Angels scream for you. No, seriously. You, the compromised artist, are the highest target of a seraph’s screeching, sobbing rage. Fuck displaced Haitians. Fuck crack babies. Fuck African AIDS statistics. Fuck the forgotten children of the Mujahideen caught between Taliban tyranny and NATO bullets. The banshee tears of every heavenly choir are spilt and sung and shrieked solely for your pain and pocket book.

And if you buy that, I’ll tell you another.

First, to recap: Macmillangate is over. Amazon caved like sun-warped flan. Buy buttons have been restored. John Scalzi called for author support. Michael Stackpole called for...I honestly don’t know. I think he wants you off his lawn. Maybe. Something. The only position I took was not using the occasion to push your own horseshit agenda. I also went out and bought a copy of 7th Son by J.C. Hutchins because much like my friend Hutch I place more value on action than one more asshole author gas-bagging on either side of the fence. But now I’m broke, so gas is all I have left.

The issue is far from resolved. Lines are being drawn in the silicon. Publishers, booksellers, authors, all want their hands in the clay when it comes to setting prices on electronic/digital copies of novels and non-fiction works. We ride self-interest like junkies ride the white pony. But what I both dig and revile most is perhaps the biggest existential byproduct of this whole argument. Because when you take a blow torch to its fatty layers and scour them down to the bone what gleams back at you is a seemingly simple, utterly complex question.

What’s a good story worth?

The ardent eBook consumer wants it cheap. They feel that somehow they are a higher form of reader, a new evolutionary being that has shaken loose all corporeal constraints and transcended material concepts like money. Others are just products of their raising, as it were. They are children of the information age. “IT’S ON THE INTERNET. WHY IS IT NOT FREE?” the debutants of the digital cry.

Arguing about the precise value of art is like arguing about the nature of God. But I do have a demand. Just one. It’s a simple demand. It’s non-negotiable. It is my gun-to-the-head-of-the-hostage, I’ve-got-Patty-Hearst’s-fine-white-jailbat-ass-locked-in-my-closet, Dennis-Hopper-is-on-coke-again-and-he-has-a-pop-quiz-for-you-hotshot demand.

I demand you pay me for my time.

It’s not about overhead. I can kill a hobo or a hooker and bind a book with their skin for pennies. A novel represents months of work, in some cases years. More time is burnt shopping it, selling it, and preparing it for publication. And if you are publishing in the mainstream, as prolific as you may be, the most you can hope for is to see a new book in print once a year. That’s it. You’ve got a few hundred pages to make your nut. If you get really lucky your books will keep selling past their “prime” and keep earning for you, but on the whole you will only be as liquid as your last advance. And if you don’t show positive returns it very well may be your last advance.

I love books. I’ll keep lugging my favorites around with me until the pages disintegrate. But they’re going. It’s not happening today, or tomorrow, or with the next shiny new toy Apple or Amazon comes out with. It may not happen within my career, or the career of the Albanian dwarf protégé into whom I eventually pour all of my wisdom and experience and knowledge.

But they are going.

It’s inevitable. It’s no different than stone tablets or parchment and quills. And that is when, upon the foundations lain today, we will either erect a golden palace of wisdom or a ten-dollar fucky/sucky whorehouse. Knowing American culture and the human race as I do, I’m banking on whorehouse. Imagine a marketplace where you have to sell six-to-seven times as many copies to make the same money. It’s impossible.

I prophesize a great purging. If you can’t move 100,000 digital copies out of the gate you will be of no use to the New York-based publishing industry. Only the author with the broadest mass appeal, with the most rabid, infectious, widespread fanbase will survive to make a living in this most possible of futures. That is scary, for the cream does not, in fact, always rise to the top. In this industry it’s more often like shit floats. I’m willing to go head-to-head against any swinging dick packing Microsoft Word and a copy of The Elements of Style in terms of valid, marketable storytelling. But staking my future on the mass audience, the Michael Bay audience, is dicey. He who builds on the people builds on mud.

The beefy tops of this business will tell you if you can’t hack it you hit the fucking bricks, regardless of what the market will bear, now or in the future. Personally, I see a distinct difference between popular authors and great authors. In fact, most authors are their own niche market and always have been. In a world gone mad, a novelist whose readership are willing to consume 10,000-20,000 copies of their new book won’t be able to scrape out even the most modest living. That’s when great work finally gets a seat on the train for that last ride.

The precedents set today will define an industry in the world of tomorrow (when giant iPads stalk the earth like Death displaying all your sins in an easily referenced touch-based index). When you get a reader used to the tit and then take it away they become extremely belligerent. They also make this excruciating high-pitched whine, much like a piglet; a greedy, entitled, obscenely cheap piglet. Whether we’re hocking words on a page or on a screen, the time investment quotient remains a constant on the part of the author.

Don’t devalue that. A good story is worth more than the sum of pages and ink and the gas to get you to a bookstore. A great story, a great work, something worth keeping for our core as a civilization, is worth feeding the author who writes it regardless of how it’s published.

I’ll see you in the future.