From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious reviews, go on your book tour and move on from there.

I lived that story from the time I started sending immature novels to agents in 1976 through that day in August 1981 when an agent—a real New York agent!—consented to represent The Beaver Papers, and that day eight months later when an editor—a real New York editor!—decided to buy it, and on through my sale of The Undressing of America to FSG a couple of years ago. There were times I couldn't make that story work for me, and times my frustration with trying to please those New York gatekeepers nearly made me want to give up on books. But the story always brought me back. It had been the defining narrative of the writer's life since before I'd come along—in my twenties I liked anecdotes about Scott Fitzgerald's dealings with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins—and I assumed it would go on being so for the rest of my career and beyond. Even when I got into the National Lampoon and comic books and screenplays because I couldn't crash those gates in New York, I was still always trying to come up with book ideas that would interest agents and editors. And when I started to sell books more regularly, I said to myself, "This is it. I can live the story now."

Now, in just the last year, I've seen that story coming unraveled. It's still common, of course, and it may still be the story I live by for a while. When Undressing is done I'll send my agent a proposal for my next book and hope she sells it too to FSG, or some other big New York house. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the way. The book business is shrinking, probably faster than anyone wants to admit yet. The latest scuttlebutt is that Borders Books is running on debt and when its current loan comes due next April it will, unless there's some drastic upturn in retail book sales in the next few months, have to close its doors. The loss of an outlet that big will take more than a few publishers down with it. Meanwhile, purchases of electronic books are skyrocketing, and channels for distributing those are taking forms that look more iTunes or YouTube than any book publisher.

I've been hearing more writer friends than ever before talking about how unhappy they are with their agents and how badly they want to find an agent who knows how to sell them, and bit by bit we're all starting to piece together that it isn't the agents that are the problem, it's the market. Lately the hallway conversations at the Writers Grotto, where I share office space with about thirty other practitioners of the same trade, are less and less about how to find the right agent or publisher, and more and more about whether it makes sense to look into BookSource or Lulu or Scribd or the many other variants on what used to be the scorned netherworld of self publishing.

There's a part of me that likes the adventure of finding new ways to get my words read and new ways to make a living, a part of me that likes the idea of being free of the usual New York gatekeepers. And there's a part of me that's glad I still have irons in other fires, in case books don't turn out to be the main work of my autumn years after all. But there's a part of me that just grieves for the story. As infuriating as the tastes and whims and arbitrary demands of agents and editors could be, as much as I resented their control of the writer's life and wished there were other ways to sell my words, I guess I took more comfort than I ever knew from the continuity of the business, its rituals and rules, its punishments and triumphs. That continuity linked me to my younger self with his wild ideas of "being a writer" and to the long-gone writers who filled my imagination. Print-on-demand and digital downloads may well prove to be lucrative and liberating. They're just not the story I set out to tell with my life.