Anticipation

The king is dead, long live the king. My first book, My Two Centuries in Africa, is doomed. I don’t have the resources to mount an expensive advertising campaign, and without one, no one will ever buy it. I don’t like the idea that an author has to pay to attract attention for a book, but I don’t see any alternative.

On to the second book, Home Free. This week, I sent out 10 book proposals to literary agents. This time, it will be different. This time, they will love my idea. This time, they will be a path to my door.

LOL. Are you laughing? You should be. Every author hopes that a new book idea will find a receptive audience. The publishing industry has other ideas. The author has to write a book proposal in which he or she estimates the exact number of sales accurately and infallibly. How will the author do it? Magic.

How to predict your book sales accurately

Now that I have submitted my proposals, I have to sit back and wait, approximately six weeks, until an agent locked in a cramped office finally gets around to my proposal. It will be hard to wait for six weeks. I am reminded of Carly Simon’s hit song, Anticipation, which came out in 1971. I was 13 and in love. I still remember her in that stretchy blue top!

“Anticipation, anticipation/Is makin' me late/Is keepin' me waitin' “

The agent will start to read my email and sit up straight, unable to believe what I have written. The sheer brilliance of it will stun them. I often stun people, but generally I stun them into silence or a deep stupor. This time, they will feel a rush of excitement, a frisson! I have always wanted to cause a frisson. It’s not that easy to do. First of all, people have to know what a frisson is, in order to know they are feeling one.

Perhaps you’ll have a frisson reading this blog!

This book proposal business is for the birds. Every literary agency does it differently. Some of them use a platform called Query Manager. It keeps track of the date of submission and the date of response, if any. Others just want you to send them an email with all or part of a complete book proposal attached to it.

The problem of course is that there is no system to determine which book will be a bestseller and which ones will end up going back to the paper mill and start life all over again as part of a batch of paper pulp. Anyone who comes up with a sure-fire system to identify a bestseller will become a millionaire for sure.

Where my first book is headed

They ask you all sorts of clever questions trying to tease out the real potential of your book. What other similar books compare well to your book, and will your book sell as well as the other books do? This is an idiotic question, of course. How can an author possibly know if his or her book with sell well or not? If the damn literary agent, who does this for a living, can’t figure it out, how is the poor author to know?

The literary agent, meanwhile, is just doing his or her best in an idiotic industry. Book publishing is like the music industry. It’s trying to find the next big hit, but no one ever knows for sure what that will be. Look at Oliver Anthony and his surprise hit, “Rich Men North of Richmond.” He was just an angry redneck hanging out in the woods with his dog and singing a rant about the politicians up in Washington, D.C. In the blink of an eye, he became a superstar. Now, everyone wants a toke of whatever he is smoking.

Why does he hate short, fat people who eat cookies?

No one had any idea that an angry redneck who is mad at short, fat people would become a sensation. I don’t see why people on welfare should not be allowed to decide whether to eat fudge rounds, anyway.

You better run! Here comes Oliver Anthony!

Back to my next book. It is going to be good, people! How good? Really good. I can feel it in my bones. I had the same feeling about my first book, but somehow the world failed to pay attention to my genius. The world is full of undiscovered geniuses like me. You can probably buy them for peanuts on eBay.

I went to the Carolina Mountains LitFest in Burnsville last weekend. The keynote speaker was an author named Jason Mott. His last book, Hell of a Book, was the 2021 National Book Award winner. He is a great public speaker. He’s had time to practice talking about his book. He’s been on a book tour for two years.

He started to describe his book and I started getting excited. His last book was about an author on a road trip across America. Sound familiar? Jason said he was a nerd growing up; so was I. He had an overactive imagination. Bingo. Me too. Finally, he decided to weave magical realism into his book. That’s my idea!

There is one small difference. Jason Mott is Black. He wrote about traveling across an America torn apart by racial violence and police killings in 2021. I am not Black. I don’t think I can write about racism as well as a person who is the victim of it. I plan to write instead about ageism, It is as widespread as racism, but is not a hot topic at this time. Ageism is actually more widespread than racism; it affects everyone.

However, you would have a hard time finding a huge number of people who are mad as hell about ageism and are actually ready and willing to do something about it. Why? It’s hard to say. Retirees and seniors have every reason to protest. We are being put out to pasture and are expected to play along.

We aren’t supposed to complain. Society considers it bad manners for older people to gripe. The elderly have had a good long life and should be quiet and behave themselves. Many cultures used to kill the elderly when they became a burden. In ancient Sardinia, they forced the elderly to eat a poison herb, and told them, “To spare you a slow, painful death, we can throw you off a cliff instead.” Most agreed. The poison caused a hideous rictus, a sneering smile on the face of the dead, giving us the word “sardonic.”

A sardonic smile?

Home Free will touch on the issue of ageism, but I don’t plan to make it a diatribe. I’m not a prophet nor do I consider myself qualified to be a leader on this issue. But now that I am old, I also refuse to be quiet about ageism.

They may have to kill me. I’m not sure how they’ll do it. I kind of like the idea of dying with a sneer on my lips. Imagine the reaction on people’s faces when they approach the coffin and see me sneering at them.

He who laughs last, laughs best. I hope you like my next book.