Independent Author Cheats and Gets Book Deal
“Should I read this?” my daughter asked, pointing to an obscure book with a drab cover of a snow man with a vulgar carrot sticking out.
She was looking for a book at B&M Booksellers and was wandering around aimlessly in the Fiction/Literature section. She used to complain about me doing the same thing, but I didn’t remind her of that.
“I know that book!” I exclaimed. I almost mentioned that I had written about it on my blog once, but she hardly ever reads my blog, and I wanted to keep it that way. We writers have more creative freedom knowing that family members, friends, and coworkers won’t read anything we put on our blogs.
“This?” she said. “You know this book?”
“He cheated to get it into book stores,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
The idea of me telling her a long story scared her off, and she moved along to find another book. But I still have the blog post I wrote.
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.
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