vituperation

August 13, 2003

As I sat on the toilet at work today, reading this week’s Time magazine (the one with the awful picture of Arnold on the cover), I happened upon an article about the newly appointed first openly gay bishop of the Episcopalian Church, who’s 56 years old and lives with his “life partner.”

Oh, damn, I thought, I don’t need the mental image of a couple of 56-year-old gay men having gay sex with each other.

But after some consideration, I decided that you did need that image, so I figured I’d share that thought here. You’re welcome.

“May I help you?” the young man standing in front of me asked. The nametag pinned to his blue shirt said “Mike” and underneath that, in smaller letters, “Manager.” His lone earring glittered in the fluorescent lights of the Barnes and Noble bookstore. I noticed the earring right away, because I’m like a human magpie, attracted by shiny things.

“Hi,” I said, after clearing my throat. “My name is Fred And3rson, and I’ve recently published a book. I wondered if you guys had some sort of way to directly sell books by local authors, or if I need to go through a big distributor to get a book in here.”

His brow wrinkled.

“Maybe,” he said, “We used to have a position just for that, for local authors, but they’ve done away with it and I’m not sure if we still can. Corporate likes us to do everything through the office in New York. Does your book have an ISBN?”

“Yes, it’s a complete book with an ISBN. I formed a publishing company to produce it and bought my own ISBN block.”

“Is it a POD [print on demand] book?” I seem to get a lot of this question.

“No,” I said, smiling, “I have thousands of copies in cases at my house. Fulfillment won’t be a problem.”

“Do you have a press kit I can look at?”

“I have a copy of the book in my car. Is that alright?”

“Yeah! Bring it in and I’ll take a look at it.”

Let them see it, and they will want it. That’s my mantra these days.

I got a copy of the book out of the comp-copy case I keep in the Jeep and brought it in. I handed it to the manager. He turned it in his hands, looking at the cover.

“Wow. Can you give me a second to call the girl who’d know if we can sell this here?”

“Sure.”

He walked to the phone and picked it up.

“Mandy, dial 208. Mandy, dial 208.”

While he waited, he thumbed through the book. After a moment the phone next to him rang, and he answered it quickly.

“Can we still pick up books by local authors without going through corporate? Yeah, it does. Yeah, that too. No, it’s not POD.”

He paused for a moment.

“No, I think this one has a chance at selling. Yeah. Oh yeah? Really. I think this one has a chance. Okay. Oh. Yeah, that’s right. Okay.”

I waited patiently, thrilled by the parts of the conversation I understood. He hung up and returned to me.

“I can’t make any promises,” he said, “because no one seems sure if we can do this or not. Can I keep this for a day or two, and show it to Mandy?”

“Sure,” I said, “not a problem at all. That’s what that copy’s for.”

He shook my hand, got a contact number from me, and gave me his card. (Memo to my wife: we really need to make those business cards I’ve been procrastinating.) Before I left, he assured me one more time that he couldn’t promise anything because he wasn’t sure if they were still allowed to deal with publishers/authors outside their distributorship chain, but that he’d try.

And that’s all I can ask, isn’t it?

My mother has read about my erection at the house o’ massage. My humiliation is complete.

I called a local Waldenbooks today to see if they’d be interested in carrying a book by a local author. They were, and the woman I talked to on the phone asked for my book’s ISBN. I gave it to her, she plugged it into their Books in Print system, and pulled the book up.

Then she shocked me by ordering four copies right there on her system, which I had no idea she could do. So, I guess that means if you want to go to a Waldenbooks and order my book, you can. They can pull it up by title, too, but if you want the ISBN it’s 0-9741500-0-2.