From Part Two, Chapter Two of Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? A Writer’s Memoir, and a Tale of a Lost Surfer’s Paradise

Which reminds me. During the past eight months, during which I didn’t write anything, I wrote my third draft of the screenplay to In Search of Captain Zero. See, I don’t really count this as writing, since it was whoring. To put it another way: Done just for the money. (As I said I would in Part One,I went into the tank.) As a writer – as with lists I make of women I’ve had sex with – it doesn’t count if the sole motivation on someone’s part is money. Even if there’s somehow a semi-rape involved.

What else did I do during all that time?

I read a lot. I read books about the creation of the cosmos and books about the lies we’ve been told by the people who run this sorry ass world. A few novels. One of the novels I read was Ahab’s Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund,a yarn that exists in some sort of parallel literary universe to Moby-Dick. Ahab’s Wife is a great book, in my opinion. I figure a book is great if I reread sentences just to hear them in my mind – while at the same time crazed to keep reading on to find out What Happens Next – and then get discouraged that I’m not able to write like that. When this happens I tell myself Yeah, but she couldn’t write what I write. This doesn’t work, so what I’ll then maybe do is dig out one of the emails or letters I’ve gotten that says In Search of Captain Zero changed someone’s life. Or one that says Cosmic Banditos made someone laugh until he cried, words to that effect. I mean try writing a book that changes someone’s life or makes him laugh until he cries.

You could write a book. Someday.

All else fails, as a last resort I might compare one of my book’s Amazon.com sales ranking with that of a great book like Ahab’s Wife and find that – according to marketing theory – my book is half as good. Which is impressive, trust me.

See, Amazon.com’s book sales ranking amounts to a Best Seller List that goes beyond the top ten that appear in, say, The New York Times Best Seller list. In fact, Amazon.com’s de facto Best Seller List lists millions of titles. (Holy shit, there are a lot of books out there!) This is useful for authors who don’t make the New York Times or any other Best Seller list, because their books don’t sell very many, relatively, yet they want to know how their books are selling. Authors of this description, of which I am one, can’t just call their publisher to find out how their books are selling because the publisher doesn’t know offhand, and doesn’t care, so they’re not going to look it up. In my case, no one at my publisher would take or return my call anyway, and certainly wouldn’t look up anything for me under any circumstances. Nor would my ex-literary, or book, agent, whom I fired for treachery. (So you don’t get confused: It was my movie agent, not book agent, whom I fired and whose response to that is the title of this book. The firing of my book agent didn't result in any titles, subtitles, or even a footnote. Only this parenthetical mention.)

Theoretically, at some point the Amazon.com list segues from a Best Seller List to a Worst Seller List. I’m not sure where this occurs numerically. It’s another spectrum kind of thing, as with Lisa and sex appeal, although I’m not so sure about that theory now. Not that Lisa has gotten less sexy…

In Search of Captain Zero has an average ranking of about 4,000 these days. This may sound discouraging but it’s not. For example, Ahab’s Wife, upon initial publication in 1999, made a bunch of real, actual Best Seller Lists, including the New York Times’ list. A few days ago I checked Ahab’s Wife’s Amazon.com sales ranking. It’s now two thousand and something. So my bookis currently selling about half as well as this former National Bestseller. As I say, this is impressive.

In case you’re wondering (and I hope you are because it would mean you’re paying attention): In Search of Captain Zero was first published in the spring of 2001 – almost two years after Ahab’s Wife. So Ahab’s Wife has had more time to slip in the ranking.

Good point.

Somewhere in Part One I mention a writer I know whom I refer to as a shitball motherfucker, due to his lack of self-reflection even when he’s looking in the mirror. I refer to the guy this way because of all the petty jealousies and even outright treacheries he’s directed toward me over the years. He mostly writes for Hollywood, but he’s also written a book. Once in a while, usually when I’m feeling particularly low, I’ll check its Amazon.com sales ranking – it’s always way up there in the hundreds of thousands, meaning hundreds of thousands of books are selling better than his book, rather than only about four thousand, as with my book, In Search of Captain Zero. (Cosmic Banditos is hovering around 8,000, which isn’t all that bad either.) This makes me grin or sometimes actually cackle with glee.

Another thing. One of Amazon.com’s many devices to get you to buy books is reader reviews. Readers get to be critics. As part of this, readers give books between one and five stars; little yellow five-pointed jobs. Both my books average 5 stars, based on a total of 80-something reader reviews, about 40 for each. This means almost everyone gave them 5 stars, the highest rating. Ahab’s Wife only averages 4 stars – plus a tiny bit of the tine on the fifth star.

Extrapolating: These days I’m capable of going to great and convoluted lengths to feel better about myself, or at least my writing.

Sometimes I outsmart myself, though – hoist myself by my own petard. While I was at it, so to speak, with Ahab’s Wife, I looked up Moby-Dick’s sales ranking. I wrote it down. On that day it was 788,765. For a brief moment I felt some sort of weird conglomeration of exhilaration and dismay. The reason for the exhilaration is self evident; not so for the dismay. Possibly something to do with Melville being dead, or dead for so long. A bit of the old doom-driven dread: I myself will be dead soon enough, and then remain that way for all of eternity. Or maybe my dismay was based on the hopelessly awful taste of the reading public, meaning you – the collective you, not you personally. I know: On some weird level Moby-Dick has had well over a hundred years to slip in sales ranking, so the above number is misleading. Also, a writer capable of producing Moby-Dick would likely be above concerns like Amazon.com sales ranking – which I, obviously, am not. This thought may have been involved in my dismay. It’s hard to say. No one knows shit about why he does anything. Add or feels anything to that.

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Excerpt: Author's Note My Homage to Kurt Vonnegut (Excerpt from Can't You Get Along With Anyone?)