BOOK-FLOGGING FOR FUN AND (PROFIT?)

When I first learned that the guy singing the theme song in that perennial holiday favorite HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS was Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft, the same guy who did the voice for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes’ beloved cereal mascot Tony the Tiger, I pictured him going out to lunch with Boris Karloff at Fatburger (“please refrain from dancing on the tables”), the two of them taking a break from their Grinch gigs to talk over old times. I’d love to have been eavesdropping on their conversation from the adjoining booth. It would have been the mid-sixties, so Karloff might have shared some funny stories from back when he was hosting the ironically-titled anthology series THRILLER on television, and Ravenscroft could have regaled Karloff with tales of what it was like to work with stars as diverse as Jack Benny and Elvis.

Speaking of Jack Benny, Bob Hope is credited with saying that when they asked Jack Benny to do something for the Actor’s Orphanage, he shot both his parents and moved in.

LITTLE JIMMY: Bob Hope? Jack Benny? Just how old IS this Malachi Stone guy?
MR. ANSWER MAN: Plenty old, Little Jimmy. Plenty old.
LITTLE JIMMY: And he smells funny, too. Not funny ha ha, funny old.
MR. ANSWER MAN: You’ll get used to it just like I did. Say, that reminds me of a joke. It’s kind of a Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts party record joke. It seems there was this elderly couple and the old lady complained that her legs were always getting cold in bed. The old man told her to catch a skunk, make a pet out of it and sleep with it between her thighs every night. She says, what about the smell? He says, the skunk’ll get used to it just like I did. Pretty funny, huh, Little Jimmy?

Someone once observed that the classic comedians like Benny and Hope were high concept in that their personas were defined by two or three simple traits. Benny was a vain, stingy man and a lousy violin player. Hope was a coward and he liked girls.

Here’s my high-concept tag: I’m a lawyer and I write novels. Until I began formatting four of my earlier novels for Amazon Kindle–CONJURER’S OATH, DEVIL’S TOLL, PRIVATE SHOWINGS and WICKED KING DICK–I hadn’t looked at some of them in years. Revisiting books you wrote years ago has a strange déjà vu effect. It dredges up nostalgia in unpredictable ways. There’s that chapter in PRIVATE SHOWINGS I wrote the afternoon the kids came home from school during a blizzard and I had to walk them up the steep hill in foot-deep snow because the bus couldn’t take the grade. I remember sitting down at the word processor, my pant legs still dripping wet with melting snow, and beginning to write. And then there’s the romantic scene in the tower. I wrote that one the night before Pascha, working until three in the morning while Maria sat with her invalid mother. It was Maria I dreamed of as I wrote those words.

I don’t know how you other writers out there may feel about your own works but I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with my novels. And I’m not much of a judge. One day I might cringe with embarrassment at something I’ve written, the next day I might swell with pride reading the same passage.

Personally, I was surprised at the prevalence of religious themes in my books. Theophanies and epiphanies pop up in the most unexpected places. All my little obsessions creep in as well: Neanderthal man, particle physics, father-son relationships, my home town–they’re all there, along with phony evangelists, sexual deviance, degradation and shame.

I’d hate having a psychiatrist deconstruct any one of these books of mine that are now posted for sale on Amazon Kindle. It’s like Xeroxing love letters you wrote to your wife and sending some flunky into the street to pass them out like handbills. The process of writing a novel, if you do it right, amounts to a critical invasion of your own privacy. Hence the Wal-Mart bag mask and all that silliness about having to conceal my identity.

Here’s a paradox: one wants to self-publicize to the right target audience and yet retain one’s privacy. When we started the law practice, brimming with the heady confidence that comes with inexperience, in addition to the lawyers’ old standby, the yellow pages, we experimented with various alternative modes of advertising. Specifically, we tried a billboard. For those of you fortunate enough never to have encountered the need for such vulgar self-promotion, please be advised that a one-year contract for billboard space costs about a bazillion dollars. And this particular billboard was blocked by some utility poles and wires and a big tree. Nevertheless we were so excited we parked across the street and took a picture. We drove a longer route home just so we could see the billboard lit up at night.

And do you know how many paying clients came to the office because of the billboard? A nice round number: zero. Oh, there was the crazy gay guy who dropped in without an appointment, spent an hour or so shooting the bull, promised to bring in his 89-year-old female companion to make a will, and never returned. And then there was the lunatic famous for riding his bicycle around town wearing nothing but a diaper and long hair like Cochise who walked in, welcomed us to the neighborhood, farted, turned around and left. Not to mention the hordes of salesmen who spotted the billboard, smelled a new prospect and dogpiled us. But clients? Nah.

We tried a newspaper advertisement. Page thirty. Response: a polite mention from one old woman at church that she had seen it. Thanks for noticing. Have a nice day. We tried a web site. This was back in the day when I lacked the skills to design my own. We hired a dude from our then internet service provider to design it. It cost around a thousand dollars in borrowed money and brought in hundreds of emails from people in virtually every jurisdiction where I am not licensed to practice law seeking free legal advice.

The point in all this, if there is one, is that we learned a lesson from our ill-fated forays into the world of advertising: you can spend a hell of a lot of money and get nothing in return. If you want your money’s worth, please consider buying DEVIL’S TOLL, PRIVATE SHOWINGS, CONJURER’S OATH and/or WICKED KING DICK on Amazon Kindle. You won’t be disappointed. I’d love to hear from you.

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