Noir fiction for the modern reader.

This very moment, as I sit at my computer sipping wine in between righteous thoughts, people are arguing over whether or not the new trend toward online self-publishing is going to bring any tangible results (read: money) to the authors who indulge in it.

A lot has been written about a few who have become hugely successful. By now, a lot of us know about Joe Konrath and Boyd Morrison and their unlikely triumphs in the e-world. “Flashes in the pan,” some say. “They’re not typical of what an author can expect if he or she self-publishes online.”

“But it’s the coming thing,” others say. “If they can do it, I can do it, too. I just have to work hard at promoting myself and my book.”

Pardon me while I take another sip. This is good stuff.

I have to come down on the side of the true believers. There are some big changes coming, and they’re coming sooner than we think. It’s not happening in a vacuum, though. There’s some historical perspective that should be considered.

Just a very few years ago, if you wanted to buy a book, you got your ass off the couch, went out to your car, got in it, and drove to a bookstore, or somewhere else that offered books for sale, such as Wal-Mart. Maybe you knew the exact book you wanted, or maybe you didn’t. Either way, off your ass and out the door, or else no book.

Then: Amazon. As home computers spread across the land, Amazon proved that people would sit home and order books by the millions. Before you could say, “One-click ordering”, independent bookstores all over the country started closing down. Even big chains like Doubleday were gobbled up by bigger chains. And when Amazon started the clever come-on of “now that you bought this book, you’ll love these”, people were instantly exposed to more books in that genre. Many people obediently bought some of those books that they might otherwise never have known about.

Amazon’s bigshots were undoubtedly sitting around one day asking themselves, “Well, now that we’ve got everybody ordering books from us, what do we do for an encore?” And somebody around the table blurted out “Kindle!”

So here comes the e-reader. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and even Apple begin shoveling these devices out as fast as they can. Dad gives Mom one for Mother’s Day, they give Junior one for Christmas, boyfriend gives one to girlfriend, and on and on. Pretty soon, millions of people have them and they’re buying NY-published books at $9.99 apiece. What a deal! Right?

Whew! My heart is pumping here. Time for another sip of the vino.

Okay, now Amazon is making about fifty billion dollars a day and the heavyweights are sitting around saying, “How can we top this?” And somebody suggests, “How about letting people self-publish on Kindle?”

Well, this one probably spurred a little discussion, you know, about letting just anybody self-publish or restricting it only to “real” authors. Of course, the open-door faction won that one, and here we are.

Millions of self-pubbed books will clutter up the e-bookstores for sure. And most of them will be crap. But many will be very good, and some will be great, and most if not all of these would’ve had no shot whatsoever with the bloated New York publishing world, insatiably thirsting for blockbusters. These gems WILL find an audience. Maybe not in the same easy fashion as Stephen King finds his audience, but the readers out there will open themselves up to these new authors.

How, you might ask?  For starters, not everyone lives in LA (something that is hard for LA residents to grasp), and therefore most of us lack easy access to quality bookstores. Amazon has proven that people don’t really need a neighborhood bookstore, or even a big-box Barnes & Noble.

Secondly, through online reviews and recommendations (which are being read more and more), self-published online authors will get their noses above the waterline. Remember, people who own an e-reader will never tire of finding books to download into it, and they will search these books out through online book clubs and reviews.

Thirdly, and this is very important, with prices of self-published books generally ranging from $1-$3, they look awfully good to someone who’s been shelling out ten bucks a pop for his favorite digital bestsellers. At that price, they can afford a couple of missteps without being discouraged. This goes a long way toward exposing them to authors and books they might otherwise never consider.

Some say that authors will now have to go online and slap a lot of backs and come across as a gregarious social butterfly, when many of us are in fact born introverts. Why should being an extrovert be a requirement for a successful author, some ask. To which I reply: for the same reason that a successful author is required to be a marketer, salesman, blogger, and book tour promoter. You know, the same stuff that NY publishers pay people to do, but which they now insist that we must do.

Finally, authors are now able to draw a straight line from their computer screens directly to the readers, much the same as musicians before us, who can now sell their albums directly to their fans without having to wait for the one-in-a-million shot at a record deal.

By the way, did I mention I have a rock & roll novel up on Kindle? No? Well, let me say that Cadillac’s Comin’, a hard tale of a rockabilly one-hit wonder who recorded for Sun Records in the 1950s, is now available at your friendly neighborhood Kindle store.

I think I’m going to pour another glass of this wine. I really like it.

Scott D Parker posted a blog on the Do Some Damage site today which got me to thinking. He posited the analogy of a book to a concert t-shirt.

When you read a book, according to Scott, the book becomes an artifact of the reading experience, in much the same manner as a t-shirt becomes the artifact of a concert you attended. People see the book, they can assume you’ve read it. People see the t-shirt, they can assume you went to the concert. If he reads a book, the experience is internal, personal, and not needing a souvenir for verification. He goes on to say that in a book, the story is everything, and the medium is irrelevant. As long as the material can be delivered to the reader, what’s the difference if it comes through an iPad or a 500-page hardcover? It’s through this prism that the book becomes like the t-shirt. An artifact. This is a somewhat original way of looking at it and it works, up to a point.

I would highlight a big difference, though. If I want to reread a particular passage in the book, or reread the entire book, for that matter, I can do so. The written words are still there. The concert’s music, however, is long gone, vanishing the moment it was played. The t-shirt is just a memory of the event, embalmed in a cotton-polyester blend and growing more distant with each passing day. If I want to hear Don Henley sing, “Freedom, oh freedom, that’s just some people talkin’” once again, well, I’m going to have to go to another concert.

Now, I know that ebooks offer the same reviewing capabilities as print books; if you want to reread something, just scroll back to the point and read away. But Scott cited Stephen King, who in a recent interview, said he felt a certain “not-thereness” to ereading. It’s exactly this “not-thereness” which crystallizes the difference between books and digital files.

Books are much more than mere souvenirs of reading. Rather, they are the physical repository of the art itself. They are tangible proof that the author and his muse came together in a magical confluence of events. Their covers are large enough to be examined in close detail. They can be signed, displayed, resold, reprinted (with different covers), and, perhaps centuries later, gazed upon with awe from behind a velvet rope. And, not incidentally, they can never be deleted with the stroke of a key.

I remember seeing the original Magna Carta around 20 years ago, as it rolled through New Orleans. It was on tour along with several other “documents of democracy”, and was displayed inside an air-conditioned tractor trailer, out of the bright sun. It was lit with the dimmest of bulbs, difficult to see, fading after nearly eight hundred years of existence. But there it was. The paper that started it all. I mean the very paper with the very ink forming the very words which, back in the early 13th century, shook England to its core and would go on to resonate around the world. It’s hard for me to imagine staring at a digital file on a computer screen with that same sense of reverence.

Don’t get me wrong, now. I’m not blind to reality. I know digitalization is here to stay and it’s only going to have a larger presence, much larger. Furthermore, it’s going to be mostly to our benefit. A quick check of the blogosphere–Joe Konrath, for example–will convince even the most hardline skeptic. Ebooks are the future and we’re probably all going to be better off for it. Indie authors will multiply and thrive because they’ll be able to draw a straight line between themselves and their readers. This is a fantastic development which could never have been foreseen just five or ten years ago.

But in the process, we’re going to lose something. Whether you call it the artifact of the experience or the vault of the knowledge itself, it’s going to disappear, straight into the digital mist.