Next time you're at the bookstore, front a copy of it on a display.

Ed, the practice has now been validated by the Wall Street Journal.
This appeared on the editorial page today:

************************************************** **************

Confessions of a Stockboy
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

What is to be my 15th book, a collection of short stories, has just --
to use the unnecessarily masculine verb -- hit the bookstores, which
means this is a difficult time for me. I can take (fairly well)
insulting reviews. I can accept (barely) not being a huge bestseller.
I can live (sadly) with close friends and family not always reading
what I have written. But what I cannot bear -- and up to now, as you
will discover, have not borne -- is seeing my books given a dismal
display in bookshops.

What of course every author wants is the Big Book Treatment: multiple
copies in the window, posters and special displays, vast quantities of
the sacred volume stocked at the counter, or point of purchase, as we
pros like to call it, with perhaps a modest television commercial
during halftime at the Super Bowl. What we usually find instead is one
copy, shelved in the back under Sociology. So many rainy days in the
Republic of Letters.

Early in my career as an author, I became a secret stockboy for my own
books. I would take that copy or two of my new books away from
Sociology or Religion, and, oh so cleverly, slip them onto the
bestseller table as I left the shop. If some of my newer books were,
briefly, on the New and Current tables, I would gently see to it that
they were positioned there more prominently. An acquaintance who works
in a bookshop tells me that I am not alone as a nonunion stockboy for
my own books. Lots of authors, apparently, go in for it. When they see
it happen, bookshop clerks add to their knowledge of the pathos of
human nature and, after the self-starting author has departed, quietly
return his books to Sociology. I hope I myself haven't yet been caught
at it.

My last book actually turned out to be a bestseller, not one
sufficient to free me from the financial wars, you understand, but
sufficient for the banner National Bestseller to appear across the
paperback version. Dream of dreams, I saw my book in respectable
stacks on bestseller tables. I saw it, Lordy be, in airport bookshops.
I had, you might think, arrived. Not quite. I still found myself
surreptitiously moving my books to even more dramatic places in the
shops in which I found them.

I have already moved a couple of copies of this, my new book, to a
position facing the entrance at Border's. I have also been watching
people as they circle the New and Current table. One largish man,
talking on a cellphone, picked up a copy of my book. I noted him
reading the dustjacket without pausing in his phone conversation. He
put it down and walked off. Poor fellow, he cannot possibly know what
he is missing.

I walked to Barnes & Noble and saw an attractive woman with my book in
her hand. I sidled up to her and announced, "I wrote that book." She
looked at me in mild disbelief, taking me, quite possibly, for a
maniac. I attempted to establish my sanity by telling her, in
too-quick speech, about an incident in which John O'Hara saw a
beautiful woman on a train reading one of his books. This could only
have confirmed her initial impression of my nuttiness.

The truth is, I am nutty. Not all of the time, but just now, under the
strain of having a new book in the world, I'm the mad stockboy, and,
count on it, I am certain to strike again.

**************************************

all the best -- Dan Ford
email: www.danford.net/letters.htm#9

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