THE MAD STOCKBOY STRIKES

Confessions of a Stockboy: If bookstores aren't moving my book, I'll move it. (JOSEPH EPSTEIN, July 13, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

What is to be my 15th book, a collection of short stories, has just--to use the unnecessarily masculine verb--hit the bookstores, which means this is a difficult time for me. I can take (fairly well) insulting reviews. I can accept (barely) not being a huge bestseller. I can live (sadly) with close friends and family not always reading what I have written. But what I cannot bear--and up to now, as you will discover, have not borne--is seeing my books given a dismal display in bookshops.

What of course every author wants is the Big Book Treatment: multiple copies in the window, posters and special displays, vast quantities of the sacred volume stocked at the counter, or point of purchase, as we pros like to call it, with perhaps a modest television commercial during halftime at the Super Bowl. What we usually find instead is one copy, shelved in the back under Sociology. So many rainy days in the Republic of Letters.

Early in my career as an author, I became a secret stockboy for my own books. I would take that copy or two of my new books away from Sociology or Religion and, oh so cleverly, slip them onto the bestseller table as I left the shop. If some of my newer books were, briefly, on the New and Current tables, I would gently see to it that they were positioned there more prominently. An acquaintance who works in a bookshop tells me that I am not alone as a nonunion stockboy for my own books. Lots of authors, apparently, go in for it. When they see it happen, bookshop clerks add to their knowledge of the pathos of human nature and, after the self-starting author has departed, quietly return his books to Sociology.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 13, 2003 12:36 PM