry that Gutenberg launched eventually made possible wide distribution of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, to say nothing of [I]Babar the Elephant [/I]and [I]The Cat in the Hat[/I]. But his technology also gave us [I]The Protocols of the Elders of Zion[/I], [I]Mein Kampf[/I], and the nonsense that turned Pol Pot in Paris from a mere fool into a mass murderer. Digitization will amplify our better nature but also its diabolic opposite. Censorship is not the answer to these evils.

On the future form of literature:

Though bloggers anticipate a diversity of communal projects and new kinds of expression, literary form has been remarkably conservative throughout its long history while the act of reading abhors distraction, such as the Web-based enhancements—musical accompaniment, animation, critical commentary, and other metadata—that some prophets of the digital age foresee as profitable sidelines for content providers.

While self-immersing in a Cat 5 data stream, looking for self-publishing trends, I happened upon Burke’s blog, Crime Always Pays. Recently, he blogged his decision to self-publish A GONZO NOIR. The manuscript must be solid enough, judging by its blurb from John Banville and the number of near-misses in the traditional publishing industry. Good for him, I thought; then, scrolling down, found no fewer than 15 comments from his friends, each one ordering multiple copies of his book. Holy cow.

Maybe he is just that good, and his friends know it. Or maybe it’s Ireland; I lived there for a summer, and many people were unusually blithe about spending money to be nice. I know for certain, however, here on the tail end of a day’s research, that I haven’t seen a blog work so well or so immediately for a writer anywhere else. Good luck, Declan!

The Editor’s Lexicon is available for sample or purchase on the Smashwords.com site (link above). I welcome any ideas about this “beta” edition!