Audio book & "Today Show" guest "offers"

(760 words)

The voice on the other end of the phone pulsed with exuberance. It was just the kind of voice I want promoting me and “The Last Baby Boomer.”

He wanted me to sign on with his North Carolina firm to grant them exclusive audio book rights. 

“The premise is dynamite,” he said. “We’re confident this will be a real break-out hit. Everyone here loves your book.”

Would I sign a contract?

I answered his question with one of my own. How many signed copies did he want?

“Excuse me?”

Certainly, I said, any reader as enthused as you would like multiple copies to keep and to give as gifts. And, man, I could really use the dough.

“Well, I haven’t actually read it.”

How do you know it’s so good?

“Our acquisitions editor said so.”

In fact, nobody had read my book. Firms like this one scout the lists to see which independent authors might be susceptible to a crafty sales pitch. He’d said they’d do my audio book for $3,500.

I told him I’d be more comfortable going forward if I knew at least one person there had read the book. I’d be happy to sell him one.

“Okay, how much does it cost?”

I told him one copy was $3,520.

I picked the inflated price so I could cover their costs, S&H, and still pocket about $2 so I could brag to the missus what a shrewd negotiator she’d married.

Art of the deal, baby!

The guy was, indeed, very friendly and our conversation was jocular. I was just jacking with him to make a point.

Some writers are on a shoe-string budget. My situation is more precarious. I can’t afford shoes with strings.

Mine is more like a flip flop budget.

Paying $3,500 for an audio book might be sound promotional strategy  but not for me at this point.

And my confidence is growing that one day agents seeking to make money off me — not from me — will step forward to secure these kinds of deals on my behalf.

Val and I went to the annual Adams Memorial Library fundraiser in Latrobe and I bumped into a reader and his praise for my book couldn’t have been gushier. He said my book was better than most of Kurt Vonnegut’s. Many of his compliments were interrupted by fits of laughter as he repeated to me his favorite parts.

I’d see him out of the corner of my eye pointing me out to strangers and telling them about me and my book.

Really, it was almost embarrassing.

Plus, my arm started getting tired from holding that heavy megaphone in front of his mouth every time I heard him mention my name.

So it was a swell end to a week that, of course, was not without his deflations. Foremost being the news I’d not be guesting on “The Today Show” with Matt and Savannah.

Now, I didn’t think I’d ever be on “Today” talking about my book. My dreams are more realistic.

But a guy I knew told me over the phone I was just the kind of guest they were seeking. And, ahem, he was a former “Today” producer.

I’ve contacted many of my media friends about promotional advice: Do they have any friends that’ll review the book or profile me?

He called me right back. We’d never talked on the phone.

“You’re perfect for ‘Today,’” he said. “Your book has a generational epoch theme and it’s funny. That’s just what they’re looking for.”

He hadn’t worked there in two years, but he was still friends with the remaining producers.

What, by the way, had he been up to?

“I’m immersed in projects involving the commercialization of legal marijuana.”

I should have realized it then, but he’d given me a clue to the opportunistic outcome.

I sent him the book (and one of the “Crayons!”) and waited. And waited.

I messaged him a month later. Nothing.

I messaged him a month after that. He sent back a terse note that his “Today” colleagues are jumping ship and he has few friends left at the Peacock.

So why did he reach out the way he did?

Does he enjoy messin’ with Sasquatch? Was it an elaborate scheme to snag a free book? Was he high when he called?

Was I?

Who knows?

All I know is we all need to be skeptical of any offers that seem too good to be true.

Consider it “sound” advice from a guy who understands how audio book negotiations work.

Related …

My Dashed Hope Fund

“Crayon!” fan letters, tantalizing leads & my first heckler

Reject me, please

Amazon “Last Baby Boomer” reviews

Someone stole Buck’s book from Tin Lizzy!

Frank Burns eats worms, redux

At Christmas, many newspapers are of the custom to re-publish verbatim the original Francis Pharcellus Church editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus,” from the New York Sun in 1897.

I intend it to become my custom on this day to re-run verbatim my 2009 post celebrating the birthday of Maj. Frank Burns. He would have been 71 today.

I realize it’s kind of lazy, but I think I exhausted the topic last year and without the benefit of a spiritual seance will have nothing to add.

So here I re-run my salute to Frank Burns.

Later today or tomorrow I’ll come back with something fresh and relevant.

I’m thinking stink bugs!

Take the day off and do something incompetent and mean-spirited: It’s the 70th birthday of Maj. Frank Burns.

Larry Linville, the man who crafted perhaps the most indelible character in American pop culture, was born on this day in 1939. The five-times married Linville, whose only other claim to fame was, coincidentally, a series of ill-fated romances aboard the fictional “Love Boat,” died April 10, 2000, at the age of 60.

But to me at least, ferret-faced Frank Burns will live forever.

It’s a measure of the esteem in which I hold Burns that when Matt Lauer saluted former Today Show colleague Bryant Gumbel on their shared birthday, I thought of calling up and demanding equal time for Burns. 

M*A*S*H remains one of the most endlessly fascinating TV shows in history.No other show has ever ranged the gamut from fall down funny to train wreck terrible. From 1972 through 1983, the show was compelling, sometimes for all the wrong reasons.

Many argue on www.jumptheshark.com about when the show leaped the great white maneater.

Was it when Klinger stopped wearing dresses? When B.J. took over for the incomparable Trapper John? When the insufferable Sidney Friedman became a fixture? Or was it when Col. Blake’s plane nose-dived into the South China Sea, a riveting episode that to this day lands like a punch to the solar plexus.

The show took hits with all those dramatic transformations.

But nothing caused the essence of the original hilarious premise to leak out of the storied series like when they lost Frank Burns.

He was the moralizing prig who cheated on his wife. He was the flag-waving patriot who stole purple hearts from wounded soldiers for his own self-glorification. He was a bumbling doctor who kept getting promoted over worthier physicians.

I’ll never forget the episode when Radar was a budding writer doing an assignment about amusing anecdotes. Burns told a story about growing up in Indiana next door  to a little wheel-chair bound boy named Timmy.

With evident glee, Frank tells of how Timmy was happily waving at the Burns family when he lost control of the chair. It plunged down the stairs, across the lawn and crashed the flailing invalid into the Burns family sedan.

He cackles witch-like through out the storytelling as B.J., Hawks and Radar listen in horror. When he concludes, B.J., the designated voice of conscience says, “That must have been awful!”

Frank says: “No, he just scratched the paint a little.”

Then he gets furious when the cheerful buddy-buddy reaction he’d sought results in scorn.

It’s brilliant. It combines a kind of malevolence and mean-spirited pettiness that used to unite the nation.

Today, all our bad guys divide us. You either love Barack Obama or hate him. Same goes for Sarah Palin.

Even deliberately cast evil doers like Montgomery Burns and Tony Soprano have their rooting sections.

That’s why we need more men like Frank Burns in our lives. We need people so bumbling and loathsome that the whole world can point our children to and say, “See that man in the white smock with the stethoscope. He’s pure evil. You don’t want to be grow up to be like him. He’s a mean, cheap and selfish stooge from whom no goodness results.”

So today, in honor of the great Frank Burns, I’m going to try and do something incompetent and mean-spirited.

Looking back over this incoherent blog post, I can surmise the incompetent part’s already taken care of.

Now, the hard part. Can I go against my gentle nature and do something deliberately mean-spirited?

I suppose while I’m thinking about it, I could call up Matt Lauer and demand he salute Frank Burns, too, instead of his suck-up buddy Gumbel, the egotisical poser who’s been on the fast track to Nowheresville since leaving the Today Show and whose head is becoming so big he ought to be called Giant Gumball.

Hmmm . . .

Maybe this mean-spirited bit won’t be so difficult after all.