Post No. 32 The Battle of the Blurbs
August 5, 2009
I am furious. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I was furious. Not I am only mildly pissed.
Yesterday I received a call from ______________ at Oceanview – I won’t name her – congratulating me on joining the ranks of published authors. I guess a have more of a delicate ego than I’d like to think, because this instantly pissed me off. What she should have said – at least, if she wanted to win me over – was something about how happy the folks at Oceanview were to have such a promising property. Anyway… after congratulating me on my good fortune, she referred to a “Welcome to Oceanview” booklet I had been mailed some time ago, hinting that there were some tasks I needed to accomplish “to move Fortuna towards publication.” Of course, I hadn’t bothered to read the book, but I did immediately call back.
I finally reach her this morning. After a few minutes of syrupy chat, she finally gets to the point: Where are my blurbs? I explain that I don’t have any, that I have told Susan (the CEO) that I don’t, and won’t have any, that I just don’t read that many books, that I often don’t remember authors names, and since Susan has a good relationship with Lincoln Child (the one author whose name I could come up with who writes “books like mine”), she has agreed to chat him up at Thrillerfest for our mutual benefit.
I can’t get ______________ to back off, and when I finally say, “What is it about ‘no’ that you don’t understand?” she comes back with, “Well, if things don’t work out, we’ll have to put our heads together.” In other words, she’s not taking “no” for an answer, but rather pushing everything into the future.
I say, “Fine, I’m happy to participate in any meeting. But I want to make it absolutely, positively clear that I will not take responsibility for obtaining blurbs. I have been in business a long time, and I’ve learned that it’s not a good idea to make a promise you can’t keep. Is that clear?”
She responds with ten seconds of stunned silence. Then, finally, “Well, let’s move on to the other issue. Do you have a web site?”
To be continued…
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Read the first chapter of Fortuna right now at www.fortunathebook.com
Note: I’m using the blog format here to post a journal I have been keeping for some time. We will catch up to the present in a few weeks.
