Your Future Finalist

After giving it a medium amount of thought, I am very excited to announce my candidacy to be a finalist for the National Book Award. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the program, the National Book Award is this thing where they put a foil sticker on your book. Then people buy your book because they like stickers. Needless to say, that sounds like exactly the sort of thing I can get behind. And so here we are.

However, I want to emphasize that I am not announcing my candidacy to win the National Book Award. I only want to be a finalist. I'm not greedy. Also, my book isn't about World War II or anything so I don't expect it to win any major literary awards. But a finalist? Why not? I think Al Roker was a finalist one year. It's like jury duty.

So I don't anticipate it being difficult for my book to become a finalist. But! I really want that foil sticker, so I'm not taking any chances. That's why I'm announcing my candidacy publicly. I wanted to make sure that all you Seth-heads out there would know to cast your votes for The Great Frustration.

Now, I know what you're saying: Seth doesn't have devoted fans who refer to themselves as Seth-heads. And also you're saying: Readers don't get to vote for which books win or are finalists for the National Book Award.

Well, guess what? You've just given yourself two pieces of super wrong information: 1.) No such thing as a Seth-head? Then how do you explain the fact that my brother bought ten copies of my book? Or the fact that my morbidly obese basset hound, Hermione, worships the ground I walk on? And don't try to tell me that she's just looking for food that I may have dropped. 2.) Last time I checked, the US was a democracy. A really, really messed up democracy. Furthermore, the US is a nation and "national" is an adjective meaning "of or relating to a nation." ERGO, the National Book Award might as well be called the Get Your Votes In Award.

So if you'd like to vote for my book, just write the National Book Foundation a strongly worded letter. Or you can tweet at them here:

twitter.com/nationalbook

Remember, the squeaky wheel gets the oil. So when you're recommending my book to them, make sure to be as rude as you feel comfortable being.

That's all for now Seth-heads! I know I can count on your votes.

Freerange Interview!

Like individual chickens in a giant hourglass filled with chickens instead of sand, so are the days of our lives. That’s my pithy, artistic way of telling you that I have done an interview with Freerange Nonfiction, one of the best reading series/websites on the planet. No! On the universe.

You can read the interview here.

Also, I will be reading tonight with lots of cool people at the Franklin Park Reading Series. You can find details about the reading here. Double also, the Brooklyn Book Festival is coming up! You can find details about my BBF events back where I hyperlinked the word “here” in the second-to-last sentence.

My Sales Figures

Let's cut the crap. Publishing is a business. The only books that are important are the ones that sell. It doesn't matter how "good" a book is or how many "pages" it has. What matters is how many people it makes stinking, throw-up-in-a-diamond-bucket rich.

So while I'm very proud of my book's cultural/critical/artistic achievements (ever since it came out this May it has been playing the zeitgeist like a guitar it bought at a garage sale), the only thing that can really be used to measure its success is huge burlap sacks filled with nasty cash.

That's why I've decided to post my book's sales figures right here on this blog... The only problem is that everyone who has seen The Great Frustration's numbers firsthand has been so blown away by its commercial success that they have either a.) moved to the mountains and become hermits or b.) spontaneously ripped their own heads off. So the exact sales figures are not available to me.

But, using the information at my disposal, I have managed to come up with what I feel is a pretty accurate report on the book's progress:

This Monday (July, 25th) a friend of mine named Shawn told me he was thinking of buying my book, which I'm assuming he later went on to do. The very next day (July, 26th) I spoke to two of my family members who said that they were both also planning to purchase a copy of my book eventually. Therefore, my sales doubled in a two-day period. In business analytics, this is what's called a "trend."

Figure 1 (Extrapolation of Trend)

Examining this trend even further, you'll find that by August 13th over 500,000 people will have bought my book.

Figure 2 (Further Extrapolation of Trend)

And exactly one-third of those people will be named Shawn.

Figure 3 (Proportion of Shawns)

And when you consider the fact that Shawn is not a particularly common name, it becomes obvious that 500,000 is a rather conservative estimate. After all, my book is probably also being purchased by Peters and Susans and Ambers and Jacobs and Sarahs and Angelas and guys whose friends call them Spud and Jasons and Tonys and Chets and Montagues and the list goes on. Amandas and Stevens and Beauregards and Tiffanys and Malcolms and Jamals and Warners.

In any event, the point I’m trying to make here is not that money is the most important thing in the world. Just in publishing. And while its commercial success does not necessarily mean that you will like my book, it does mean that not liking it would make you evil and strange.

End of post!

Search and Replace

This is a book trailer I made using Notepad's Search and Replace function. This just proves that you don't need a big budget to make a book trailer. All you need is a word processor, lots of spare time, and the heart of a lion.

Poets & Writers 2011 First Fiction Roundup

I am interviewed by Hannah Tinti in the new issue of Poets & Writers. P&W has selected The Great Frustration for their 2011 First Fiction Roundup, highlighting the best debut fiction of the summer. You can read an excerpt from TGF on their site here. Make sure to check out the excerpts from the other great writers on the list as well: William Giraldi, Eleanor Henderson, Daniel Orozco, and Vanessa Veselka.