Marketing is everything today. How we choose what to write about. Where we learn about query letters to agents. Where we find our agents. How we market our books to editors, and how to sell our books to the public. Sell, sell, sell. As if the world of the written word were no different from the automobile industry or product placement at Kmart. And certainly for the professional writer, marketing what we write is part of the game, but it's not the whole show, and it ought not to be even the strongest motivation. I've spoken with agents and editors who seem to me to be little more than salespeople themselves, newly arrived in the world of NY publishing from a previous career at GM or the shoe department at Saks. Books are more than commodities. They are expressions of the human spirit, our hearts and souls, the muse of the world attempting through the medium of language to communicate something valuable, even deathless. Sure, we can write to entertain and debate, to enthrall and infuriate, to frighten and fascinate. Yet from Homer to Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain to Joyce, Faulkner, Mailer, Styron, and even Stephen King, there is a voice speaking to us that means more than book sales and internet hits. We write to prove we were here, that we listened and lived among each other and left something behind for those who follow. Every poem, essay, novel and play is a message in a bottle cast out onto that great sea hoping to be discovered. We want to be read, but more than that, we want to write. And so we do.