Okay, after reading about that hen house book signing you just endured I'm grateful for both of those writers’ groups for disinviting me. It sounds...like high school, and I bolted from that pit of contrived ignorance on my 16th birthday. You did sell some books though, so get over it.

You are not alone when it comes to slow sales. I published two books today—one of which I would bet no one will read in my lifetime. If the book that I expect to sell 10 copies sells 4,000 copies than I will still only make as much money off of that 40 hours of effort than I used to get paid for the same amount of time disciplining ex-convict stock clerks, chewing our parcel pickup clerks, refereeing cat fights between ghetto cashiers, and telling me psychobitch boss I’ll make everything alright as she jumped up and down on her desk.

Look Baby, you write a nice story and have some dark inclinations that make you interesting even to a rape and pillage nut like me.

My Forty Hands of Night was a better novel than King's Mister Mercedes, but it does not matter to the material world. Winter is better than half the novels King got made into movies. This does not bother me. King will sell. I will not. He's the bandage and I'm the amputation—of course he is more popular by an order of magnitude. If I was making money I'd know my stuff would not last, because what people today are interested in is more shallow and of less substance than at any other time in history. That's how I look at it—keeps me writing.

You have it tougher because you are writing for a gender that still reads and the allure of actually making a living is there. More importantly monetary value is what we have been conditioned is the mark of success in all things. Remember the 1980s kid's movie The Never Ending Story? Instead of a villain there was 'the Nothing' eating the world. That's money—The Nothing which becomes everything.

That feeling of ennui you have I experienced when my series of three history books that I had gotten an advance for was cancelled—12 years down the toilet in materialistic terms. It was a full time job for three years. But we have sold 5 copies now—five men who are really passionate about ancient boxing have bought it. That really is enough. I'd rather have 10 guys buy my book and use it as a coaching aid, or pass it down to a young fighter, than be King and write another pedestrian bestseller knowing that some lonely woman's cat is going to piss on it one day after the old broad passes away in her house of despair.

The reading pie is smaller than it was when we were kids but now everyone can publish a book. That process is reflected in the spreading ghettos of America and empty suburban homes even as mansions rise higher. We live in an age of skewed concentration. There will remain a tiny minority of high selling writers to service the masses and the rest of us will labor in obscurity. But, when this empty carcass of a culture finally implodes and people start digging through the rubble for something worthwhile, they will not care a wit for the bestsellers that necessarily pandered to all of the common petty concerns of a dying civilization, any more than we care what kind of lubricant Caligula used on his dildos. [Granted someone cared.]

So, I know this used to sound like a loser's declaration, but I just want to be read, and if it’s only by one reader so be it. I try to practice the craft according to commercial rules, like not padding out a short into an empty novel, but biting the money bullet and letting the short go as non-profitable art, something for twerps to judge me by when I'm gone.

As for going back and getting a degree—to hell with that. Do you want the credit or the skill? Take targeted courses. The biggest thing is to write a lot and to write outside of your comfort zone. That is how you grow in anything, how I coach fighters, how I was coached today as I have decided to return to competition—don't tell Mum!

Here is one final experience that was dark and bright at once for this writer. When my second book the Logic of Steel—which became my best seller and is still a cult classic and regarded as ground breaking—was released I found out that knife manufacturers and magazine publishers were pissed off that my publisher put out something that was ostensibly a book on knife fighting that recommended the reader not carry a knife for self defense. By writing for the reader I spit in the eye of commercial interests and both sales and reviews suffered. But, readers have written and thanked me for keeping them out of jail and out of the morgue by stressing avoidance behavior over packing the latest greatest knife.

One of these young men even came into town to visit me and train. He brought his crippled little girlfriend with him who he carried around town on his shoulders in the August heat. I talked the morning away with these two young bright people—one of them from half way around the world—and they bought me breakfast and then got upset when I seized up from lack of potassium [kind of funny in retrospect]. I thanked them and they said, "No, thank you."

These were some of the best people I've ever met, and it was all because of a book—my first book—which I dislike so much I can't even revise it. That weekend made up for the fact that my second book, which the publisher had gone all 'gee whiz' over, was about to be shunned by most of the market.

And I understand where that kid was coming from, that someone wrote a book that made him feel like he wasn't alone. I get that feeling when I read Melville. The man regarded as one of our best American literary figures could not pay the rent from his sales. Hell, I think Poe coughed up a lung down the street from here as a vagrant.

I recommend that you put whatever shit job you have in perspective so that you can do what's important. Girl, the money we toil for is losing value by the day. It's time to concern ourselves with lasting things, and you have the talent to communicate with people around the world—women just like you. Just wait until you get some international customers that aren't all caught up in cutting the Kardashian lawn. To find people in other countries value your work is going to be a huge rush for you one day.

Write every day, even if just 50 words.

4,000 words a week gets you 4 novels a year.

I suggest you do 2 a year and use the rest of the wordage to write shorts and nonfiction as promotional content for your site. Eventually you sift through this stuff for a print anthology.

Good luck—and make sure your write that smug PHD bitch at the book signing into your next horror story.

Speaking of King—take a page out of his masturbatory book—and write a short story about the book signing, only you are some evil Haitian mamaloi hawking her voodoo manual...

Really, you need to practice doing shorts of about 1,500 words.

When you have worked in that framework it makes it easier to chunk out a novel a piece at a time when life intervenes.