Independent Author Cheats and Gets Book Deal

Sigh!  Some snowmen will do anything for attention.

There are a lot of ways to cheat when you’re trying to sell a book.  You can put cleavage (or a hot shirtless guy) on the cover.  You can put profanity in the book title.  You can put a humorous vulgar image on the cover.  You can give yourself a gimmick pen name, or you can even pretend to be the opposite gender.

I’m not saying that cheating is wrong when it comes to selling a book.  New authors have to do what it takes to grab readers’ attention, so I don’t have a problem with an independent author cheating to sell books.  I call it cheating because these gimmicks often have nothing to do with the quality of the book, but the cheating isn’t necessarily bad.

The book Diary of an Oxygen Thief  by some guy named Anonymous took a few years to sell enough books to attract a major publishing company.  You can read more details here , including some strategies that are NOT cheating.   Remember, I’m not reviewing the content of the book.  I’m reviewing the process the author went through to sell enough copies of his book to get noticed.

First, the author called himself Anonymous.  This was before Anonymous the hacker (I think), but there have been earlier versions of Anonymous authors.  Anonymous wrote a controversial diary(?) called Go Ask Alice back in the 1970s.  Another Anonymous back in the 1990s (who turned out to be a journalist named Joe Klein) wrote the book Primary Colors about a presidential campaign that mirrored the Clintons.   Anonymous is the pen name authors sometimes use when they write stuff so controversial that they don’t want to attach a name to it.  It’s a gimmick because the stories usually aren’t true but the author wants to pretend they’re true.

Next, the cover of Diary of an Oxygen Thief  has a snowman with a carrot in a provocative place.  Some people would say that it’s the perfect place for a carrot.  It depends on one’s perspective, I guess.

The cover ticks me off, not because it’s vulgar, but because I came up with that idea back in 1973, and I’m sure somebody else came up with it before me as well.  Anyway, I was eight, and we’d just gone through a blizzard, and some friends and I had just built a snowman.  We put a baseball cap on it, and used buttons for eyes and a carrot for a nose.  In a moment of genius, I moved the carrot to a lower spot and pointed it out to everybody.

Nobody seemed offended, so I went inside and brought my older brother out.  He nodded his approval, went inside the house, and came back out with a bigger carrot.  If I’d had foresight, I would have photographed the snowman and used it for one of my ebook covers decades later.

Getting back to the book, Anonymous made about 1,000 copies and got a few of them inside a local book store.  Once copies of his book were distributed in small bookstores, the anonymous author supposedly pretended to be a publishing company to get his book into Barnes & Noble.  Lying is really cheating.  I don’t like lying.  But book publishers can be unethical too, so maybe it’s okay for an author to lie by pretending to be a publisher whom everybody assumes would be unethical anyway.

Anonymous also pretended to be a hot chick in an online dating service and mentioned the book in “her” profile as a book that she loved.  Yeah, it’s clever, but it’s also dishonest, and I feel bad for all the lonely guys who bought his book thinking they had a chance with a hot chick who liked books.

I’ve never been a lonely guy, but I’m a writer, so I’m empathetic and would never intentionally put a lonely guy through that experience.  I guess Anonymous is NOT empathetic.  I too thought of posing as a hot chick to get people to read my blog and buy my books.  I could have done it and chose not to.

Over time, Diary of an Oxygen Thief sold enough copies to get a publishing company’s attention, and now Anonymous has a book deal.    It’s great that Anonymous no longer has to pretend to be a publishing company and a hot chick.  On the other hand, I don’t think he ever got punished for pretending to be a publishing company or a hot chick.

As an aspiring author, I’m torn about this Anonymous.  I like to read success stories, but I don’t like to see bad behavior rewarded.  His success teaches writers bad lessons, like lying to Barnes & Noble and giving lonely guys false hope is justified.  I’m a little uncomfortable with that.

At least the lesson my older brother taught me decades ago was harmless:  When you’re building a snowman, use the biggest carrot.

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What do you think?  What’s worse, pretending to be a publishing company or pretending to be a hot chick?  How unethical are you willing to get in order to sell your books?  What other examples of Anonymous authors are out there?

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These books might not be sold at B&M Booksellers, but at least I didn’t cheat!

Now only 99 cents each on the Amazon Kindle!