Why I haven't yet been offered 6 figures for my new novel

Today's NYT explains it all: I'm not a 25 year-old graduate of one of the big fiction factories. You can tell. For one thing, I'm not quite that young (for obvious professional reasons I'm not revealing my age, but let's just say I was about 8 months old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, which makes me a Second Millennium sort of guy). And I don't have the kinds of connections those young writers have. And you know, I never learned to write like them either, never having gone through the program. So I have only one, or maybe two ways, to compete: I just have to write better than they do, or say something they don't know. I'm working on both. (Meanwhile you can read on-line Chapter 1 of the new novel.)