Nice interview.

Thanks so much!

Superbly done, Amy. You were articulate and right on top of the questions. You truly did a masterful job on this interview.

What a fun interview, Amy! You spoke well and kept the tone lighthearted. Keep up the good work!

I love this blog entry's title, by the way. "I See Rude People on reason.tv."

Heavens! There are rude people on reason.tv? Well, I'm just never going on reason.tv then. Some nerve! They should learn some manners over there!

Great job, Amy! I like the squirt gun idea for smokers. Works for cats, dontcha know!

A good presentation of your philosophy.

This one is my favorite interview of you to date. Well done.

Great interview! You carry yourself very well. You managed to convey the image of you correcting other people's rudeness without coming off like a bitch! Good job!

Great interview, I enjoyed that!

Thank you all so much -- the kind words are appreciated (I'm really critical of myself, especially on TV!)

Very good interview. However, someday I'd like to hear an honest answer to the oft asked question:

Why did you write the book?

FOR THE MONEY!!!! I gotta earn a living, OK? I mean I wouldn't have done all that work for free.

I saw your reason interview n H&R... Terrific!

Now, how do I meet a smart, funny, attractive girl like you? I was thinking of calling you at dinner time, every night for a week, and exposing my needy inner-soul while trying to persuade you that "this offer won't last for long". Would such an approach succeed?

Sorry Amy. My mistake. I guess you are a saint. You put in all that work (which you complained about daily for months) just to help out humankind.

Where are you donating the proceeds from the book?

BTW, I'm in the tech field which if I wanted to do for money I would have invented Google before those 2 guys did. I guess I'm a saint too.

Nice to finally hear your voice - I expected more of a midwestern accent.

I agree that you kept it light - hard to think of you as a scold when you're flashing that smile!

Interestingly, people think of writing books as some road to riches. There are very, very, very few authors who make real money from their books. There's a guy I know here at the Tucson book fest who wrote a masterpiece -- took him 17 years. His wife nearly killed him.

Deanne Stillman, also here, took either 10 or 12 years to write her book "29 Palms," on murder, the Marines, and the Mohave.

Advances are large for the Jim Pattersons of the world; not for the rest of us.

And I just read the beginning of a journalist friend's novel. It's fantastic. I was talking to a friend of ours, and that friend told me it's her 11th, and probably the first that will sell.

These days, a good-sized advance is $20K. For a book that will, say, take the author six months to figure out and write a proposal for and maybe two years to write.

And then, publishers are cancelling whole divisions of books. A friend who got a smaller than $20K advance, and got only the first half, had her publisher cancel her contract. She's unable to resell the book in this tough environment. And she's far from unique.

The best advice for anybody who wants to write books is have some other reliable source of income.

Who said I didn't like you?

I guess you don't like being challenged.

When you have nothing of substance to argue I end up:

Not knowing anything about publishing.

Not liking you.

And apparently I'm a pervert too.

You know when you've won an argument when the other side starts calling you names.

I win.

Unless you can say with a straight face that you would have written that book if your publisher paid you nothing. If you can't then Money was one of the reasons you wrote it.

That doesn't make you a bad person Amy. We all need to earn a living. It's OK.

Apart from the difference between "THE" reason and "a" reason, which is obvious to most of us, wht's the point here? If it's completely self-evident that any author writes books at least in part for money, why is it so important to hear one say it?

"Would you have written that book if your publisher paid you nothing?"

"No."

"Did you breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide while writing the book?"

"Yes."

Yay.

"I'd like to thank myself for being so brilliant and writing a perfect first draft" Sean will say to the assembled Academy whilst accepting the Oscar for Best Screenplay Adapted From His Own Novel Which Was Written Painlessly In Two Short Weeks And Published To Critical Claim As It Rocketed To The Top Of The Bestseller List. "And anyone who thinks this is hard work has never tried it."
Stardom awaits, Sean!

"Would you have written that book if your publisher paid you nothing?"

Again, many authors have still-born books, false starts, and many write books (especially novels) that never sell. They are writing in hopes of having their book sell, but most will not sell their books.

Writing non-fiction, I tend to spend six or seven months writing a proposal, utterly on spec. If you're lucky, that proposal will get you an agent who is willing to try to sell it. If they're lucky, and you're lucky, they will sell it. If you're lucky, you'll get an advance that, less your agent's commission and your expenses and the, say, two or three years it takes you to write it, will net you 3 cents an hour.

I'd love to make big bucks from writing -- in fact, it's one of my goals. but, again, only the naive are in publishing to get rich, especially in this publishing environment.

sean, your last name isn't Penn, is it?

I really enjoyed the interview.

Thank you for the tip about Zabasearch. I was getting at least 2 solicitations for continuing education daily from a professional organization. I had to let my membership lapse because they raised the price & I was unemployed, yet I continued having to shred these solicitations, so I located & wrote the President a politely terse complaint. His office responded cordially, saying they would actually remove me from the mailing lists. I didn't believe it was possible to actually get removed from mailing lists!