Periodically, I study either Publishers Weekly or a book on the publishing industry. The tome Buddhapuss is munching these days is How to Get Happily Published. So many books in this genre – books about selling a book or getting a book deal – are commercial powerhouses. For instance, there are more than 500,000 copies in print of How to Get Happily Published. That’s way, way out of the stadium from a sales perspective.

A search on Amazon.com for the phrase published returns several pages of results while Google returns 52,700,000 worth of pages.

Here’s 3 observations about this phenomena.

1) Lots of people want to get published. Or at least read about getting published.
2) 99.99 percent of the people who buy these books don’t get published, thus they were ripped off. Look for a class action lawsuit soon.
3) It’s more fun to read about writing, than it is to write and submit something. Not that rejection is all bad, it’s just intimidating. Fear of the no is a lot more potent than actually hearing the word no.