Thursday, October 11, 2012

I just can't remember...

(Reprinted from Venture Galleries Blog Site.)

Heard a band play not long ago and saw the lead singer totally forget the lyrics to his song.
I mean the guy was singing along and then nothing. He wasn’t an old fart like me, either. Guy was in his twenties. Later in the set it happened again. The singer blew it off as too many distractions in his life. And we, the audience, applauded because we knew exactly what he meant.
I mean there are TV shows, news shows, debates, the Internet. Facebook, Tweeter, and gobs of other sites I have not yet learned about. There is eBay and BidNow and the daily newspaper and the weekly magazines and the on-line magazines and then there are books. (Remember them?) And neighbors wanting to come over and talk. And then you want to go to the neighbor’s house and talk. And then the pets go missing. Not bad if it is a cat , but the gold fish is most disconcerting.

Didn’t we have sushi last night?

Pollsters call. They come by your door. The catalogs have started arriving – by the pounds. The emails are piling up. Your bank demands you change your PIN number. They even tell you how it can be changed to be accepted by them. (Arrogant bastards!)

No fault of your own, you forgot to pay the credit card bill on time. Or was it the phone bill? Why is the electric service truck in the alley? “Honey, have we paid the light bill?”

There are visits to the doctors’ offices. Insurance forms. Then calls to the insurance company because a period was left of a form. The car has to go into the shop for computer adjustments. And your own PC is getting slower and slower, not to mention that you are waking around with a two year-old iPhone, for God’s sake; or worse yet – an original Blackberry.

All of this builds and builds. The kids need money for school. Their cars need tuning, tires and tags. The office is going to move adding thirty minutes more to your commute. The Rangers lose. The Astros go into the American League. Chavez is re-elected in Venezuela. More illegals cross our borders. And the price of gasoline enters the stratosphere.

Wait, the Rangers had a thirteen-game lead just the other day. What happened to it?

No wonder the guy can’t remember the lyrics to a couple of songs.

And through all of this we want him and about a million other people like him, to remember our books. Remember to stop what they are doing and go buy them.

Good luck.

There is a lot of competition out there and little of it has to do with publishing. Most of it is life’s static. That bleeding noise which seems to infiltrate every corner of our being. It saps our energy, our imagination and our memory.

I mean, I’ve even forgotten the point I wanted to make – oh wait – it is this. Your marketing has to cut through all of that to be successful.  You aren’t just competing against Stephen King or John Grisham – oh no. you’ve got CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, ESPN, FX, TNT, TBN, HBO, PBS, RSVP and God knows who else standing in your way. Not to mention The New York Times, and times changes in the fall (do we spring or fall and in which direction? What day does it happen on.)

And don’t forget the trash has to go out, there’s a school play tomorrow night, a soccer match on Thursday and the Lawrences want us over for cocktails Friday at six-thirty sharp. And through it all you are supposed to remember to buy a book. A book. A quiet little invention with words printed in it. A book, among all this cacophony. Shew!

Who the hell are the Lawrences?

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