The Write Stuff.(Authors.)

"Have you heard?" chortled my friend the literary agent. "Apparently, 81 percent of Americans feel they should write a book." She wasn't kidding. Eighty-one percent of the citizenry of the land of the free and the home of the brave think they have a book in them, according to a survey of 1,006 adult Americans commissioned by the Jenkins Group, a Michigan publishing-services firm. Having just established, in an earlier piece in these pages, that a staggering percentage of Americans are in fact functionally illiterate, I was astonished to discover that an even more staggering percentage saw themselves as pregnant with best sellers waiting to be born.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, because I've met Carlos the doorman. Carlos presides, in green uniform and peaked cap, over the reception desk at one of New York City's tonier addresses, the kind where all visitors have to be announced but there is no sign crassly telling them so. One day the person I was visiting happened to mention that I was an author. "Really?" Carlos beamed, his smile equal parts admiration and complicity. "I'm an author myself." It turned out he'd been working sporadically on a tell-all, spare-no-one, bodice-ripping novel about the inhabitants of a fashionable apartment building on the West Side. "When I'm sittin' here, helpin' the residents with their problems, I'm not just no doorman," he confessed. "I'm doin' research!"

I assured him that his was just the titanic best seller the literary market is waiting for, so I thought better of giving him a quick primer on the libel laws. After all, this is the year that two New York nannies turned their thinly disguised experiences mentoring the mewling offspring of Park Avenue parents into a best seller and soon-to-be-a- major-motion-picture, "The Nanny Diaries." If two nannies can mine their months of child-minding to such runaway success, who's to say Carlos can't find golden indiscretions amid the packages he signs for, the visitors he announces and the food deliveries he sends up every day?

In fact, Jenkins estimates that 6 million Americans have actually written a manuscript. A grim statistic, when you realize that only 80,000 or so books get published each year. Thus the manuscript-writing multitudes are being met by the implacable resistance of a tiny troop of mainstream ...