Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  Twitter. No blue checkmark, yet.

  Amazon. No reviews.

  There’s this secret page on Amazon called Author Central, where you can see how you rank up against other people trying to sell books on Amazon, which turns out to be most humans on the planet. On my book release day, my book was ranked number 35,777 among all printed materials for sale on Amazon, including Lolita and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Glengarry Glen Ross and Don’t Fill Up on the Antipasto: Tony Danza’s Father-Son Cookbook.

  What did all this mean?

  It meant I was now my own social media intern. I spent three hours checking tweets, tweeting, retweeting, hypothesizing how I might generate more retweets. An inspirational post about believing in yourself, alongside a photo of a seagull, for example, seems capable of making Twitter users highly excitable. Should I do that?

  I would spend the next year pondering this question of how “not-me” I should pretend to be in order to draw more attention to the “real-me” of the book. Thus began the season of my life in which I would post about my book at least once a day, such that I might be unfollowed by many friends on social media, whom I don’t blame, not a one—I’d have grown tired of me, too. I did grow tired of me. I would have unfollowed myself, had that option been available, which it wasn’t, I checked. I tried outsourcing my online presence to a Bengalese firm specializing in the field, I did. But I had captained the ship of my ambition this far—might as well keep going until we reached whatever New World we sought.

  What did I seek, now? It is instructive to remember that not a single European was looking for America, before they found it.

  * * *

  Two days after I was officially published, we launched the book at the SCAD Museum of Art. They call it a launch because, as with a NASA rocket, all the friends and families cheer and there’s champagne and explosions and occasionally mourning. It was divine. In one blinding flash the book was in space, and space is beautiful. Friends handed me giftwrapped bottles of alcohol, and I learned why writers die of cirrhosis.

  I felt the crack of the starter pistol in what suddenly seemed like a race, between me and Tony Danza and every other author of books with words. The way I was going to win this race was via the world’s largest book tour. Phillip and Debbie and I had discussed this, a couple months before the book launched.

  “How many cities are you thinking?” Phillip said.

  “Fifty,” I said.

  Although that was a lie. Seventy is what I was thinking. A hundred is what I was thinking. My plan was to visit every city where I’d ever lived and also any American city with a mayor or running water or enough oxygen to support human life. It had been exactly twenty years since I’d experienced the divine revelation of my fate, to create explosions of fiery comic wonderment in the hearts of my fellow pilgrims, and now that the book was done, that fire needed somewhere to go, and where it went was on the road.

  I could feel the fire trying to tell me something, even as I made a very long list of cities I wanted to burn to the ground with comedy. My father was in the fire, I knew. At the time, that is all I knew. Later, I would know more.

  I sent the list of cities to Debbie and Cal and Phillip.

  “You don’t really want to go to all these places,” they said.

  “Definitely.”

  “Birmingham?” they asked.

  “My wife used to live there.”

  “Greenwood?”

  “My grandmother’s buried there.”

  “Austin?”

  “Brisket.”

  “What about Charlotte?” they said. “Do you actually know anyone there?”

  “No,” I said, “but I will.”

  * * *

  The first official tour event took place at the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia. Mark drove over from Atlanta, for moral support.

  “There will be many famous authors here,” I said. “Please come.”

  “What if nobody shows?” he said. “Will you be sad?”

  The thing about book festivals is: People do show. They might be lost, but they show. They will wander in, hoping to discover a cooking demonstration of some kind. They could put a sign on the ballroom door—“Alopecia and the Novelist: A Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates” | 2:00–3:00 p.m.—and readers would flock.

  The night before the festival, we went to a VIP author party, a phrase that Mark hooked into like a lamprey.

  “We’re looking for the VIP Author Party,” he said to the man at the hotel desk.

  “Is this the VIP Author Party?” he repeated, to the man holding the door for us.

  “This feels pretty chill for a VIP Author Party,” he said, as we sampled the prodigious array of pita wedges before us. You could tell it sort of blew Mark’s mind that this was happening, that one of us had become potentially famous, the way we’d wanted to, so long ago.

  Just then, a beautiful woman came running toward me, trying not to spill her Chardonnay. She seemed anxious, eager, almost, dare I say, excited?

  “Are you Harrison Scott Key?” she said.

  “No effing way,” Mark whispered. “Five minutes at the VIP Author Party and you’re a sex object.”

  I turned up the wattage on my smile. Perhaps I already was famous. I reached for a pen.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” she said.

  “How did you know?” I said, curious.

  “You dropped your name tag,” she said.

  * * *

  The next day, we walked to the convention center and I entered the VIP Author Lounge in a commanding stride, to be greeted by an empty room and a young man lighting the Sterno jelly.

  “Where’s all the famous authors?” Mark said.

  Just then, a famous author entered. I won’t say who. You’ve heard of him.

  I stood up, introduced myself, and made the mistake of telling him I was a big fan of his work, which meant we could now never be friends. The imbalance of power was too extreme. Authors, like other humanlike creatures, can only be true friends with people who do not fawn over them. I knew I’d blown it.

  He shook my hand limply, surveyed the muffins, and departed.

  Again, we were alone.

  “That was fun,” I said.

  “Do you want me to go kick his ass?” Mark said, ever the loyal friend.

  “It’s fine.”

  “We should at least go to his panel and jeer,” he said.

  “Let’s eat.”

  Like conquering lords, we grazed on the VIP author salad and a generous fruit cup.

  Two hours later, I did my first reading. It went fine. Everything felt quite normal, honestly. Touring would be a snap. The next day, our panel convened before a full audience, mostly because one of the panelists had written many bestselling historical romance novels. I could tell they were bestselling books because their covers featured such key elements as antebellum homes, oak trees lining driveways leading to antebellum homes, oceans, inlets, the backs of beautiful and mysterious women’s heads looking through avenues of oaks and to the various oceans and inlets beyond.

  This bestselling author was quite funny and charming and smelled of powdered sugar and money. She was a pro, you could tell.

  “She’s good, damn,” Mark said, after.

  We wanted to mock her book covers, but this woman was slaying it. You had to respect it. Every grandmother in South Carolina lined up to get a selfie with the lady.

  “She’s destroying you,” Mark said, as he sat beside me at the book-signing table, later, and watched her line snake through the convention center.

  “It’s not a race,” I said.

  “I thought you said it was.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “Because she’s totally winning.”

  “People will come to my line,” I said.

  We waited for people to come.

  People did not come.

  Then two people came, a woman and her daughter, about twelve.

  “She loves to read,”
the mother said. “She’s homeschooled.”

  “I’ve never heard of you,” the girl said, proudly.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I signed her book, and they disappeared around a corner.

  My first fan interaction was over.

  An announcement reminded us that the convention center was closing in five minutes. Across the wide hall, the darkness descended by rows, and Mark wandered off to the VIP Author Lounge to collect turkey rollups for his suitcase.

  * * *

  And so it was that the fire of my ambition thrust me across America. I was living a dream, and like a dream, the story of that summer unfolded with a Jungian logic. I woke to find myself at bookstores in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, where I discovered the hard truth of bookstore events, which is: Nobody comes.

  Any author will tell you this is what happens, but you think, Not me! It shall be different with me! But it’s not different, and it’s fine, because in the first few weeks of the tour, all the touring actually did pay off: My Amazon ranking soared up the charts, from number 35,777 to number 33,907. Which is fine, it’s fine, it is, because when you go to bookstores, they always purchase a few copies of your book, to have on hand when you arrive, and this is why you go, really. You don’t go to meet fans. You don’t have fans.

  Bookstore owners and employees are dream doulas, too, like agents and publishers: They want your book to sell, for they also have mortgages and a belief in art and truth. For many, their bookstore is their dream, and it’s a wondrous thing, to see the companion dreams overlap in this way, even as I was shocked that so few people’s schedules were overlapping with mine, at my book events.

  I’d walk into the empty bookstores an hour before my event and wonder where everybody was, trying to pretend I wasn’t wondering where everybody was, grateful that the bookstore had invited me in the first place. Some of them made flyers, which I appreciated, a lone flyer, tacked to the wall, where everyone in town could see it, should they choose to come into the bookstore and squint while standing very near the flyer.

  At one shop in Alabama, during the early weeks of my tour, I entered and introduced myself and thanked them for hosting me for the reading.

  “We don’t really do readings,” the manager said.

  He didn’t say what they did, instead of readings. Screamings, perhaps?

  THE FIRST SIX MONTHS OF THE TOUR THAT PHILLIP AND I PLANNED

  Austin, Texas

  Baton Rouge, Louisiana

  Brooklyn, New York

  Charleston, South Carolina

  Charlotte, North Carolina

  Dallas, Texas

  Decatur, Georgia

  Fairfax, Virginia

  Fairhope, Alabama

  Fayetteville, Arkansas

  Greenwood, Mississippi

  Jackson, Mississippi

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Miami, Florida

  Natchez, Mississippi

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  New York, New York

  Oxford, Mississippi

  Raleigh, North Carolina

  Richmond, Virginia

  Sewanee, Tennessee

  St. Augustine, Florida

  St. Petersburg, Florida

  St. Simons Island, Georgia

  And who would pay for all this, again? Phillip agreed to pay for some of the tour out of the cryptic HarperCollins treasury. How much, he wouldn’t say. I explained that I could sleep on the futons of friends and family, if that helped. He agreed to a dozen hotel rooms, two rental cars, two plane tickets. That was all he could do, he said, which seemed generous, although I had nothing to compare it to. The rest of the money would come out of my remaining book advance monies, sitting in a non-Swiss bank account, accruing non-high interest.

  “It’s an investment,” I told Lauren.

  “In what?”

  “In my ability to convince people to put on pants and leave the house,” I said.

  “How will you do that?” she asked.

  “I am going to put the power back into PowerPoint,” I said.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks into the tour, I found myself at Page & Palette in Fairhope, Alabama, a sort of platonic ideal of a bookstore, with a big room full of books and a whole other room just for readings and many lavish appointments, such as chairs. I set up a projector and a screen, and people came into the room, and kept coming.

  Fifty people? Sixty, was it? More?

  Was it happening?

  Why had they come?

  Wine.

  They were giving out free wine.

  Nobody tells you how crucial rosé is to the publishing industry.

  They introduced me, and I tilted the microphone closer to my face, its metal arm groaning like some ancient bird, and I showed them my PowerPoint, and people laughed in all the right places, and they didn’t stop laughing, not even when I read a passage about my father dying and I sort of wanted them to stop. In that moment I knew: I’d turned a corner in my calling and was on the other side of something now. I had wanted to make others laugh, and here they were, laughing, applauding, standing, even crying. Was the dream real now? I thought it had been real when I got the money, but no, not then. Was now it? Is this what I had longed for, all those years? Had my quark finally burst into joyful luminescence, creating rich human feeling in the world? I wanted to assume it was my brilliance that had caused these tremors of feeling but then I thought, no, it was probably the wine.

  Afterwards, when I entered a restaurant for a late dinner with my cousin and her fiancé, a table full of elderly women, one wearing a lobster bib, stood and applauded.

  “Well done!” they said.

  “Bravo!” they said.

  “We just love you!”

  In this situation, the temptation, of course, is to believe you are as important as these people are pretending you are, which makes you believe you have superpowers, which is how actors end up on CNN discussing carbon emissions and attempting to divert tsunamis via telepathy.

  “Remember where you come from,” Pop had always said. “Remember your name.”

  What was my name? I couldn’t remember. Kanye West? Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson?

  Don’t get above your raisin, is something I heard said often, as a boy in Mississippi, and I heard it in my head now, a chorus of aunts and cousins and grandmothers and Sunday school teachers, their heads floating in the celestial heavens above me. Where was my raisin? I wondered. I was above it now, surely.

  Chapter 15

  In painting, you have unlimited power. You have the ability to move mountains. You can bend rivers. When I get home, the only thing I have power over is the garbage.

  —BOB ROSS, The Joy of Painting

  THERE’S A PRETTY CLEAR PATH TO BECOMING A BESTSELLER IN the United States, which is to write a diet book, or a book about angels, or a diet book for angels. The other way to write a bestseller is to be Tori Spelling. The woman is prolific. Bestselling celebrity memoirs do have their uses, I guess, especially in developing nations, where they can be read aloud to patients before surgery, in place of anesthesia. At least, this is what I thought; but then I read a few pages of several of these books one day when trapped in a used bookstore during a severe thunderstorm and I was like, Well, damn. Some of these celebrity memoirs are not so bad. Turns out celebrities are people and have feelings, too, which was upsetting.

  What I am trying to say is that if you’re not Tori Spelling or an actor or musician with some free time and a desire to diversify your creative revenue streams, then becoming a bestseller is a trifle more bothersome. How does one get known, so as to be further known? And then how known does one have to be to be on the bestseller lists, which will only increase the “known-ness” of the known?

  This is what we do know about how bestsellers are determined: the New York Times and Publishers Weekly keep a small band of sightless actuaries chained to radiators in their basements, analyz
ing data gathered from booksellers and distributors, which is then doctored by Tori Spelling.

  After the glorious triumph at Page & Palette on the rich briny waters of Mobile Bay, where I signed what felt like five hundred books and was photographed by strangers and cheered by the elderly, I careened north for events in Tennessee and Mississippi and back to Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina, shaking my head at the wonder of it all. Fame is a remarkable thing. You think you know what it is, and then it whispers in your ear and you’re like, Oh.

  Fame coos, Hey there, buddy.

  And you’re like, Wow, you’re even prettier in person.

  Fame says, You are really good at this.

  And you’re like, Oh, you flatter.

  Fame says, No, I mean it. I want to marry you.

  And you’re like, Oh, stop it. When?

  I began receiving calls, letters, emails, dispatches from distant nooks and crannies. I got one letter from a Florida state correctional facility, and it thrilled me knowing that my work might be shining light in a dark place. The inmate said he enjoyed my story. He also said we should hang out when he was released from prison, and then he asked me to help him sell some paintings. He did not say why he was in jail but I think it has something to do with paintings.

  * * *

  Per Amazon, the book had risen from number 33,907 to number 6,306 in a single week. Phillip the Publicist was calling and emailing more and more.

  New bookings!

  Guest blogging!

  Print interviews!

  Radio interviews!

  His exclamation points were having a very positive effect!

  Audiences grew. I’d begun taking countless selfies with people I did not know and would never see again.