“Is anyone else annoyed that Hollywood decided to retitle Beezus and Ramona as Ramona and Beezus?”

Five of my women friends were immediately all like, “Yes!  Thank you.”  Years after reading it, we are all still carrying around enormous affection for this book.  Enough that we’re personally offended by what is, when all is said and done, a fairly minor change.

I’m not sure if I’ll see it in theaters, but this week I decided to pick up Ramona’s World, the only Ramona book published after my own childhood.  I’m a few chapters in and, I must confess, not fully engrossed yet.  I guess I am a little old for it.  But it’s got me pondering the following question:

Would Beezus and Ramona be published today?

I mean, all it is is a thoroughly charming story about a precocious little girl and her big sister.  As hooks go, there’s not much of one.  Where are the vampires and the explosions and the ZOMG zombies?  Where is the hook?

Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe I know jack squat about Middle Grade publishing trends.  But when I imagine the query letter I’d write for Beezus and Ramona, I’m not optimistic about the response.

I don’t know whether a modern day Ramona would ever hit the bookshelves.  But here here are a few things I do know:

1. If you measure people by the joy they give others, Beverly Cleary’s worth is enormous.
2. When a property has this much love, adapters would do well to be faithful to the original, and
3. That teacher should have known she was causing trouble when she told Ramona to “sit here for the present.”  Honestly, what was she thinking?

With my writing group, Wednesday night.  My summation: “I think it’s a path to publication that is opening up for some people, like bloggers and celebrities and other people with existing platforms.  But I personally would not do it.”

With Mark, last night.  My summation: “It’s not the worst idea.”

All this is to say that my attitude toward self-pubbing is rapidly opening up.  Which I don’t think is because I’m crazy, or because I haven’t found an agent yet.  I think it’s because between the blogs and the e-readers and the bestselling books based on Twitter feeds, we’re reaching a sort of inflection point.  Things are changing.  For some writers, they already have.

Now, I am not anywhere near ready to comb through the Lulu terms of service yet.  But, Mark and I did have another “what would we do if the book didn’t sell” conversation last night.  It seemed to me that there were two possible paths: (1) write another book, and hope that when it sold, it would pull this one along with it in a package deal and (2) self-pub.

Just for the hell of it, we talked about how to chart a course down Path #2.  “What if I released it as a blog?” I asked.  “A chapter a week, for about a year.  And if you want to read the whole thing right now, you can buy a self-pubbed copy?”

Mark liked it.  It tied into that whole giving-your-stuff-away-for-free ethos that is such a big part of the web.  “You could be, like, the Jonathan Coulton of cozy mysteries.”

“But my audience isn’t all that webby,” I pointed out.  “It’s entirely female, and I’m not really sure it’s necessarily the youngest, most tech savvy females.  My audience properly includes my mom.  My mom is never going to read a book online.”

“And here’s the real kicker.  I’d be risking not just this book, I’d be risking the entire series.  If my book didn’t take off for any reason, I’d never get it, or any of the sequels I intend to write, picked up by a traditional publisher.  I’m not saying I can’t come up with another idea.  I’m just saying, I’ve got plans I don’t want to torpedo on a whim.”

And yet… the idea still held some appeal.  It was new, it was sexy, and it involved higher royalties.  So when I got home, I looked up “serialized online novels.”  And it turns out that, yes, this is a thing that is done.  And is it successful?  Sometimes.

The really successful serialized books I found were in the horror genre, i.e., they had a primarily young, primarily male audience.  And it’s hard, honestly, for me to know how successful they really were.  Which brings up the whole question: what is success?  How do you define it?

I used to define it as having a book published that was critically acclaimed.  Now I couldn’t care less about that last clause (well, I could care less, just not a lot). But I think that for me success still entails a presence on a bookstore shelf.  Which probably means publication, traditional publication.

So that is what I’m pursuing.  But I’ll be honest: the idea of self-publication still does have its appeal.  On the one hand, everything would be on me: the editing, the marketing, et al.  And on the other hand, everything would be on me.  It would be my baby, start to finish.  I could get started today, and if I didn’t get my feet under me immediately that would be ok, because there’s no one I’d ever have to get approval from.

I have to say, I wasn’t prepared to love it as much as I do. It is, in a word, elegant. In eight words, it is like a computer that just works. No load times. No viruses. No maintenance. No confusion. And while it doesn’t do everything I want a computer to do, it does about 90%, all while being extremely portable.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The technology set is still sticking to their story that the iPad is nothing special. To me, this is like the academic and literary authors who said the Da Vinci Code was nothing special. They’re entitled to their opinion, but they aren’t really the target market.

To me, the target market is grandmas and students and people who don’t have the good fortune to be married to computer programmers. I’ve often wondered how such maritally disadvantaged people get by. Now I know: they can just buy an iPad.

But where the iPad really rocked me is by convincing me, in less than a day, of the coming e-book revolution. When I was a kid, the idea of a world without paper books would have been anathema to me. But now I’m ready to say it: The king is dead. Long live the king.

I’ve been reading plenty of online discussions defending the longevity of physical books. People love the feel of books, the smell of books, the look of books on a shelf. They love lending books, giving books as gifts, and taking them into the bathtub. They like giving them to their children without worrying about replacement costs.

Those are all excellent arguments, and I don’t disagree with any of them. But they don’t exactly counter the arguments that people like searching their books, and annotating their books, and traveling with books but without bulk. People like buying books, and starting to read them, all without leaving bed.

The two forms just offer different features, and I’m starting to think that the e-books have the better set. They’ll expand their capabilities, too; it won’t be long before we get gift codes and cheapie e-readers for kids.

And the most powerful argument of my youth, that people don’t enjoy reading on screens, has been overset. Not just by the new form factors of the Kindle and iPad, but also by the Web itself. Over the last ten years we have all gotten sort of used to doing a lot of our pleasure reading on screens.

It can’t be said that I’m ready for the revolution, exactly. I’m experiencing a bit of collection bifurcation anxiety at the moment. But ready or not, it’s happening. It might take ten years, or even twenty. But the war, as far as I’m concerned, is over.

I see a metric ton of red, black, and purple. A good assortment of chillingly beautiful, yet otherworldly faces. And confirmation that vampires aren’t just a thing in teen fiction anymore; they’re The Thing.

This, my friends, is the power of marketing, and of storytelling. Between them, Stephanie Meyer and her publisher have moved an entire generation. I predict we’ll be seeing ripples of this effect in adult fiction for years to come.