FORGET COLUM MCCANN, FORGET Elizabeth Strout – although how can you forget them if you’ve never heard their names before?1 The real publishing story of 2009 was Sarah Palin and her memoir, Going Rogue. And what a story it was! Four hundred pages in a mere four months of writing, a seven million dollar advance, a first printing of 1.5 million copies, and a twenty-five state “Going Rogue” tour by specially retrofitted bus and chartered Gulfstream jet. Now that’s what I call a book tour!
Good for Sarah – and good for Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, and anyone else who can pull off such a feat, however they manage it. But where does that leave the rest of us wordsmiths, who struggle almost or equally as hard as the A-list champions but never remotely approach their success? Sitting around wondering what the hell we’re doing, that’s where.
I really shouldn’t complain. I write young adult novels under a pseudonym. I’ve published five of them since 1999, when I abandoned the stuffy seminar rooms of academia in order to become the cool freelancer and fiction writer I had dreamed of becoming ever since age twelve. It took me a few years, but I finally taught myself to write the kind of books I love to read and eventually found a publisher…
This is Berlin 
