This “salon” is intended as a place where you will find articles by impressive writers willing sharing their thoughts on the process, their insights on craft, and their ideas on other writers. Oh, and their unvarnished experiences about making a living, being edited, facing rejection, going out on all kinds of limbs. Each post will have a comment area to encourage conversation and to ellicit your thoughts as well, so, please post away!

George Orwell, always prescient, once wrote, “If booksellers wanted to be millionaires, they’d be in another line of business.”

Few writers count on becoming millionaires, and just the promise of a book advance is enough to keep many motivated. But is the book advance in retreat? Author and editor Meghan Ward took a survey to find out, and we asked insiders to share their insights.

Go to any panel on book publishing these days, and you’ll hear a lot of hoopla about self-publishing. Easy to do! More control! A bigger cut of the profits! At a time when advances aren’t exactly advancing, editors are often too over-worked, and publicists are spending the house’s dimes on blockbusters, self-publishing sure sounds tempting. Add to this the allure of royalty rates of 70 percent or higher instead of the 15 percent (at most) from traditional publishers, and it’s no wonder all writers aren’t going Indie.

But, wait. Self-publishing might be the word on everyone’s lips, but is it right for you?

The iPad may sometimes seem like a boondoggle for authors (Yet another must-have device? Now I need an app for my memoir?), but it has been a bona-fide boon for e-book vendors. Caught in the middle are agents and traditional publishers, trying to carve out new territory for themselves and their clients. In April 2010, Sarah Baker explained the finer points of the chaotic electronic book market, informing authors of the state of e-rights, royalties, piracy, and pricing in this competitive (and lucrative) landscape. Let’s trace the zigs and zags of the e-book industry in the year since.

In 2002, Google initiated a secret project with a noble goal: to make the knowledge in the world’s 130 million books available to anyone connected to the Web. Some feel that the project, now public and known as Google Book Search, has flown in the face of Google’s noble motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Unless stopped, technology companies like Google and Amazon will control the culture for which they are now the gatekeepers. Access to books is far more important than quarterly dividends. Allowing books to become victims of the corporate imperative will lead to evil being done to readers, writers, students, libraries, and publishers.

Consider this three-part solution…

E-books arrived at America’s bookstores on December 6, 2010, with the announcement that Google eBooks would be sold through independent bookstores. Bibliophiles like me greeted the news with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Many breathless digerati have been heralding the arrival of e-books as a sign that the reign of the printed word is over. Soon, they claim, everyone will be reading digital type on backlit screens. Not so fast, booksellers say. We are generally happy to have an array of electronic books to offer to our customers, but few of us are tearing down our bookshelves.

Ask any writer to define literary style, and you’ll find that the answer is as distinct as, well, that writer’s style. I noodled around on the Net and found that Gore Vidal defined style as “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” Curious, I asked some of my favorite writers–including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—to share their thoughts on style.

Style may not seem like such a sticky word, but ask writers and editors to define it, and you’ll find yourself in the mire. Some will tell you that style dictates whether you should use O.K. or okay, D.J. or deejay, an apostrophe before or after the “s.” Others will insist that style refers to sentences that swing, or paragraphs that unfurl with panache. Let’s disentangle these disparate ideas.

In a class on the postwar novel, Harvard professor James Wood commented on Cormac McCarthy’s use of parataxis in The Road. Para-what? I wondered. More recently, I’ve been ruminating about rhythm. In my writing classes with journalists in Harvard’s Nieman and Loeb fellowship programs, I wanted to explore techniques leading to rhythmically masterful prose. It was time to find out more about parataxis.

Electronic rights are the chaotic bazaar of book publishing. Here authors barter with agents, agents haggle with publishers, and publishers brawl with e-retailers. Everyone is vying for his or her claim on the best pomegranate.

This frenzy, and a barrage of media attention, has left most people involved feeling confused. So what should a writer know in a labyrinth of twisting alleys and ad-hoc product stands? Here are some key terms and general guidelines to the unstable warren of the U.S. market.

Literary agent Jill Kneerim put together an eight-point checklist for prospective authors looking for an agent. Point Number 1: If you have more than one idea or book you are working on, pick ONE of them to lead off with, and don’t mention the others for a while. (The woods are full of amateurs who have drawers full of unpublished manuscripts.).

If you’re thinking about writing books, it’s helpful to know some of the basics about how much money to expect, how advances work, and when—if ever—you’ll collect royalties. There’s much confusion out there, especially since all we generally read in the press is that Sarah Palin got $5 million for her book, Barack Obama $500,000 for his.

I did some quick research, added to it what I know from my own experiences both as an author and editor, and then ran this summary by a few agents and editors to make sure it’s sound.

Nearly every writing book on my shelf suggests the same somewhat mysterious daily practice. It has many names: “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; “first thoughts” in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones; and “early morning writing” in Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers, prefers the somewhat ungainly but increasingly popular “freewriting.”

I find that freewriting is a useful channel for my ever-churning, over-active brain. It’s efficient therapy—cheap and fast.

An old deodorant commercial once proclaimed, ‘If you’re not a little nervous, you’re really not alive.’

Pretty sage advice, even though the only thing at stake was staying dry and odor-free. But there is something to be said for accepting—and learning to navigate—the minor turbulences of life. I’m talking here about common, everyday anxiety. The jitters. Butterflies. This is particularly true for writers, whose very feelings are the raw materials of their craft.

Then there are the more virulent writer’s anxieties, shared by few in other lines of work: Your agent hasn’t returned your phone calls. You are three weeks past deadline. You have Act Two problems.

A laid-off writer/editor contemplates the challenges of a freelance career

The day I walked out of the newsroom—July 29, 2008—I felt like the happiest unemployed man in America. For nineteen years, I had put out the Sunday Travel section at the Sun-Sentinal in Fort Lauderdale, filling it with stories from journeys around the world (mine and freelancers’), and columns reflecting on—and often poking fun at—the changing state of that world. It was, as I wrote in the book that collected some of those pieces, “a charmed, unheralded life.”

I don’t remember the year, or the name of the artist, or even whether the exhibit contained paintings or sculpture, but I’ll never forget the name of the show years ago at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum: “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” I immediately copied down the words and later pasted them on my bulletin board. There they still live.

“Total risk, freedom, discipline” has become my mantra. Those four words say more about my daily life as a writer than the empty term “process” can begin to suggest.