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As some few of you know, I published a novel back in 2001. Lifers is the uplifting tale of two Christian boys who build a homemade rocket in their backyard to escape white slavery and meet Jesus in person so they can assasinate him in revenge. Despite this blockbuster plotting and a nude centerfold of me, the book did not a) sell very many copies, b) get bought by a Hollywood studio as the next Adam Sandler-is-a-serious-actor vehicle, or c) make me at all rich. Despite these disappointing returns, I still keep tabs on Lifers events across the globe: When a library in Skokie picks up a copy for its shelves, I know about it. When some young punk uses it for rolling papers down in Union Square, I know about it, and have him punished.
Used to be that when books like mine-the ones that don't sell and no one ever hears about-passed a certain point (usually about three months after their publication), the publisher would just give up, wash its hands of the whole mess, and remainder the books it still had, which basically means the price gets slashed to pennies on the dollar and truckloads of them get sent out to all the used bookstores of the world, where they are sold for $3 apiece and used for mulch, or occasionally as props on Hollywood sets in movies which involve book-burning sequences. They were then quickly forgotten and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Today, though, we have The Internet. Search on Lifers today, and you will get...a bunch of anti-abortion web sites. Ah, but search on "Lifers Somers" and you'll get dozens of hits back concerning my book, and only about half of them will be my own web site. The strange fact is, the number of web sites selling my book has actually increased in the past year or so. From big-name places like Walmart and Buy.com, to web sites I've never heard of, like www.aliensonearth.com or www.bookden.com, you can buy Lifers more easily today than you could in April 2001 when it was first available. And aside from the places you can buy Lifers, there are also plenty of places you can read about Lifers, some of which are not run by personal acquaintances of mine, believe it or not. You can read reviews of Lifers at www.philly.com, you can read old press releases I composed to promote my little readings at www.prweb.com. You can read encyclopedia entries on me at www.4reference.net or www.wikipedia.org. You can find out all the book this one guy's read (I don't know who the hell that is, but he's read a goodly number of books. Here's the first sentence of his little review of it: This book kind of sucked, but it looked good at the library and it was short so it's not like it mattered that much. Ah, now that's a review!). The point is, my book, which hardly anyone has actually read, lives on in the public eye on the Internet, like a ghost. This is, of course, a good thing. I prowl the used bookstores of SoHo in Manhattan on an almost-daily basis, and I can tell you unequivically that there is nothing sadder than finding a paperback book published in 1970 that I've never heard of, by an author I've never heard of, that I can't find a single hit on the Internet for. For all I know, this stained, brittle-paged copy is the only copy left in the wild, and this poor author's book has faded into complete obscurity. It isn't so hard to imagine my own book in that role. The Internet, of course, is not exactly a guarantee of immortality. But it's better than nothing. If it wasn't for the Internet, there'd be no public record of my book beyond the Library of Congress and perhaps a few straggling libraries across this great nation. Lord knows it barely penetrated bookstores across the country, so the fact that it's still available at Amazon.com is amazing. I don't mind that the book is a ghost, because being a ghost is better than not being here at all. Naturally, I'm not sitting on my hands breathlessly waiting for the Lifetime Channel to buy the film rights and make a TV-movie of Lifers starring a resurgent Corey Haim and Jessica Simpson, with a special guest appearance by Roger Moore as Jesus. I'm actively trying to sell my next novel, Chum, which is the uplifting story of a slow-witted Jersey City man who gets his foot stuck in his toilet one day and is forced to live the next year of his life in sad isolation in his bathroom, eating toothpaste to survive and fighting a losing battle with an army of invading Black Ants. Soon Chum too will haunt the Internet as the Book That Time Forgot. And I will be well pleased. If you want to tell me how badly I suck, or possibly send me some money, please do so.
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September 30, 2003