Squawk Radio
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Teresa Sings "SPOOT Me Baby One More Time!"
As horrid as it is to expose all of our neuroses to you, gentle readers, I thought you'd want to know about a tribal ritual we here at Squawk Radio call "spooting". Now, the original term was "spotting", but a careless typo (Connie's perhaps?) has rendered the terminology unique. For us, spooting has become an intimate rite of passage that we perform whenever a new book is due out. This is how it's done:
1) Determine which Squawk Radio chickadee has a new book out that month
2) Travel to all of the bookstores/Wal-Marts/drugstores/grocery stores in your immediate driving range (if your royalty payment has arrived and you can afford gas)
3) Count the number of the aforementioned Squawk Radio author's books on the shelves
4) Deliver detailed report on placement and number of books at each site
Alas, since we're dealing with neurotic writers, instead of receiving appreciation for all of your hard work (or reimbursement for your gasoline), these are the responses you are likely to hear:
1) "What do you mean Lisa/Liz/Connie/Christina/Eloisa had more copies on the shelf than me?" (she whined)
2) "The publisher obviously forgot to ship my books this month! My career is dead and I wish I was!" (she wailed)
3) "They didn't have my book at all?!? &^%$$#%^!!!!!" (Liz, is that you?)
4) "They still had 30 books left! Holy crap, the book must be tanking! I'm going to have to go be a barista at Starbucks!" (back to whining)
What I'm trying to say is something our respective spouses learned a long time ago—there is no way to make a writer happy. If there are no books, we are convinced that there never were. If there are a handful of books, we're convinced they're not selling quickly enough. If there are a lot of books, we're convinced they're not selling at all.
But I have come up with a foolproof way to keep my dear friends from killing the messenger--lie. This is my new Official Spooting Report:
"So I walked into Wal-Mart and you had 6 pockets on the Bestseller rack, each pocket holding 6 copies. I counted the books and you'd obviously already sold 30 copies just since yesterday when they'd obviously arrived! And the good news was that there was this muscular Adonis type delivery guy right behind me wearing nothing but a g-string and carrying a fresh shipment of your books—30 more copies! But before he could place them into the rack pockets, he was besieged by a stampeding herd of wild-eyed women screaming, "OH MY STARS!!! Is that really Connie Brockway's/Christina Dodd's/Lisa Kleypas's/Elizabeth Bevarly's/Eloisa James' new book?!?! I HAVE TO HAVE IT NOW AND BUY COPIES FOR ALL 47 OF MY DEAREST FRIENDS!!!"
So tell me, my little chickadees, have you ever told a slight exaggeration to make a friend feel better? (Don't pretend innocence! You know just what I'm talking about--the time you told her those white pants really DIDN'T make her butt look big and her husband was witty instead of obnoxious.)
Teresa Medeiros, 5:30 PM
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