I got this awesome gift of a tissue box cover made to look like an Easter Island head. We tend to go easy on the paper products around here, but of course once one of these things enters your house everyone succumbs to a bad case of the snots. I'd take a photo of the tissue box, but we've basically sacked and pillaged it in the last day or so. You see, the Kleenex comes out of the nose and the effect has been lost.

Now it's sitting on my desk with pursed lips and a furrowed brow, somehow deepening my mistrust of the holidays. If you don't dig shopping, what the hell do you do with yourself this week besides suck the last drops from the wine cask bladder or drive your friends to the airport? It's all the ambivalent recreating going on, the closed-for-the-holidays, Boxing Day, overfed, squidgy feeling of existential limbo. Plus the cable went down leaving me with no internet and a snowy version of Lord of the Rings, which I adore--just not for the fourth time.

Once back online, I found a day-old from Maud Newton via Bookninja about authors moving from bigger houses to smaller ones.

Maud says:

Increasingly, even established writers like Kurt Vonnegut are looking beyond big-name publishers. They're signing small press deals that guarantee heightened publicity and higher royalties; in return the authors accept drastically reduced advances.

Prompted by a Wall Street Journal article from a couple of weeks ago, "The Hot New Advance: $0."

Vanguard says it is responding to the rapid-fire changes that have given the once-sleepy publishing world a distinctly casino-like atmosphere. Increasingly these days books have only a week or two to establish themselves as big hits; otherwise they're quickly washed to the back of the store.

I sort of agree with Ninja George:

If you're treated like afterthought dirt at even the largest press, you're still just afterthought dirt. Besides the increased production values and care given by smaller presses, you also get more personal attention from the people trying to sell books. They really care about what they're publishing and do nothing out of habit. This is the advantage of living so close to the edge. It keeps the senses sharp.

Maybe more than sort of, actually. If you're a writer--especially a rookie author--lured to a big house by a fat advance, then imagine how you might feel if your book doesn't perform like a thoroughbred. Like a supermodel with a bad skin rash, that's how. I've heard it said that American authors get two shots on goal. Up here we're a little behind the times. We supposedly get three shots.

I guess one could always make the case: if you're afterthought dirt, then can you really expect people to treat you like royalty?

I'm at a medium-sized house and I've received flowers from my publisher at least six times. In fact, they've got me so spoiled now, when I walk into a hotel room and there isn't at least a bouquet or some sort of fruit baskety thing on the credenza, I'm all: "So where the hell are my flowers?" And I actually once said this to the publisher: "Are you sure it's worth it to fly me to Toronto again?" And I haven't even paid off my advance yet.

A few years ago a certain editor had to basically threaten seppuku on a board room table to get a certain third novel through the gate after the author's sophomore novel was a sales donkey. Oh yeah, and I think that third novel went on to win this overseas prize that used to be called the Booker, which is now called the Man Booker, which if the trend continues, will soon be called the Man Prize. Now that's an award--The Man Prize. I want to win the Man Prize some day.

I can't see how it pays in the end for big houses to chase trends around the countryside in hopes of picking a winner. That's like trying to predict the weather for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.