You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (16 page)

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 yo s wh garageur 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 Tol
stoy 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 have developed an actual keel.

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

*
Har.

*
Assuming rats c
an shrug.

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

*
I’m assuming Thunderb
olt 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.