"… the idea that somebody might choose not to publish—or might choose to publish in a small circulation magazine rather than a large circulation one—can look downright bizarre in the age of the blog and the tweet. The space between the writer and the reader is evaporating. Writing, initially a very private act, has the potential to become an overwhelmingly public act. I realize that this is part of the excitement of writing. I’ve experienced that excitement firsthand. But how a writer chooses to negotiate the transition between the privacy of writing and the publicness of reading will ultimately determine what kind of a writer he or she is. Writers who publish with small circulation magazines and tiny, non-commercial presses can sometimes achieve an astonishingly powerful presence, because they’ve acquired their readers gradually, incrementally, one by one. And the writer who begins with the big blastoff by the major New York publishing house can all too easily vanish. Nothing is for sure. The writer who holds back too much may well be a hopeless neurotic. But if there are risks involved in resisting the public, there are also dangers involved in running after the public. Nobody talks about those dangers anymore."

Alone, With Words