Dear Publisher,

Thank you for your email of yesterday morning, just after the delicate petals of the bright flowers had opened. Needless to say, I was quite shocked by the suggestions it contained. Frankly, as an author who has been nothing but an asset to your house for many years, I expected better treatment.

So it’s come to this, eh? If being treated as a reliable workhorse, whose books consistently dozens of copies (yes, yes, I know — but wait until they start to teach them in college!) wasn’t enough, you now apparently think that I am also an idiot.

I accepted the publication of trade-paperbacks as a necessary compromise, the lipstick of whoredom that allows the mouth upon which it sits to partake of its required, more wholesome sustenance. Alas! This, capitulation has obviously only whetted your appetite for my degradation, as you now seem to require a further slide down the razorblade.

This will not stand, I am happy to report. I can only bend so far, before I am bound to snap back to an upright position, tall and proud. Insist all you like — it’s obvious to me that you won’t be satisfied until my mouth is full of my own toes.

Let me remind you, I am a writer of books. Let me also remind you that books are devices made from paper, with protective, rigid covers — which are further protected by dust jackets; a more dignified item of apparel for a book there is not.

Books with floppy paper covers, are barely — just barely — allowed to be categorized by that word. And the smaller, weaker, parodies of books, those kind that you find at the supermarket, should not even be considered real, lest one find one’s heart breaking.

To suggest, therefore, that I allow my words to be cruelly torn from their pages, converted in to some wet, steaming pile of electrons, and displayed on some half-literate boob’s magic slate device boggles my sensitive mind. If we accept that kind of talk, well, what will come next?

Did you know, for instance, that any ape can bash 150,000 words into a computer, and distribute the results? Is that a book, sir? Good gravy, what an insane notion!

If you wish to know how to separate the works of a genuine writer from the offal produced by his simulacra, here is a method that I’m sure you will understand: If you wished to murder a cretinous editor with the object in question, could you simply and elegantly bludgeon him to death, or would you require there to be the presence of a large puddle of water, a building with unsound wiring, and a large and convenient thunder-bolt? The former, of course, is far superior, and therefore must be the product of a real writer.

My sense of myself is far to fragile, too dependent upon the heft, girth, and width of my precious hard-shelled, acid-free children to accept publication in a format that any imbecile can also take part in. (It’s bad enough that I have to share shelf space with the likes of *** ****!) What if, when the meat is divorced from its carapace, people are unable to tell what a Big Important Writer I am? Not that I care what those dull know-nothings think, but what if?

Yours,

A Real-Life, Not Pretend Author