I have pretty much always known that I wanted to be a writer. Having my first short story “published” in ’78 was what clinched it: The Magic Swingset—a piece I’d labored over for two weeks, illustrated and painstakingly copied onto yellow legal paper, was stapled onto the wall outside the principal’s office, complete with broody photo of 12-year-old self. Everything about the experience seemed to suit me; long hours in soothing solitude, lost (with license, for a change) in my own thoughts. Meetings with admiring editors–or in this case, teachers.

“The Internet,” I was told bluntly, when I asked about cyber-marketing, “isn’t part of our publishing model.”

That magic moment when I—a lone bookworm in a family oriented towards finance—not only read the finished product, but then got to see other people read it, and react. True, my parents voiced doubts about a career in the arts; they were clearly worried, already, about setting their spacey, pre-teen daughter free to make her way in the real world. Some of the more direct reactions were also less than appreciative: Tommy Windle dismissed the story as “dorky.” Which struck me as self-evident; I was, after all, a dork.

But all that really didn’t matter. What mattered was that I’d found a process that felt intrinsically right. I imagined doing it for the rest of my life. And three decades later, much of my writing life is more or less as I imagined it would be. I still love the long hours spent hunched over my laptop, the enjoyable lunches with mentors, agents and editors. The moment I held my first novel–The Painter from Shanghai—was nothing short of miraculous, thanks to the fabulous job my publisher did with the book’s presentation. I’ve loved, too, hearing from the reviewers and readers, none of whom to date have called it dorky (though one young critic did call it “hyperbolic”).

What’s different from my childhood imaginings is the enormous work it has taken simply to get people—enough people—to read it. Or at least, read about it. Especially online.

I’ll say it up front: I’m a novelist, not a blogger. My clothes might be hip (a latent backlash against years trapped in dorkdom). But my writing, most definitely, is not. It sprawls lazily across the pages; is reined-in and rewritten, cut and sculpted and pondered, and then cut some more. I love the freedom the novel as a literary form offers for this process; months or years to muse and daydream and refine, the deadline usually far-off, the readership misty, unformed. And yet, these days, it seems, the bulk of my time goes into—well, blogs. (Blogs. The very word would have been enough to make my sixth-grade self giggle. It sounds like a name from The Muppet Show.) These short, sharp little sites and pieces can be vastly engaging and informative, and I’ve found several that I truly love. That said, they feel like the very antithesis of the way I write; tight deadlines, immediate readerships. Instantaneous—at times cacaphoneous—response.

Still, in the past four months I’ve gone from blogging ignoramus (I’ll admit it; in 2007 I wasn’t ever quite certain what a blog was) to someone if not proficient then certainly functional; kind of like my mom with her VCR. I can do the basics: daisy-chain from blog to blog, track authorities, price ads. On occasion I’ve even designed my own banner. I email scores of bloggers, praising their efforts and their wit, then (more self-deprecatingly, of course,) praising Painter. Perhaps one in four will write back to me, interested in seeing a book. Off goes the book. Back online go I. I also blog in the verb sense. As in, when asked, I eagerly offer up blogs like this one, which attempt (obviously, with very mixed results) to adopt the hip quips and savvy, “I could care less that I’m so smart” tone that all good bloggers seem to have. Half the time I feel like a mom at a nightclub; overdressed, way too old to be here.

But I’m also aware—as my 12-year-old self was not–of the realities of the post-millenium publishing world. I know that the Internet can spread word of a new novel in a way traditional ads and book tours can’t. And that readers today—or at least, many of them—have come to expect the dimensionality only the Web offers: the instant gratification of seeing a book’s sales-rank and popularity, both in numbers and reader comments. Of reading reviews in twenty-six different languages. Of Googling an author to see what else she’s written or posted or perhaps just to see what she looks like. And then, of course, blogging about it. I also know this particular, quivering tip of the publicity frontier is one that most publishers—at least traditional ones—have not yet crossed into. It was fact made clear to me early on in the publishing process; not only by mentors and fellow writers, but–with disarming honesty–by publishers themselves. “The Internet,” I was told bluntly, when I asked about cyber-marketing, “isn’t part of our publishing model.” That doesn’t mean that publishers aren’t aware of or don’t care about the Internet’s power and scope. It simply means that—as with so much else in a hopelessly understaffed, underpaid and overwhelmed industry (built on a cyber-free business model that—like Keynsian economics—makes no sense in real life) it remains an unproven region, one that most publishers simply don’t have the time, expertise or money to explore.

Which leaves it up to us—the authors (like me), some of whom (also like me) leap eagerly in to fill the gap. Why do we do it, when we’re clearly so ill-equipped to do it, and really (like me) should be working on our next novels?

In part, it is due to the vicious cycle of authordom; something that—like ARA (Amazon Ranking Addiction) and pyramid-scheme MFA programs and the uncorruptible, absolute power that is Oprah—my preteen self could also never have imagined. But the truth is this: if you want to write your next book, your first book has to sell. If you want it to sell, in today’s world, you have to help.

And while no one yet knows quite how much, the Internet does help—I can attest to that. When I take out a set of blog-ads, my Amazon and B&N rankings jump. When one of my blog reviews makes it to the Huff Post and Yahoo news, they jump more. When Barnes and Noble puts me on the front-page of their “recommended books” site as a Discovery author, the number there jumps too. Of course, no one—apart from Amazon and B&N themselves– knows precisely how many sales that represents. But, absent having the book stapled to a public wall somewhere where I can actually count the people who read me, it’s the best proof I’ve got I am selling; so that–when I finally stop blogging–I can get to work on the next novel, in good faith.

Of course, there are other, more vicarious gratifications in the blogging world for an oldish, first-time author like myself. Like many, I can’t resist the autoerotic urge to self-Google, though I’m worried it’s hurting my eyesight… But all the stuff I find! The Shropshire County Council (is that in England?) is recommending my book to readers! NYPL has 87 holds on it today! A teenager in Singapore is putting off her homework to read Painter a little longer (“going to stop procrastinating SOON, I hope” she writes)! Of course another S’pore teen (a lot of Painter chatter in Singapore, for some reason) reports bleakly:“I was force to buy a story book cos I always nv read books. So I randomly choose a book. Its tittled: the painter of shanghai….its so thick! I dun think I can finish it in a year….” This particular blog-entry is titled “Hi, Bitch.” I would venture its author thinks reading is for dorks…….Which, I suppose, sort of brings me back full-circle. It’s not quite Tommy Windle. But it’s close. In the end, then, maybe things aren’t so very different from how I imagined them after all. Not, at least, if one pictures the Internet as a very, very long wall, with my novel stapled up on it, in a school full of student bloggers. (In Singapore.)

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve now spent two days on a blog while my next novel languishes—achingly unwritten—in my bookbag. Perhaps I, too, should stop procrastinating. SOON. After all, at some point books—not unlike spacey preteen daughters—must be released to make their own way. In both the cyberworld, and the real one.

You can find Jennifer Epstein’s website here. And buy her book (c’mon you know you want to!) here.

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Nearly a decade ago, when I haltingly embarked on the project that would become The Painter from Shanghai, I was nothing if not flattered when people in my writing workshop immediately began comparing my novel to Memoirs of a Geisha. Well, actually, I was something else—mainly, surprised. Like most of the apparent universe, Iâ€d devoured Arthur Goldenâ€s runaway bestseller (my husband still refers to that weekend as “the time Jenn left me for the geisha”). But Painter struck me as a completely different endeavor. For one thing, it was set in China, a country Iâ€d spent well over two years living and traveling in, and one I found radically different from Japan (where Iâ€d lived for five). In fact, my first reaction upon detraining at Guangzhou Station in 1986 was a stunned astonishment: apart from Chinese characters (appropriated by Japan from China thousands of years ago, and somewhat awkwardly adapted to its own, radically different language), the Middle Kingdom seemed to share almost nothing with itâ€s smaller, more homogeneous neighbor. It was loud, rude, exuberant; cluttered, colorful, vividly alive. Watching Chinese citizens barrel across streets against the light, laugh and curse musically on the street and jostle good-naturedly in a ticket line, I—who had just spent a quiet year with a family in Kyoto–felt like a schoolchild let out to recess.

Of course, the fact stands that my novel–like Arthur Goldenâ€s–begins in a brothel. Unlike Memoirs, though, it isnâ€t centered there. At heart, The Painter from Shanghai is less about prostitution than cultural mergings and clashings, and art, and a painterâ€s pain-filled but ultimately triumphant quest for self-realization. As I imagined her, Pan Yuliang—the real-life figure at its center–was a woman who battled fiercely against preset gender roles and aesthetic norms, during a uniquely tumultuous moment in Chinese history. So while I—like Golden–tried to take an unflinching look at the daily degradations and misogyny inherent in a life of prostitution (and it should be noted somewhere that a geisha is far more than a prostitute—as anyone who has read Memoirs should know) I was far less interested in the brothel itself than the fierce individualism and artistic sensibilities that (I imagined) separated Yuliang from her coworkers there—the same qualities that would eventually drive her transformation into one of Chinaâ€s most controversial and daring modern artists. And then, there was the writing. As Iâ€ve said, I thoroughly enjoyed Memoirs, and certainly admired Goldenâ€s clear, elegant writing style. For my own part, though, I was trying for something very different; something more experimental; something that played with words and rhythm and image in a way that (hopefully) evoked–if not Joyce or Woolf–then at least the impressionistic daring of Pan Yuliangâ€s own paintbrush.

For all my efforts, though, my book continued to be compared with Memoirs. People to whom I described the project congratulated me beamingly, as though Iâ€d taken on the Geisha sequel. Writing instructors glowingly referenced it in recommendations they wrote for me. Well-meaning friends pointed out where Memoirs had failed them, as though to caution me of the same pitfalls. Rather than fight the trend, I ultimately opted to embrace it, mentioning the comparison preemptively in agent queries. The responses I got went in two directions: at least one agent (Iâ€m fairly sure) didnâ€t even read the manuscript before offering me her unqualified and enthusiastic services. Several others declined with polite (if unwritten) yawns, implying one Asian prostitute was quite enough.

The shadow of Memoirs reached, in fact, well beyond the point that a fabulous agent (who did read the book) took me on and promptly sold it to eleven publishers, both here and abroad. I have no way of knowing how many of these sales were on the strength of the kiss of Geishaâ€s kiss. I do know, however, that my two English-language publishers both agreed that marketing it after Memoirs made sense. Nortonâ€s catalogue introduces Painter matter-of-factly as “evocative of Memoirs of a Geisha,” a description that is now writ, in bold, on the bookâ€s Amazon page. Penguin went a step further, putting a round, red sticker on their (quite lovely) trade paperbackâ€s cover that cheerily notes: “If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, youâ€ll love this!”

“Donâ€t we want the book to be seen—well, on its own terms?” I asked my agent, hesitantly. But it was hard to argue with the common logic: Memoirs was a book people knew, loved and identified with. Referring to it offered an immediate hook to readers. Hooked readers, as everyone knows, leads to bagged revenue. And after seven years without an income, two college tuitions to save for and two years at a pricey writing program to pay off, income was something I couldnâ€t afford to eschew.

All this, by the way, is a quandary faced by other books as well; my friend Charlie Leerhsonâ€s terrific new biography, for example. Crazy Good—based on the astonishing true story of Dan Patch, a former grocery-cart horse who “was the most significant pop-culture figure in the first half of the 20th century”– labored under the inevitable comparisons to Seabiscuit before finally getting picked up by Simon and Schuster. Charlie acknowledges that such automatic comparisons “give reviewers something to wrap their minds around, and thus can get you noticed and remembered.” But on the whole, he says, he considers it disadvantageous.

As far as the Memoirs hook goes, my own views are still unformed. Certainly, the comparison was picked up by reviewers—to mixed effect: Library Journal signed off its very nice, starred review by noting that “fans of Arthur Goldenâ€s Memoirs…will enjoy this engrossing story of a woman forced to choose between following her heart and pursuing her art.” Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, began its rather sniffy short take like this: “More than a decade after Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden’s best-seller still inspires imitators like The Painter From Shanghai….”

Happily for me, though, the New York Times not only loved the book, calling it “luminous”, “vivid,” “an irresistible story” but also refrained form making any literary references at all. Even more gratifyingly in some ways was the South China Morning Post, which compared my book to a “cross between Zhang Yimouâ€s movies and Chen Yifeiâ€s oil paintings.” Granted, this may not hook American readers, most of whom probably couldnâ€t pronounce Zhang and Chengâ€s names, much less get the reference. But for me, itâ€s worth at least a few sales.

In the end, while itâ€s been interesting to have traveled this far with a geisha, I do hope weâ€ll part ways at some point—even though (Iâ€ll admit it) I plan to set my next novel in Tokyo. During World War. I do, however, plan to avoid the brothels. And if the book is pegged to anything this time around, I hope itâ€s War and Peace.

You can find Jennifer Epstein’s website here. And buy her book (c’mon you know you want to!) here.

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