Lately I’ve really been enjoying johnaugust.com and The Artful Writer. I’m not a screenwriter, but a lot of the writing advice they offer carries over, and really it’s refreshing to read blogs about the Hollywood process from people who’ve achieved success there, versus people who post Getty images of Hilary Duff and hope this is somehow going to make them famous.

I realize that two screenwriter bloggers does not a movement make, but to me it seems like people from the film industry in general get blogging and the internet so much better than people from the book publishing industry. Why aren’t there a slew of published fiction authors blogging and providing insight into the industry like John does? There’s Cory Doctorow, but he doesn’t count because he started on the internet and crossed over. Michael Chabon has a website, which is cool, but his posts are more essay-length and few and far between. Matthew Klam tried and quickly gave up. Don’t even talk to me about Guilfoile. I had high hopes for that one, but he wrote a couple pieces for The Morning News about his book tour and then I guess went home for an extended nap. So I guess that just leaves Neil Gaiman as the world’s only mainstream author-cum-blogger. And he spends most of his time simply answering reader mail about when Mirrormask is coming out. (If I’m missing a bunch of success stories, let me know.)

And don’t tell me it’s because authors don’t have time, they’re too busy doing actual writing. People who write screenplays for a living are under much tighter schedules than people with book deals.

I used to spend some time at Zoetrope, which was pretty decent as writing communities go (in a world where most of them are frightfully horrible, one that only kind of sucks is a homerun). I met the occasional cool person there, but mostly it’s a place for wannabe writers to critique stories by other wannebe writers, which isn’t that interesting to me.

Part of the reason for that, I think, is one of audience. For the most part, people who write fiction are not my target audience, and never have been, so I’m not particularly interested in what they think about my stories. My audience has always been People Who Like Stories, across all backgrounds, and I’m able to reach a decent number of those people through my website, and that’s worked out fine for me. Even with my limited (some say ever-dwindling) readership, I get solid feedback on any story I post.

But I would be interested to see what the daily mechanics of the publishing industry look like from an author’s perspective. It’s possible I just have my hopes up for something that could never really exist, and if it did it would be the most disappointing thing ever. Woke around noon. Wrote two paragraphs. Agent called again, let machine get it. Finished NYT crossword. Good day. I mean I read those articles Stephen King writes for Entertainment Weekly and they’re so awful that I can’t even believe there are still people willing to pay money for his books. Stephen King as a person is a fucking joke. So whatever. Maybe it’s good that there aren’t sites like that.

I guess it’s just annoying because when I started putting stories up on the internet (six years last March, thank you), I thought “Man this is awesome. I bet it doesn’t take long for publishers to realize how many great writers there are on the internet.” But I’m all checking my watch, and I guess they sort of never got it, and there are no signs that they ever really will see what a great tool and resource the internet could be for them. Meanwhile books sales are increasingly falling and, I don’t know, they’re probably blaming video games or something, because all that matters is having someone to blame.

So my hope is that someday more people will just get it, and understand not only the power websites have in providing a way to connect with an audience (versus just marketing to it), but also how cool and powerful it is to give art away for free. Post drafts of stories you’re working on. Show others how your process works. If they’re good you’re still going to be able to sell books, if that’s your goal.

And then, in the very long term, we can try to get rid of this bullshit idea that success in writing means you’ve sold a million books. Break down the wall and show that writing stories is just a simple act performed by humans. It’s not some magical ability possessed by a select chosen few who deserve millions of dollars for doing it. Everyone can tell stories, and everyone should. People who have websites get that, and so do the people who read them.