More Query Tips for Aspiring Authors

1. Everybody who gets published knows somebody on the inside. So be sure, in your query, to lie about knowing someone famous.


2. Before you pour a lot of time into writing a book, call some editors on the phone to ask if they think your idea is a bestseller.


3. Just because you're too busy to write a book doesn't mean you can't be an author. Hire an unpaid intern to write one for you.


4. Successful authors always write what they know. That's why most books are about alcoholism and depression.


5. Publishers like authors to be kind of ethnic, but not too ethnic. Try to work that angle, if you can.


6. Only submit to literary magazines with names that evoke wide-open, sun-dappled places where nobody wants to live.


7. You drink because you're lonely and life disappoints you. You write for the same reasons, and also because you're a narcissist.


8. No matter what your book is about, describe it as "dystopian" and "steampunk" in your query.


9. Your query should include at least three references to "social media."


10. Tell agents that your main love-interest would be a great movie role for Robert Pattinson. That's a big selling point.


11. The bestselling "Dexter" features a serial killer who only kills other serial killers. But what if there was series about a serial killer who only kills children? Edgy!


12. Why has there never been a book about a girl who has to choose between the affections of a straight-laced hunk and some kind of bad-boy?


13. There's no such thing as oversharing on the Internet. Tweet about your relationships, what you are having for lunch and, especially, all your form rejections.


14. Manuscripts should be interesting to look at. Use fun fonts like Comic Sans and italicize as much as possible.


15. Show you believe in your manuscript by assuring agents that it is a guaranteed bestseller which they'd be stupid to reject.


16. Agents love getting unsolicited full manuscripts. It saves them the trouble of requesting. Ship your unsolicited manuscripts by FedEx overnight, to show you are serious.

Who Wants To Be A Kindle Millionaire?

Self-publishing for e-readers has been very lucrative for a small a small group of authors in the last few months. However, for the vast majority of authors trying to sell books, self-publishing won't bring much exposure and it won't earn them much money.

The case-studies for self-publishing success are  J.A. Konrath and Amanda Hocking.  These two authors have been very good at self-promotion and their books are better than virtually all their self-published competition.  These authors distinguish themselves from commercially-published authors on the basis of price; their books cost $3 or less.

Amazon pays a 70% royalty to authors who self-publish on Kindle and sell their books for between $2.99 and $9.99.  By contrast, a hardcover royalty is usually 10-15% of the cover price and a mass-market royalty is usually 6-8% of the cover price.  That means a royalty on a $3 e-book is close to the same as an author earns selling a $15 hardcover (which has a $25 cover price).

$2.99 was a great opportunity when very few people were selling books in that price range.  This high royalty made it very easy for self-published authors to undercut the price of commercially-published books, because these authors were able to keep a much larger percentage of their readers' money.  This arrangement was also very beneficial for Amazon and BN because it attracted a huge cadre of value-conscious consumers to e-reader platforms.  However, Amanda Hocking's success story is now common knowledge, and everyone with an unpublished novel believes they can replicate that success.

These authors don't have the imprimatur of New York publishers.  They don't have authoritative praise from critics or famous authors.  They don't even have professionally-designed book covers.  So they use price to compete.

That means it's very hard for an unknown self-published author to price a book at $2.99 right now; most other self-published books that are ranked high in Kindle sales are priced at $0.99.  But if you sell a book at $0.99, you get only a 30% royalty, or 33 cents per copy.  It's very difficult to earn a substantial amount of money at that price, with that royalty, and the 70% royalty is no longer the game changer it seemed to be six months ago because most authors can't earn it.

E-book growth has been huge in the past few years, but we shouldn't overstate its market-share.  For a published author, bookstores are still roughly 70% of the market, and e-books are only about half of online sales.

That means that, while a $.99 cent self-published John Locke title may be selling as many e-books as the new Michael Connelly, the Connelly book is selling the same number in hardcover as it is in e-books on Amazon.  And brick and mortar bookstores represent nearly triple the total online sales.

Meanwhile, the attractive 70% royalty rate doesn't benefit Locke, because that rate only applies to books priced between $2.99 and $9.99.  An author of a bestselling hardcover like Connelly makes ten times Locke's per-copy royalty, and sells five times as many copies.

Locke claims he sells an e-book every ten seconds.  If that's true, he'll sell about three million copies in a year and he'll earn a million dollars.  That's ten times as many copies as a commercially published author has to sell to make the same money.

Self-publishing on Kindle, for most authors of fiction, is likely to become a stepping-stone to real publication rather than a viable business in its own right. The model going forward will most likely force authors to price at $0.99, in hopes of garnering significant sales that will attract an agent and publishers, and then a real book deal.
Nearly everyone who can publish with a commercial publisher goes that route, especially in fiction.  And there are good reasons why this is the case.

Updated Funny Article Links

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Sarah Palin Advances In Another Direction

Liberals Are Ruining The World of Warcraft

Novels Submitted For Consideration at a Literary Agency

Money-Saving Holiday Shopping Tips From The Wizard of Oz

Look at My Edgy T-Shirt

Business School Prepared Me to be the Final Boss of a Video Game

Sick of Politics As Usual? Vote For An Alligator!

At Science Creative Quarterly:

Tyrannosaurus Rex Just Wants to Be Loved

Querying Tips For Aspiring Writers

1. E-mails can get lost in the Internet. When you query, always call at least three times to verify that the agent received it.


2. Thank you notes are appropriate whenever you get a form-rejection or an out-of-office autoreply.  Always send several thank you notes, in case one gets lost in the Internet.  Call to make sure they arrive.


3. If you query by regular-mail, put some granulated sugar in the envelope. This lets the agent know that your book is a sweet read


4. Literary agents are busy people, and it can be hard to get them on the phone. Sometimes, you need to wait outside their houses.


5.  If you have an idea for a book, but you don't have the time to write it, you should call agents to see if they want to buy the proposal for someone else to write. But don't tell anyone what the idea is, because they might steal it.  Ask them to sign a nondisclosure agreement.


6. The rules of grammar aren't really rules. They are more like guidelines for people who like to think inside the box.


7.  If someone tells you your writing is incomprehensible, it is because they are too stupid to understand it.


8.  Always stand up for yourself. Let every craven dumbass who rejects you know that they've made a mistake they'll regret forever


9.  J.K. Rowling got, like, five rejections. You got fifty, so that means your work is ten times more groundbreaking and threatening to the bourgeois establishment!


10. If your book is about spies, you should write your query in code. Agents will have so much fun decrypting it. 


11.  Make sure to tell agents that you have registered your manuscript with the copyright office. That lets them know you're serious.


12.  Don't let anything stand between you and your dream of being an author. Especially not your learning disability or your functional illiteracy.


13.  Don't let anyone tell you that your writing is "bad." "Bad" is just a word, and great authors don't care at all about words.


14.  There is no such thing as a bad writer or a bad book. There are only bad agents, bad editors, bad bookstores, bad critics and bad readers.

15.  Every story is a sacred jewel that deserves to be treasured. Some jewels are transparently racist.  Some jewels are full of cliches and stilted dialog. Some jewels don't make any sense. But they're still jewels, dammit.


16.If you are writing about a common topic like vampires, try to put a unique twist on it. Like, maybe the vampire falls in love

Paltrow Pornos: A List

I like "head" and I like "box." Yet the end of "Se7en" doesn't arouse me.

1. Country Schlong

2. Iron Man-Bits

3. Shallow Hole

4. Sky Captain and the World of Fellatio

5. Se7en Inches

6. Shakespeare In Lust

7. The Talented Mr. Winky

8. The Pole-Bearer

9. The Royal Perineums

10. Great Ejaculations


Gwyneth was also in "Duets," "Hard Eight," "Austin Powers in
Goldmember," "Two Lovers" and "Bounce."  But those titles are already
so suffused with innuendo as to be essentially immune to parody.

Charlie Sheen is Winning

Adonis DNA. Blood of a tiger.

Charlie Sheen is the guy everyone is talking about lately.  Apparently, he's gone completely nuts, aided by unfathomable quantities of drugs. He's cavorting with multiple women simultaneously, some of whom are prostitutes and porn-stars.  He's made bizarre proclamations of his greatness and specialness on television and radio.

And Sheen's long-time publicist just quit as the star made the rounds on radio and TV talk shows to boast his unusual theories about addiction, and to spout his inspirational quotes about WINNING.

Porn-Star Capri Anderson, who Charlie Sheen had sex with

Everyone enjoys watching a celebrity meltdown, and Sheen's bizarre behavior has eclipsed even the continuing collapse of the once-promising Lindsay Lohan, who is about to go to prison for stealing jewelry.

But is Sheen really collapsing?  I'm not so sure.

For the past eight years, Charlie Sheen has been primarily occupied with a CBS television show called "Two and-a-Half Men."  This is a show about a womanizing bachelor, played by and based on Sheen, who has to change his life when his brother moves into his house and brings his kid.

 Denise Richards, an ex-wife Sheen had sex with.

"Two and-a-Half Men" is awful.  It's not funny.  It's not interesting.  It doesn't explore anything pressing.  It doesn't delve into the souls of its characters.  It just pitches shabby, uninspired one-liners at an indulgent studio audience, and manages to sanitize Sheen's persona enough that the audience can enjoy something a little transgressive without any risk that they might see anything inappropriate for children or offensive to mainstream sensibilities. 

This is the most popular show on network television, for reasons I can't understand.  This is a show that is so far from the interests of my desirable young educated white-male demographic I don't even know anyone who watches it. Critics hate the show.  If you ask me, the main difference between Charlie Sheen on TMZ or 20/20 and Charlie Sheen on "Two and-a-Half Men" is that the Sheen on TMZ says things that are funny.  

The show's creator, Chuck Lorre, is the mastermind behind a number of hit television shows that have been detested by critics and people like me.  He's responsible for "Dharma and Greg," "Mike and Molly," and "Big Bang Theory," or, as you might know them, "A Corporate Guy Marries a Hippie," "A Couple Falls In Love, But They're Fat," and "A Hot Chick Lives Near Some Science Nerds."   

Ex-wife Brooke Mueller. Guess why he's smiling

All these shows are awful, and all of them are hits.  I don't understand what strange alchemy allows Lorre to connect with audiences.  I don't understand why audiences watch Lorre's programs while disdaining shows like "Community," and "30 Rock" which are superior by any conceivable measure. Whatever people like, it certainly isn't the writing.  Lorre's shows are relentlessly unfunny.  His "vanity cards," which are "uncensored" personal screeds he flashes up briefly at the end of each episode, tend to be rambling and incoherent.  These brief glimpses are a window into the mind of a shitty writer.

Sheen's partnership with Lorre has been very remunerative for eight years; Sheen was the highest-paid actor on television.  But any TV show begins to wear out after a hundred and fifty episodes, and the end was in sight.  Sheen must have been considering his post "Men" future.

Historically, stars of hit sitcoms have struggled to reach those peaks again; that teary May-sweeps finale is like a gold watch at the end of a career, after which audiences move onto something new and relevant.  Maybe Charlie Sheen doesn't want to dodder off to be a TV elder-statesman.  I mean, not even Matt LeBlanc wants to be Matt LeBlanc anymore.

Better than a clip-show retrospective.

Maybe Charlie Sheen wants to be a movie star again.  He's been in films made by Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone and Spike Jonze, so maybe he doesn't want Chuck Lorre to be in the lead paragraph of his obituary. But hot film-directors aren't into multicamera sitcoms, and the CBS audience isn't driving the theater box-office.  The biggest risk to Charlie Sheen's future career isn't cocaine; it's Chuck Lorre.  And Sheen just quit that habit, cold-turkey.  

Sure, he's walking away from an enormous paycheck, but the casts of "Seinfeld" and "Friends" did the same thing.  All Sheen has done here is improve upon Seinfeld's "leave on a high-note" mantra.  He's walking out with a goddamn explosion behind him instead of a smattering of polite applause.

Yeah, this dude clearly needs to get his shit together.

Let's look at the real consequences of Sheen's meltdown:  he hasn't gotten himself arrested.  He hasn't caused himself any serious health problems.  He hasn't been photographed passed out in a car, or staggering around confused.

Instead, Sheen's process of unraveling has mostly been a parade of glamorous, enviable hedonism: suitcases full of cocaine, trashed suites at luxury hotels, private jets, beach houses, $3,000 call girls.  A man who spent the last eight years on CBS is suddenly edgy and dangerous again.  The star of a show people were getting sick of is suddenly the guy everyone wants to look at and talk about.  Charlie Sheen may not be blowing smoke when he says he's got a plan. 

Now, he's making the TV rounds, taking drug tests to prove that he's cleaned himself up with the power of his mind.  The stuff he's saying is a little bit kooky, but it's also endlessly quotable and kind of awesome.  Which is why, when Charlie Sheen signed up for Twitter, he picked up a million followers in less than 24 hours.  In the last week, Charlie Sheen has said more things I would laugh at, retweet or forward to my friends than Chuck Lorre has come up with in his entire unfunny, lowest-common-denominator career.  

Movie stars can be weird.  Movie stars can be crazy.  Movie stars survive stories about sex and drugs and debauchery.  What Hollywood can't handle is lameness, dullness and blandness.  Chuck Lorre and CBS have been sanitized Charlie Sheen into something that's palatable for sitcom viewers who find NBC too offensive.

The money has been good, and Sheen's spent almost a decade dining at that trough, but, if he wants to salvage his badass credentials, now is a good time for him to insult the chef and ditch the check.

I think that's what they call "Winning."  

Advertising for Dummies: Defending Mad Men against the NY Review of Books

"Dude. WTF?"

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, critic Daniel Mendelsohn attacks AMC’s acclaimed Mad Men, charging that it is an ultimately shallow program, concerned with more with its set decoration and wardrobe than with the political issues of the period it depicts. 

Mendelsohn argues that the show’s main appeal is that it indulges viewers in a sense of false superiority over the 1960’s-era characters, who spout the naiveties and unfashionable sentiments of their time, while simultaneously offering the fantasy of the period’s excesses.  He also complains that the wardrobe and accoutrements of the characters’ lifestyles are fetishized and then sold to consumers as marketing tie-ins.

There’s validity to Mendelsohn’s complaint that Mad Men sometimes takes easy shots at its character’s antiquated norms and ignorance of the adverse health-effects of smoking and drinking excessively (or while pregnant).  But the weaker moments of Mad Men are no worse or more frequent than those on the other beloved modern shows Mendelsohn cites as counterexamples.  For example, Battlestar Galactica, which Mendelsohn praises as “a kind of futuristic retelling of The Aeneid,” enraged its fans with a bizarre mystical denouement. 

Further, many of Mendelsohn’s criticisms seem to miss the point.  While Mad Men is a show set in the 1960’s, and a show which frequently evokes that era’s historical events and political issues, it’s not really about race, feminism or social change.  Mad Men is, rather, a show about secrets, about lies, and about the ethos of characters who keep secrets and tell lies.

 Mad Men’s focus on surfaces reinforces the show’s themes 

At the start of the first season, the show presents Don Draper, a handsome, rising ad-executive with a dapper wardrobe, a well-stocked bar in his boy’s club of an office, a neglected family at home in the suburbs, a two-pack-a-day habit and a series of mistresses.  Don thinks he’s on the way up, but the audience, with its historical perspective, knows that his moment is already passing.  He’s reliant and dependent upon an unjust system that’s about to be shattered.  This guy is on the way out. 

History, it seems, is going to hit this retrograde, racist chauvinist like a freight train.

And then, it doesn’t.

Instead, we learn that Don Draper is really Dick Whitman, a poor kid from a disadvantaged background who walked away from his past when a moment of battlefield confusion in Korea gave him an opportunity to steal a dead man’s name.

Draper's backstory, which Mendelsohn calls “rusty and unsubtle” reveals that this man is not the embodiment of mid-century white male privilege he appears to be.  Rather, he’s something potentially worse; an empty suit; a cipher; a man who is nothing but surface.  He stands for nothing, except possibly the perpetuation of the lies that animate him. 

This revelation posits a different fate for Don; he’s not going to be pilloried as the representation of his antiquated beliefs. He can shrug those off as easily as he strips out of his immaculately-tailored suit.  Don’s story is about the manufacture and maintenance of his perfect surface, and his efforts to conceal or excise aspects of himself that are inconsistent with it. He’s not going stand against the tide of history.  He’s going to yield to it; he’s in advertising, after all.  The show establishes that he’s reinvented himself before so it can concern itself with how he will do it again.

Don’s chameleon-like adaptability and his cynical method of survival is demonstrated at the end of season 3, when Don and his cohorts steal everything of value from their company, which is staid, wood-paneled and collapsing, and decamp to start a new firm with trippy artwork on the walls and stylish, mod furniture.

So, when Mendelsohn criticizes actor Jon Hamm’s portrayal of Draper as being “remarkably vacant,” maybe he’s missing the point.  It’s not the show’s failing that we are “constantly told about, but never really feel” Don’s “tormented interior.”  Don has no interior.  His ostensibly tormented internal life is just another charade.

This is the kind of character who will use photos of his beautiful, disintegrating family to land Kodak’s advertising account, and then he’ll go celebrate the coup with his mistress.  His greatest professional success comes when he invokes the idyllic childhood he never had and is failing to provide for his kids, so that he can sell GlowCoat floor wax.  Don Draper is so fake that his internal conflict is between the man he’s pretending to be and the man he wants to pretend to be.

Mad Men does not use its characters to explore issues; it uses issues to explore characters.

When one understands that the show is about characters who neglect or disregard underlying problems to focus on surfaces, the character, behaviors and storylines Mendelsohn targets for specific criticism fit elegantly into the whole. Don’s arc is the main narrative thrust of the show, and because Mad Men is a coherent story, the other characters’ stories tend to reinforce Don’s themes.

For example, Mendelsohn is puzzled at why Paul Kinsey, a member of Draper’s creative team and a white Princeton graduate, is living with a black supermarket check-out girl in New Jersey during the second season.   He feels that this relationship is insufficiently explained, and that the black girlfriend is a character who is “parachuted in” to raise an “issue-related subplot.”  In fact, this story is not about race or about the girlfriend, but about Kinsey, and it’s very clear and consistent within the thematic fabric of Mad Men.

Kinsey, following the show’s larger theme, is primarily concerned with surfaces.  He’s the kind of white guy who thinks he can become a progressive revolutionary by growing a beard and smoking a pipe.  Like Draper, whose identity is totally fabricated, Kinsey views his life as a story he tells about himself, and Kinsey wants to tell a story about the guy with the black girlfriend in 1963.  He’s not making some courageous stand for a kind of love society discourages; that’s just the dress-up game he’s playing.  He outfits himself with the props that allow him to live the narrative he’s fashioned for himself.  

When we see him parade this woman through the office, he’s grinning with smug satisfaction about how uncomfortable he’s making all the squares, and he’s completely oblivious or indifferent to how uncomfortable his girlfriend is.  Later on, Kinsey blows off his “principles” to further his career (unsuccessfully: Kinsey is ultimately abandoned at the old office with the old furniture when Draper defects at the end of Season 3).  But this story is a miniature retelling of the larger story of Don’s marriage.  Kinsey’s controversial interracial relationship is the same as Draper’s conventional marriage; these men are playing house with women they can’t really love and never try to understand.

Mendelsohn also expresses disappointment at the resolution of the Salvatore Romano character, a closeted homosexual who gets fired by Draper after he rebuffs a come-on from a powerful male client.  Mendelsohn is disappointed that this story turned out to be about caving to power, and Draper’s business ethics instead of the more obvious story “about gayness in the 1960s.”  But that’s because Mendelsohn expects the show to be about issues, and the show is about Draper and the people around him.

When Mendelsohn complains that Draper’s discovery of Romano making out with a bellboy on a business trip “weirdly… [has] no repercussions,” he demonstrates the depth of his misunderstanding.  Draper’s discovery of Romano’s homosexuality doesn’t create conflict; it draws an analogy between the two characters.   These are both lonely men who neglect their frustrated wives to conduct a series of trysts in hotel rooms, and Don Draper is the last character who would ever think about exposing somebody else’s secret double-life. 

It also seems likely that New York businessmen in the 1960’s would politely ignore obvious signs that a co-worker was secretly homosexual, just like they’d ignore a colleague’s alcoholism or extramarital affairs.  Any resolution to the Romano story that brought the issue of his sexuality to the forefront would be inconsistent with the story Mad Men is telling.  These characters are selfish, not sanctimonious, and they’ll protect their colleagues’ secrets to avoid unpleasantness or inconvenience, and out of fear their own secrets might be exposed.

Draper’s approach to “issues” is best exemplified in season 4, when he fakes a moral stand against cigarette advertising to save face after his company loses the tobacco account that provides the bulk of its business.  In typical Draper fashion, his cynical, self-serving maneuver is, on paper, a perfect facsimile of a genuine crisis of conscience.  He types it with a cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Mendelsohn’s complaints about the show’s melodrama and soapiness are baffling

While Mendelsohn alleges, without much discussion, that the show is poorly-written and acted, his most serious charge is that it resorts to soap-operatic “melodrama” of serially-raised and quickly-resolved personal crises rather than “drama” of “believable conflicts between personality and character.”

In general, the stories on Mad Men deal with two kinds of problems.  Professional hurdles are these characters’ specialties. Don is uniquely innovative as a creative talent, and he’s forceful and compelling when he pitches to clients.  He’s cagey, with a strong survival instinct, and he’s good at corporate politics as well. 

But for problems in his personal life, Don’s strategy is to ignore, deny and conceal.  In one Season 4 episode, Draper’s protégé, Peggy Olsen is astonished when Don emerges after an all-night bender in a pressed suit, without a hair out of place.  No underlying problems have been resolved, but the façade is flawless.

Other characters follow similar arcs, as with Romano’s closeted double-life, or a season 4 storyline when Don’s business partner attempted to hide the loss of the tobacco account from his colleagues. 

In season 1, Peggy Olsen’s burgeoning career is threatened when she gets pregnant after a fling with a co-worker.  Draper helps her conceal the child’s existence.  “This never happened,” he tells her.  “It will shock you how much it never happened.”

This is one of the “successive personal crises” that Mendelsohn complains about the show “serially (and often unbelievably) generating and resolving.”  But concealing the child isn’t really a resolution; it’s just a way of avoiding the problem.  Because, while Mendelsohn thinks he’s watching a show that should be “exploring [social issues] by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation,” Mad Men is, more often than not, a show about how people ignore or talk around the issues in order to avoid conflicts.

Mendelsohn’s criticisms are non-specific enough to apply to almost any show

A television show necessarily contains some padding and some repetition when compared to other narrative forms.  A novel is usually between 80,000 and 110,000 words long, and takes most readers six to eight hours to read.  A Hollywood film generally lasts between 90 and 150 minutes.   There are currently 52 episodes of Mad Men, roughly 45 minutes each, excluding commercials. 

That kind of length necessarily requires that, like most television shows, Mad Men functions as a series of interconnected stories rather than a single narrative.  Problems must be resolved over the course of those hours (and years), and new ones must replace them.   There’s an argument to be made against television as a medium for narrative; if Hamlet takes two hours to explore and resolve, and Gatsby requires only two-hundred pages, why do we need dozens of episodes to figure out what’s going on with Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Archie Bunker or Captain Kirk?

But Mendelsohn doesn’t make an argument against television; in fact, he says that we’re living in “a new golden age” of programming, citing The Sopranos, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Friday Night Lights, all great shows that could easily be tarred by Mendelsohn’s broad and non-specific complaints of melodrama, repetition and parachuted-characters.

Ultimately, while Mendelsohn’s feeling that Mad Men is glib, slick and cold may justify his subjective dislike for it, his arguments don’t have enough substance to justify a re-examination of the prevailing positive critical opinion. 

The Cost of an E-Book

The Washington Post has a blog entry breaking down the costs associated with e-books.  The argument is that "the costs of creating an e-book and a hardcover edition are similar."

While the writer here is correct that the material costs of a book are a small percentage of the price the reader pays at the register, he's wrong to conclude that this means an e-book isn't cheaper than a conventional book.

There are two kinds of costs associated with selling a product: fixed costs and marginal costs.  Fixed costs are the costs that are necessary to create the product, and that do not rise with the volume of units created; as volume rises, the fixed costs diminish on a per unit basis because they are distributed over more units.  Marginal costs are the costs associated with producing each additional unit.

So, for example, the cost of building an auto factory is a fixed cost of making cars, and the materials that are used to construct the car are marginal costs.  Similarly, editorial costs and publisher overhead are the fixed cost of producing a book.  Author royalties are marginal costs, because they're costs that are incurred per-book, but the advance before earn-out might be considered a fixed cost.  

The costs associated with making a book into a physical object; printing, binding, shipping, are marginal costs.  So, even if that's only two bucks per hardcover, that means an e-book should either be two bucks cheaper or two bucks more profitable.

Selling books through bookstores is also costly.  Bookstores have to rent spaces.  They have to hire staff to handle retail transactions.  In order to sell you a book, people at the bookstore have to take it out of the box, enter it into inventory, put it on the shelf, help you find it, and ring up your transaction.  What you pay at a bookstore tends to be four or five dollars more than the wholesale price, and that covers the store's costs and profit.

So, in addition to having zero marginal cost of production, the marginal cost of selling an e-book drops to zero as well; if listing a book on Amazon's site and running the back-end functions necessary to get the file to your Kindle were costly, then Amazon's robust offerings of free or very cheap e-book content would be a giant money-losing operation.  If listing products on Amazon was costly, then it would be extremely burdensome for the site to list tens of thousands of self-published and vanity published books that sell nearly zero copies.

So Amazon has no cost or risk that justifies the $3.30 profit that's built into the Post blogger's analysis.  With no marginal cost and minimal costs associated with listing an item, Amazon can profitably sell books at a very small markup, or by taking a small cut to act as the conduit for books sold on the agency-model by publishers.

It's not unreasonable to think that publishers could sell an e-book for $5-6 less than the hardcover price and still make the same profit.

If Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote for TMZ

In Xanadu did Charlie Sheen

  A stately hooker-dome decree:

  Where both his sacred nostrils, ran

  Through cocaine measureless to man

  He smoked it constantly.                                            

  So twice five girls he kept around

  With big fake breasts and asses round:

  And here were crack-pipes packed with rocks for thrills,

  Which set so much white and noxious smoke a-free;

  And here’s the deluxe home-theater where he chills,                         

  And watches hours and hours of pornography.