Publishing on Kindle is a hot and heady impulse not unlike waking up one morning with a wild hare to go on American Idol. Everybody in America, it seems, fancies himself as either an undiscovered singing talent or a brilliant but as yet unknown writing genius. Or a Republican presidential candidate.

Recently I posted four of my "backlist" novels on Amazon Kindle. Those titles are: CONJURER'S OATH, DEVIL'S TOLL, WICKED KING DICK and PRIVATE SHOWINGS.  Kindle Books offers a publicity deal where any author enrolled in the Kindle Select program (in which one grants Kindle a 90-day exclusive) can list his or her books free of charge for promotional purposes for up to five days per ninety-day period. So, having nothing to lose, I offered all four as freebies.

I doubt my own humbling experience was unique. Publishing ebooks on Kindle proved relatively easy. Perhaps too easy. For just as the unsuspected horde of would-be novelists began actually writing those novels and exploded onto the scene with the advent of the word processor and personal computer, there are now in excess of 1.2 million books currently listed on Kindle Books. I am willing to assume that, given the strictures—and I DO mean strictures—of traditional publishing which prevailed until a very few years ago, the overwhelming majority of those Kindle authors would have had no hope of ever seeing their novels advance to the stage of being available to the public for sale or giveaway were it not for the technological breakthrough provided by Amazon. Orphaned and agentless, those authors' labors of love and the tangible fruits of their artistic inspirations would have taken their inevitable course in days gone by: FedEx to slush pile to shredder, like Tinker to Evers to Chance.

It's convenient to stroll down the primrose path of such negative thinking. The problem is, that path leads to subtle self-deception. As Jules Feiffer once observed, we must never let our enemies define us. I might add a corollary to Mr. Feiffer's rule: we must never view ourselves, let alone our written works, as dime-a-dozen.

If you find yourself tempted to wander down the path that leads to surrender and despair, my advice is that you first consider those novels that Amazon freeloaders' choices ranked above yours. Utilize the "look inside" function and browse around for a while. You may find a certain mean-spirited consolation in the fact that, while some novels rated higher than your own may be excellent indeed, many if not most of the rest are trite, cliché-ridden pieces of excrement, replete with errors of grammar, diction and syntax like undigested kernels of corn.

Lest the reader precipitously accuse me of envy or sour grapes, I rush to add that I truly do not bear any of these other authors the least bit of ill will. Amazon's ranking is no different from the selective service lottery those of my generation are unfortunate enough to remember from the Vietnam era. Amazon is simply following the numbers. Those numbers don't lie. The question is, what truths do they tell?

Dr. Samuel Johnson was once asked what he thought of supporting a cause he knew to be bad. Johnson replied: "Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad until the judge determines it. I have said that you are to state facts fairly; so that your thinking, or what you call knowing, a cause to be bad, must be from reasoning, must be from your supposing your arguments to be weak and inconclusive. But, Sir, that is not enough. An argument which does not convince yourself, may convince the Judge to which you urge it; and if it does convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong and he is right. It is his business to judge; and you are not to be confident in your own opinion that a cause is bad, but to say all you can for your client, and then hear the Judge's opinion." Substitute the word "public" for the word "judge" and you have it all.

Consider my own experience: out of the quartet of novels I have posted on Kindle, in my own opinion PRIVATE SHOWINGS is by far the weakest. It was written almost fourteen years ago at a time when I was first teaching myself to write novels using my own combination of the hit-or-miss method and the wag system. My wife and I sat around and spitballed ideas of story and character at each other and if we thought something belonged in the book, in it went. She wanted me to write a romance and so I did, albeit a cross-genre jabberwock of a romance. In other words, the book is about as close to a piece of shit as I would ever confess to writing. The book was such an embarrassment to me that at first I seriously considered withholding it from the list of books I eventually decided to publish on Kindle. Imagine my astonishment when downloads of PRIVATE SHOWINGS exceeded the total downloads of all three of my other novels combined by a margin of nearly two to one, consistently leading downloads of my other books by similar margins in North America, the UK and Germany. I regard those numbers as a baffling statistical puzzlement.

Perhaps the mere fact that PRIVATE SHOWINGS falls in the romance category explains its sales leadership over all my other Kindle books. Maybe the book's suggestive, even salacious title contributed to its popularity. In any event, there's rare exhilaration in seeing one's novel rated higher than free Kindle offerings by established romance authors, many of whom have penned NYT and international bestsellers.

Maybe my judgment is no good when it comes to popular fiction markets. Maybe I lack that Broadway producer instinct of knowing what the public wants. Apparently it's not the same sixth sense as knowing what a jury will do. I thank each and every one of you who took the time and trouble to download one of my novels and wish you many hours of reading pleasure. And a few five-star ratings and rave reviews would be more than welcome, deserved or not. Who's to say?