There is someone on a certain Web site who I am not going to respond to there because I think they are probably a troll. If not a troll, then they are either naive about traditional publishing to the point of delusion or are someone who works in it and is cynical and manipulative to the extreme. They are making the "Don't you wish you were Tinkerbell?" argument, and they keep adding names: There's Fawn and Iridessa and Rosetta and Silvermist--don't you wish you were them?

Let's put aside the fact that there is probably NO best-selling author who was earning as much money as Amanda Hocking is at this point in her career--a career that, for the record, is all of 11 months old. (ETA: OK, I looked it up: Apparently one woman got a $2 million advance for a first novel--that was a record. Hocking is estimated to have earned at least $1 million by this point. So, yes, one made more. Were there two?) (EATA: And now Amanda Hocking has a $2 million advance and is ahead again.) There are are probably in this country more people who have made a million dollars by buying lottery tickets than there are people who have made a million dollars by writing fiction.

Don't you wish you were them?

Obviously what you should do is to stop working at your stupid job and plow every last dollar into lottery tickets. It's really that simple.