Last Friday morning, Marion Gropen reminded us that all publishing is a gamble, and that the "real" publishing companies can get things wrong just as easily as self-published authors do—the difference is, they have sufficient capital to weather the setbacks. That doesn't necessarily do the author any good, though. Consider, for example, the plight of Bob Eckstein, who told me that he wrote The History of the Snowman as an early step in "a five-year escape plan out of magazine freelancing." (It hasn't quite worked out that way, as he documented on his Freelancer's Lament blog.)

"I had a lot of breaks," Eckstein recounts: "A big supportive publishing house (Simon & Schuster), numerous TV & radio spots, etc. But my chance of getting out of the clutch of magazines became a long shot when it was decided that the initial print run of the book would be modest. So no matter how well the book sold I wasn't going to get rich from it—because of the nature of this particular book (color inserts, paper grade) a second print run is a four-week process." So when the marketing and publicity campaigns were so effective the first printing sold out faster than expected, bookstores didn't have copies during the crucial holiday shopping season. "So my dream of getting that oval driveway and hot tub probably came and went," Eckstein shrugs. "Back to freelance humor stories and showing up at the New Yorker pitching cartoons..." Which isn't to say that he's given up on the snowman angle entirely; he's just launched a new contest on the book's website for a snowman picture of the month ("o snowman porn, no steroids, no gambling and no ice-balls").