Sell Sell Sell

You can’t listen to the radio for 10 minutes without hearing claims for miracle products dreamed up by the enterprising. I'm talking about  everything from products designed to enhance your love life to products to inflate your skin so your wrinkles simply disappear. Come to think of it my sister got her face inflated once when a scorpion stung her on the inside of her lip. For a solid week her face look a dome of Jiffy Pop but hey, nary a wrinkle!We Americans have a long tradition in the old hustle game. Look at all the people selling stuff on E-Bay and Craig's List. Was it P.T. Barnum who said there's a sucker born every minute?But listen to me, trying to sound like I’m above it all. If fact I joined the selling game when I began publishing my own books back in the flannelly 90s. I thought it would be fun.And it was fun, some of it. Selecting the blurbs was totally fun, though hard to take seriously. My all-time favorite came along when an angry woman wrote in to her paper after seeing a long-ago column I did on Liz Taylor’s latest nip-and-tuck job:  “Who are YOU to talk about looks?” her letter said. “Your eyes are beady, your hair is out of style and your teeth look false!” I put that one right on the cover of Book One.But making a book is always easy. It’s selling a book at a book signing that's hard. Over the years I've done signings both at the big chains and in the smaller independents, where actual refreshments sometimes served and you get to give a real talk and the audience talks back.At the big stores they just set you up at a table out front and make you ambush the people coming in. In fact they call them “ambush signings” and they're awful. The people coming in don’t know you. They’re just there to get the book they need and leave - and are you really going to leap out at them and shout, “Here’s a cute little read!”?My little author site shows how many signings I did when Vacationing in My Driveway came out - a zillion in short - but I'm pretty much done with such events now. Maybe I’m more Irish than American really: we Irish tell our stories non-stop anyway and for free too.My pal Jerry Zezima just came out with a funny book called “Leave it to Boomer,” a signing for which he announced in an email blast last week. His "contribution to the decline of literature" he calls the book.  “Good news for masochists and insomniacs!” he went on in the email, adding that the books were $15.95 each with signed copies being “practically worthless.”Maybe Jerry's part Irish himself. With a last name like Zezima you wouldn't think so, but you never can tell. Who could guess that a dark-haired girl named Marotta could trace every ancestor for 200 years back to the Emerald Isle?