My novel Marshlands, the product of nearly five years of writing and revision, hits bookstores this week.

I’m incredibly proud of the book and optimistic that it’s going to be well received, but the truth is that a modern book launch is something of an anticlimax.

I’ve been preparing for it for months by writing essays and op-eds related to the novel, which is an allegory of the excesses of empire, but I predict that very little in my everyday life will change in the days and weeks to come.

Gone are the days when a publisher — even an excellent one like Farrar, Straus, and Giroux — will spring for a fancy book tour.

Not that the prospect of a book tour is the least bit enticing.

Unless you happen to be a Robert Gates or a Sarah Palin, book store events are likely to be humbling experiences. You worry: did they advertise it well? What can I say to keep my presentation fresh? Will anyone even show up?

Often, the worry is well founded.

Celebrity books are a growth area of publishing these days precisely because it’s so hard to drag people into a bookstore — if there’s even a bookstore to be found. Bricks and mortar bookstores are every bit an endangered species as authors of literary fiction.

Keeping an actual human being fed and housed while he travels from city to city is an expensive and tedious business. I don’t blame publishers for burying the traditional book tour. I’m all for its demise. The prospect of leaving home and hearth for weeks at a time doesn’t appeal to me in any way. Book tours are about salesmanship, something I’m pretty bad at. I’d much rather be working on the next book than trying to convince people of the merits of the last one.

So if the book tour is dead, what has taken its place? It turns out that modern book publicity is almost entirely of the virtual variety. Meaning, a book’s success or failure depends to a shocking degree on the vagaries of the Internet.

Yes, reviews in the traditional trade publications still matter. And yes, a well placed review in a major newspaper can really help. But more than ever, marketing a book depends on canny use of the Web.

To that end, a few months before the launch date, an author sits down with the publisher’s marketing team and develops a game plan for the launch. In my case, this meant sitting at an immaculate round table in a corner office with excellent views of the Manhattan skyline, and being given a stack of assignments.

Everyone agreed it would be an excellent idea if I spent the next several months working day and night on this essay or that article — unpaid, of course. Oh, and by the way, did I happen to know of anyone who might be interested in these pieces? An author’s personal connections can be very valuable, you know…

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Things started to go downhill as soon as I answered the question, “How many Twitter followers do you have?” with a blank stare.

For the record, I did volunteer to do anything I could to help Marshlands, and I’m very grateful to the excellent editors and marketing people at FSG, who are among the last holdouts in publishing who believe in the value of literature. It’s an honor to have their elegant three-fish logo on the spine of a beautiful hardcover they’ve spent so much time and energy bringing out.

But there’s something disconcerting about how much of the book’s fate will depend on anonymous reviews on Goodreads or Amazon. Anonymity encourages honesty, which is a plus, and one of the key reasons people trust these reviews; but it also unleashes some very bad behavior. People feel emboldened to say things on the Internet that they’d never in a million years tell an author to his face.

Very, very mean things!

For a taste of the kind of high-brow criticism an author can expect, try Googling “children’s authors read online reviews of their own work,” and watching the associated Youtube videos. The clips are funny and painful, and an excellent reminder that writers should either avoid reviews altogether or heavily gird their loins.

Popularity contests, which is what a lot of the media platforms built around publishing have become, have their place. Everyone has an opinion and the right to express it.

This is America, after all.

Oscar Wilde famously said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

It can go either way. The launch of a book is something every writer dreams of. The noise — or silence — that follows is a different kettle of fish.