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ILoveQuitters.com
Sleeper
Having worked for magazines and publishers all my life, I never thought I would start a magazine format in cyberspace. Ilovequitters.com is quite a journey in a brand new world.
In the old days, it would cost millions of dollars for a Conde Nast, Hearst, or Time, Inc. to develop a new product. Very expensive, top of the line consultants would sit around conference tables strategizing for years about how the new magazine would look and what it would say and who would advertise in it. And then they'd spend mucho more dinero on surveys and questionnaires to find out what readers really want and who would buy it. Oh, the cost of advertising for the launch when it got finalized. Oh, the parties. Oh, the anticipation and self congratulation.
Publishers used to do the same with books. I remember the agonizing over covers, the cover copy, the survey cards Bantam sent out when Burning Time, the first April Woo novel, was published. They asked: Is this too graphic, not graphic enough? Would you recommend to your readers? It was so much fun. I loved the parties that made us feel so In and important, the gifts sent to booksellers, the fancy lunches at restaurants with white tablecloths. But that was in the 90s. After 9/11, when the airports and train stations were down for months, the distributors floundered and the business began to change. Then the Internet and Kindle forced it to change even more. Both authors and publishers have suffered terribly.
One author told me he knew things were not good when his editor started meeting him for lunch in a self-serve diner with crumbs on the table. Publishers' sales were down last year more than 30%, my agent told me. No one's having a party anymore.
Publishers will always take chances on new writers for small bucks in a whim and a prayer. But for writers, there is no bonanza anymore. You can't just sit down, write a novel and have agents and editors clamoring for it with checkbooks open. But in a way, this should be the most liberating thing in the world. Writing should not be about making the big bucks. It's a craft, an art and a spiritual journey. You do it for the fun of learning something, of mastery.
I started Ilovequitters.com with a group of people sitting around a living room, because hearing the stories of real people working on their problems touched me and fed my imagination. I believed those stories would resonate with the general public. We need to integrate the whole field of emotional recovery (because everyone is recovering from traumas, or addictions, of one kind or another), talk and write more, not just to Dear Abby.
Ilovequitters asks some basic questions. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who is going to decide for us how to get better? To explore pop culture and how it impacts our behaviors and lives is a privilege I never thought I'd have. But I never thought I'd be talking to readers directly like this, either.
The old publishing system had us writing the books and articles for the public, but being largely alone in our lives and thoughts. Now writers can fly in cyberspace, which is where the imagination lives.
My new novel, Sleeper, came out of my imagination. But the issues and pressures faced by law enforcement and homeland security and the horrifying crimes resulting from greed are absolutely real. Welcome to the working writer's world.
