I’m old enough to remember when real estate was a good investment, America had a middle class, and people preferred ink to pixels when they sat down to read.

I spent the weekend at the annual conference of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. I pitched my two books and have five agents at least willing to take a look at them. So I should have come away ecstatic.

But it was bittersweet. Writers and agents are finally admitting out loud that the publishing industry as we know it is in its death throes. We will soon have little need for bookmarks or for flashlights to read under the covers. We will have to find something else in which to press our flowers.

Non-fiction is very comfortable with the electronic world. Google a subject, you’ll find the book. Fiction doesn’t fit the mold quite so readily in terms of being found, but with enough folding, stapling and mutilation, we can reshape it.

It will be wonderful for niche books or for any fiction that follows a different drummer. Let’s face it. What is still published in paper is primarily fantasy/sf, thriller, romance, young adult. Not bad … but not as diverse as devoted readers would like. Also it is the era of escapism – don’t count on many realistic endings any time soon.

And so we change direction, some of us as slowly as a battleship in the harbor. I will give it six months. If one of these agents does not think she can sell my stories, I will investigate self-publication. This was once a dirty word … this weekend, I heard two agents recommend it in their workshops.

What it means is that writers will have to be marketers. We’ll twitter and blog whether we want to or not. We’ll publish excerpts and sell online. We’ll hope to build up enough of an audience so that a real publisher will see that our efforts are worthy of their notice.

If I were younger (or at least less employed than now), I would start a new website. It would be a bookstore for ‘traditionally unpublished’ manuscripts and it would be funded/managed by a writers association. This site would have standards; it wouldn’t just be Uncle Eugene’s scrapbook online. It would employ editors … there are plenty looking for work.

The reader would be able to download a paper copy or an efile. She would know that the books were worthy contenders. Yes, there would be a percent cost for the writer … but the book would reward the investment in the long run. Because a minimum quantity would not be important, there would still be room for the oddball or non-mainstream fiction so many of us love.

It’s already being done with erotica, and maybe other categories, too. Amazon seems just a click away. Somebody way smarter than me will have to deal with the whole issue of pirating. That will be cause for another snit one day on the back nine.

But for now, I’m going to go curl up with a good computer.