December 11, 2001
The Inexorable Sadness of being a published author at your day job EVERYBODY, including me, expected that once I published a novel, everything would change: doors would open, money would be exchanged, contracts would be offered, and at the end of that long and winding road Skeet Ulrich is playing me in an ABC TV special entitled “Bourbon & Blues: The Jeff Somers Story”. When that didn’t happen, when the publication of my novel was met with crickets chirping and blank stares from everyone else, there was a period of disillusionment and soul-searching (it may appear to be simply drinking heavily, but in reality it’s soul-searching) which threatened to result in a new, slimmer ego for moi. I was saved from such a drastic ego downscaling, however, when my novel was reviewed by The New York Times Book Review over the summer. Surely a mention in such a prominent and well-regarded publication would lead to movie deals, drug-problems, and appearances on Oprah . Once again, the crickets, blank stares, and soul-searching. That’s okay, though. I’m happy to flog the book until I sell enough copies to be worth mentioning, and I don’t mind being a small-press author. At least I am a published author; there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, who never get anyone to pay them money for their work. So I am not here to whine about not selling millions of copies of Lifers--at least I have copies to sell. But you know what sucks? What sucks is showing up to work where people know I’ve published this book, because they’re all wondering the same thing: what’s he still doing here? Everyone expected the publication of the book to be the beginning of great things--and I’m sure it will be--but now it’s been eight months and I’m still showing up at work every day like a sucker, and having to answer the same questions over and over again is irritating: THEM: Hey, Jeff, how are book sales? ME: Uh, I don’t know. THEM: Oh. I’m sorry. Do you need some money? ME: NO I DON’T...well, okay, how much can you spare? You can’t explain to your coworkers that it was never about the money, that it’s great to just be in the game and written into the lineup. That just sounds like excuses for being an abject failure, or a fraud. It’s not like I told everyone "Kiss my German-Irish ass, I'm going to be a millionaire " back in March when the book first came out. But plenty of people assumed I was going to be rich and famous, and now it’s just weird that everyone knows I have a book out, but I’m still working.
Plus, there is the plot of the novel, which is basically about robbing a publishing house of all its equipment in a futile attempt to break free of a rut. This hits a little too close to home, since I happen to work at a publishing house. Every fellow employee who reads that damn book has to make a joke about that. Where’d you get *that* idea? they smirk, the bastards. Not only am I that guy who thought he was fancy because he published a book but didn’t sell any, I’m now also the guy who openly plots to rob his place of employment. I can’t wait for the fun to start if we ever actually got robbed. It’d be a scene from a movie: me sweating in some room while humorless cops flip through Lifers and make notes in the margins. Plus, of course, it’s hard to give a ripe fuck about work when you’re thinking you ought to be on the road, hitting book stores and appearing on any crappy local TV show you can manage, devoting your life to selling the book . That quickly leads to me to thinking that selling the book is pretty much just like work, except with a lot of travel involved. This quickly makes me sleepy, and I have to find a nice, empty conference room to relax in. It’s hard to shlep into work every day when you know that in a just world you’d have a check from Miramax in your bank account and college kids writing papers about your book, and it gets harder when people who can fire, promote, or ruin you via impersonal memos glance at you in the elevator and ask that damned fucking question again, how’s the book doing? The reason that question sucks so much is simple: if the book had just hit the million mark, I wouldn’t fucking be at work to be asked. Normally I would be vibrating with anger towards these people for their obvious cruelty, but so many of my coworkers are brain dead it might not be their fault. So, there you have it: instead of a life of adventure, money, and appearances on daytime talk shows, my life is one of vague embarrassment and obsession with Amazon.com sales ranks. Pity me, please, and feel free to send me electronic pity via email. And buy my book, for god’s sake. I can’t take much more of this. Jeff
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