You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About

by Barry, Dave

  Remember the US Airways flight that hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed in the Hudson River after both engines died, and the passengers all miraculously survived? If my wife had been on the flight, when she and the other passengers were standing on the plane wings waiting for the rescue boats, she would have taken the opportunity to tell them that they needed to buy The Kite Runner.

  Other books that my wife has, by relentlessly hectoring innocent bystanders, personally turned into bestsellers include The Bridges of Madison County, Room and The Language of Flowers.

  Now to answer your questions:

  No, my wife has never made any of my books into bestsellers.

  Yes, I am her husband.

  Unlike, say, the author of The Kite Runner.

  No, I am not bitter.

  Really! I’m fine with it!

  Shut up.

  But you cannot rely entirely on my wife to promote your book for you. You will also have to do some promoting yourself. One effective technique, especially for first-time authors, is to march into bookstores and inform the staff, in a loud yet irritated voice, that they don’t have enough copies of your book, and don’t have it displayed prominently enough, and clearly are not doing an adequate job of informing customers about it. Bookstore employees really appreciate receiving this kind of helpful input from authors and will definitely pay special attention to your books after you leave.

  The Book Tour

  As a bestselling author, you will be sent out on a book tour, which is a multi-city trip starting out in New York City and ending in death.

  Ha-ha! I’m exaggerating of course.

  FACT: Only eight percent of book tours are fatal to the author.

  Nevertheless, book tours can be grueling because you go from city to city appearing on TV and radio shows where you will be interviewed by perky on-air personalities who have not read your book and sincerely do not give a shit about it. If they were interested in books, they would never have gotten into radio or TV in the first place. So it’s up to you, the author, to “carry the ball” during these interviews, and it can be hard work, as we see in this classic author-interview transcript from the early days of radio:

  Host: Our next guest is Herman Melville, who has written a book called Moby-Duck.

  Melville: Dick.

  Host: I beg your pardon?

  Melville: It’s Dick.

  Host: What is?

  Melville: The book title. It’s Moby-Dick.

  Host: Dick?

  Melville: Yes. It’s the name of a whale, which is a major character in the book.

  Host: So this Dick is a talking whale?

  Melville: No, the whale is essentially a symbol—of fate, of chaos, of uncertainty, of the vast uncontrollable and unknowable forces of the universe, against which man is powerless.

  Host: I see. (Pause.) So there’s no duck?

  So book tours are not easy. But you still should do them because there is no better way to “get the word out” about your book than to appear on TV, especially a major national show such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Dancing with the Stars or Mad Men. You should go on as many of these shows as your schedule allows.

  How to Get on a Major Television Show

  It’s extremely easy. These shows always need guests and they’re especially eager to have authors who are promoting books. So you don’t need an appointment or anything. Simply show up at the TV studio about fifteen minutes before the show starts and let the security people know you are available to be a guest. They will take it from there.

  I myself have used this technique countless times to get on national TV shows. Here’s a photograph of me taken on the set of the Today Show, where I am attempting to explain my book to four TV personalities who—this is clear from their expressions—have no idea who I am or what the hell I am doing there:

  Getting Book Blurbs From Famous Authors

  Blurbs are quotes printed on book jackets in which famous authors reveal their honest critical opinions of the book:

  “It was OK for the first twenty pages, which was as far as I got.”

  “Pretty much all I know about this book is that it’s rectangular.”

  “My agent, who’s also the agent for the author of this book, asked me to write a blurb, so here’s your fucking blurb.”

  I am of course kidding. Authors write blurbs because they have been pressured to do so by other authors or publishers or agents; they are never even remotely critical. No matter how crappy a book is, the blurbs always declare that it is not only a brilliant work of literature but it can also, if applied directly to the affected area, cure cancer.

  Naturally you want your book to have blurbs from big-time authors. But how do you get them if you’re just starting out and you don’t know any big-time authors? The answer is—and here I am quoting directly from an official statement of the American Academy of Famous American Authors—“Lie.”

  That’s right: These authors are officially granting you permission to go ahead and make up blurbs and claim they wrote them. They don’t care anymore. They’re sick and tired of being pestered to read books and then write ludicrously gushing praise that nobody with the IQ of a midrange hamster takes seriously anyway.

  Improving Your Book’s Amazon Ranking

  Your book, along with millions of others, will be listed on the Amazon.com website, which will also show your book’s sales ranking. As a professional author, you need to check this ranking a minimum of two hundred times per day so you can monitor exactly how your book is doing and respond accordingly.

  For example, let’s say you check Amazon at 6:23 a.m. and notice that your ranking is 2,325,217. That is, frankly, not a great ranking. So you boldly take action in the form of calling your mom and asking her to go on Amazon and purchase one or more copies of your book. If—and this can happen to you, as a professional author—your mom is no longer accepting your phone calls, you may have to purchase a copy of your book yourself.

  Then you go back to checking Amazon every several minutes until finally, at 3:47 p.m., the rankings are updated and, BOOM, there’s your book, sitting pretty, at number 2,304,958. That’s right: Thanks to your decisive action, your book has moved up more than 20,000 places!

  But you cannot rest on those laurels. You need to immediately resume checking Amazon because there are thousands and thousands of competing authors out there and we are all vigilantly monitoring our own rankings. It’s our second-favorite activity, behind snacking. If you want to “stay in the race,” you must do whatever is necessary to protect your book’s ranking.

  FACT: When J. R. R. Tolkien died, the police found seventeen million copies of The Hobbit in his garage.

  Another helpful thing you can do is monitor the Amazon customer reviews and threaten to kill anybody who gives your book fewer than four stars. Joyce Carol Oates is famous for this.

  Conclusion

  So there you have it: The “inside story” on how to become a top professional author. These are proven techniques that will work for you. But don’t just take my word for it: Take the word of Dan Brown, James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Ludlum, the Fifty Shades of Grey woman, Jackie Collins, Dr. Seuss, Agatha Christie, Leo Tolstoy and Jay Z, all of whom have read this chapter and, speaking in unison, declared it to be “without question the most helpful thing ever written by anybody.”

  So now you have all the tools you need to be a professional author. Now it’s up to you. Follow your dream, do not give up and never, ever, let anything stand in your way.

  It’s time for another snack.

  * Always carry some.

  * Eddie Friedman.

  * Don’t think this doesn’t happen.

  * I, personally, do not know what I mean.

  * This is not a figure of speech: By age sixty-five, you h
ave developed an actual keel.

  * VERY DEPRESSING FACT: When The Real McCoys first aired, Walter Brennan was younger than I am now.

  * Har.

  * Assuming rats can shrug.

  * Hebrew, meaning, literally, “The Al.”

  * I’m assuming Thunderbolt is a he.

  * None of your business.

  * The punch line is “Take it all, bitch.”

  * And it was not a male penguin.

  * Source: Chaucer.

  * “BFF” stands for “Best Friends Forever.” This is a term that girls my daughter’s age use to describe essentially everyone they know.

  * Instagram is an Internet service that young people use to post photographs of themselves every eight minutes so their BFFs will not forget what they look like.

  * There were roughly eight men at the Justin Bieber concert, counting the janitorial staff.

  * Not really! The music sucks.

  * A bat mitzvah (for boys, it’s bar mitzvah) is a Jewish religious ceremony in which a thirteen-year-old child formally becomes a thirteen-year-old child who has received a lot of gift checks from relatives he or she does not always know.

  * Having out-of-shape middle-aged men who have been drinking carry people around in chairs is another ancient Jewish tradition, originated by ancient Jewish orthopedic surgeons.