SEARCHING FOR ICONS

This is a blog post simply because it's too many words for twitter. I've bludgeoned a fair amount of social media types with blurbs, updates and annoying reminders of a book I wrote entitled Coma Dog. This basically falls in line with the same self-pimping barrage except it's not a request to buy, read or review the book. I'm actually just looking to shift a few little icons onto my Amazon page. Footprints in the sand. Say what?

If you've ever browsed books through Amazon (on a full web screen) you may have noticed tiny images of other books toward the bottom of a page. In other words, you happen to be a habitual online shopper of books and decide to click on the page for War and Peace because it's exactly what you want to be reading on an electronic device this summer. And when you scroll down you note with some interest, that “customers also viewed" other writings by Tolstoy or perhaps Chekhov or Maria Alyokhina.

Maybe you decide to browse a bit more. If you look at a book by Hunter S. Thompson, you might see that customers also viewed work by Tom Wolfe or Bret Easton Ellis. Or, if you checked out the Amazon page for Phil Jackson's 11 Rings you might see that readers also browsed the work of David Halberstam or Balto, the Inner Spirit Wolf.

What happens if you click on the Amazon page for my own novel entitled Coma Dog? This is a “a madcap ride through the crazy, cynical world of movie production” according to one supremely intelligent reader. Yet, people who view my page don't seem to be reading inside-Hollywood satires or anything else remotely in the wheelhouse of my confused tale of doggie diabetes and the mid-life crisis. What other books are my viewers browsing? Wizards, dark towers, cobweb brides and things having to do with a slender pair of female wrists, lovingly bound by rope.

Okay, full disclaimer. I got nothing against torrid love affairs and fairy princesses and zombie killers. All those things are hot Amazon genre sellers so I should be appreciative – my Hollywood redemption tale seems to be appealing to those who have their fingers squarely on the button that drives Amazon's vast eBook empire. This is good, right? Perhaps. Unless any uber-hip NY Times and Guardian-type espresso swilling purveyors of all that is right in the world of literary importance happen to stop by and start giggling at the tiny icons of dark towers and unicorns in leather harnesses that seem to be my legion of followers.

And so I write these words and have a sudden dawning realization – that the disintegrating house of cards that has been my literary life will now become even more unstable. That the few people who have been kind enough to browse my book will probably abandon ship altogether – after all, if this asshole is going to make fun of our shape-shifting sex demons then screw him.

So what's the frequency, David? What do you want?

I want people to view my Amazon page, that's it. No need to buy anything. No need to “click to LOOK inside” for free chapters. I'm searching for new icons. Something besides butterflies and zebras. But who knows. Maybe I'll discover that people on my twitter feed read E L James or L Ron Hubbard or Kafka or Dr. Seuss. Maybe I'll find y'all are habitual browsers of self-help books or wagon trail prairie romances. Don't worry, your anonymous book reading pleasures are untraceable - they are only tiny pictures but every picture tells a story, don't it? Click on the Amazon link. Just do it. Leave a footprint, proof that you were there.

And the techromancers and their dark armies swarmed all around, and everywhere were the ancient healers with leather masks and opaque eyes. And a single file of cinnamon girls on fairy horses, drifting on the wind.