I have heard variations of this story quite a bit (two members of my family nurse on-again-off-again dreams of going into the business, and I read a lot). The industry is very, very overdependent on outdated, inefficient methods of moving books because it is the only thing they think they have -- basically, there are no options between getting approved by kingmakers like Oprah or the New York Times and doing book tours to have the author hand books to readers directly.

This is insane. Can you imagine how little work I'd get done if, after being rejected by the New York Times, my marketing effort was going to little collections of teachers, giving a speech, and trying to persuade them to play bingo with their classes? And I make a lot more off a marginal sale than the average midlist author does.

Thankfully, some authors are finally starting to get clueful. They're doing things like having a blog and an email list. (I will bet you any amount of money that the anonymous author cannot identify her hard-core fans by name or contact them in any way. What the heck. Screw the New York Times, these are the people who you should be most worried about getting your next book to because you know they will love it and tell everyone they know about it.)

I think that is pretty much the way forward for midlist authors: do your own marketing, talk directly to your readers, cut out the middlemen wherever possible. Midlist authors don't make a lot of money or sell a lot of books in the status quo. You can probably do better just being a micro-celebrity on the Internet: beloved by the "thousand true fans" that know and talk to you, and selling to folks a bit wider than that social circle.

It beats sitting at the kitchen table waiting for rejection letters.