Last year I had the great experience of being "discovered" by a good-sized independent publisher that had the means and desire to put a book that I authored in bookstores. Lots and lots of bookstores, including all the big box stores, many independent bookshops, and even Target. Bookstores all over the world. Sounds like a dream come true, doesn't it?

Well, it was indeed a dream come true, but probably not exactly in the way you're thinking. And the things I learned from the experience were definitely not the things I expected to learn. Many of those things were lessons I wish I had been tipped off to by someone who had trod the road before I did.

Which is why I'd like to share them with you. My experiences are by no means universal, nor would every writer react to them the same way I did. But for what it's worth, here's what I would tell you if you and I were talking over coffees at your local Barnes & Noble.

Let's start with this: Fame is fleeting. Well, that's an old saw we've heard before, but it has new meaning when you have a successful book. For the very rare author, the book deal lands you high on bestseller lists and leads to more deals from your publisher that will employ you for the rest of your life. But in the vast majority of cases, even if your book sells well, your publisher may move on to the Next Big Thing and not want another title from you. And likewise, there are many things completely out of your control and your publisher's that can impact sales and popularity. From the economy to where bookstores elect to display your book to competition from similar titles, the publishing biz really is a crapshoot.

On the positive side, even if your book sells only modestly, you will have new fans and an established relationship with a publisher, neither of which are bad things! So I'm not saying a significant book deal should bring dismay (as if it possibly could!), only that you should have realistic expectations of what you can count on:

* You will have the delight of seeing your book on the shelves of bookstores.
* You will gain readers and get some nice fan mail.
* You will probably get to do book signings or other appearances/interviews (which may be good or bad news, depending on your personality).
* You will have the bragging rights of having a successful title (and anything over 5,000 copies sold is considered respectable).
* You'll be able to make a nice scrapbook including such things as bookstore posters, newspaper articles, reviews, and photos of your book in stores and yourself with fans.

These things are all good and fun! And they are definitely worth the hard work you'll put into your book and its promotion. Oh, yeah—let's talk about promotion.

You will be expected to put a lot of work into promoting your book, and you won't get any additional remuneration for it. This could mean such things as seeking out and participating in online discussions on relevant topies; courting reviews; doing interviews for print, radio and TV; doing appearances (which may involve significant travel); arranging and doing photos shoots; holding contests; blogging and contributing content to websites and/or social media outlets (e.g. Facebook, Twitter); and more. Some of this will be fun and exciting, some of it tiring or a chore, and none of it is guaranteed to sell a lot of books.

In other words, you will definitely earn your advance and royalties. While when you first saw your contract you were thrilled at seeing earning possibilities you never had before, I assure you it is not easy money. And if you see a possibility of living off your book sales, I recommend you pause before quitting your day job. There are a couple of main reasons why it is hard to be a full time professional author even when you have a "lucrative contract" in hand.

First of all, do not forget about that infamous clause known as "reserve against returns." Your publisher may place their entire print run in stores, but that doesn't mean you will get paid a percentage of all those sales. The publisher is entitled to a "reasonable reserve against returns," a guesstimate of the possible number of copies stores will not sell, and will return instead. This can be a very large percentage, and there is no point in an author arguing that it's too high.

It's very easy and inexpensive for bookstores to return books. All they pay is shipping and they get their money back from the publisher, and remember, with paperbacks all they need to ship back is the torn-off covers. Most stores will opt for this rather than leaving old titles taking up shelf space. And by old I mean books as new as six months out from publication.

Which leads to my second reason. The attention span of the publishing industry is very short (a lot like the television industry, really). If a book is not a hit right away, no one will keep it around to see if it finds an audience. So between these two factors, the wise author doesn't count her royalties until the check is in hand, particularly after the first year. It's fairly likely you will make some money, which beats the heck out of writing for nothing; however, even if it is a living wage it will probably not be one for long.

Now I realize my tone here has been pretty glum, so let me take a little brighter view. Let's say you walked into a Borders or a Books-a-Million store. You wave a magic wand and turn all the books on the shelves into their authors. Then you sort out those authors by their success. You will have a small corner where you can put the super-rich folks like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer. There won't be a lot of those. Then you'll have another area where you have authors successful enough to live modestly off their work. You'll be very surprised that some of these are pretty well-known people, downright famous ones even. And there will be surprisingly few of those, too.

The biggest group by far will be authors with day jobs. Many of these will be multi-published authors with lots of fans--truly legitimate talents. They can justly consider themselves professional writers and feel proud of their success. No one would accuse them of being posers in any way. It is no small accomplishment to be one of these people and anyone would be proud to be among them. But they are not full-time writers and they can't live off their royalties alone.

I wrote this column to dispel any illusions you may have about your aspiration to be a successful author, lest you discover one day that achieving your goal did not equate to achieving your goal at all. But what I really recommend is simply having an accurate understanding of what "being successful at writing" is. It's not making enough money to live on so you can write full time. It's not becoming famous. It's not finding yourself with guaranteed publication for the rest of your life.

It IS getting your book in the hands of a goodly number of readers and, in your own small way, changing their lives. And because that's what it is, I recommend that you always do the best work you can do, whether in the initial drafting, the long editing process, or the promotion of your book. If you do that, you won't have to measure your success in checks or sales figures. You can measure it by the impact your book had on the lives of lots of good people.

That, regardless of anything else, is always worthwhile.

Diana Laurence's popular new book, How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-by-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful was released in September. She is also the author of the Soulful Sex anthologies of erotic romance fiction, the vampire romance series Bloodchained (www.bloodchained.com), and many other titles. Visit her at www.dianalaurence.com or enjoy her blog at www. dianalaurence.blogspot.com.