I wrote a book last week. I've never written a book before but so what? They're just words on a computer screen, right? I've written stuff before -- emails and lists of things to get at the hardware store -- so I have experience. Anybody can do it.
It all started when my friend Bert said, "You know Bud, you should write a book about your crazy family." I thought about it for a minute. It was a totally unique idea. So I wrote it. The words just flowed out of me like diarrhea.
It took me a pretty long time -- three hours -- to think up a catchy title. I finally came up with, My Crazy Family. How could you not sell a million books with a grabber like that?
I slapped together a cover -- my niece Sarah Jane (she's so cute) helped with the finger-painting -- and uploaded it on Amazon as a Kindle and a paperback. Heck, the uploading was harder than writing the book!
The next thing I did was change my Facebook profile. It used to say, "Works at Plumber." Now it says, "Works at Author."
Then I had to do some marketing. My first idea was total genius -- I got all the members of my crazy family and a bunch of my friends to write customer reviews on Amazon. In a few hours, I had 20 reviews and a 5-star rating!
Next, I pasted the Amazon link on Facebook, which is also a really clever idea that's probably never been done.
I heard that Amazon has a freebie program where you give the book away for free to create what they call "buzz." I knew this would work. How often have I stood in line outside of Walmart to get a free set of beer coasters or an umbrella hat?
I ended up selling 8000 books for free. Now I had a following!
I thought about trying to get reviews from hoity-toity newspapers like the New York Times -- (it's pretty simple -- you just send them a copy of your book with a nice letter) -- but the Post Office was going to charge me $9.95 for Priority Mail, so I didn't bother.
The book sold pretty well (getting my friends and relatives to buy it was another brilliant marketing scheme -- has anybody tried that before?)
About a week after publishing the book, my son caught our dog Bowzer tearing out the pages and eating them (everybody's a critic, right?). It was the cutest thing! My son got the whole thing on video and made a YouTube and pasted it on Facebook. The damn thing went -- what do you call it? -- virile in two days.
The next day, I sold 150,000 copies but poor old Bowzer was constipated for a week.
A few days later, I got a call from a guy named Marty from Hollywood. Said he loved my book and wanted to make a TV sitcom out of it. He asked me if I have an agent and I told him I did. (Mickey Bergan has been my insurance agent for 20 years.)
But I told Marty I didn't want to sell. I figured I could shoot a TV series myself. How hard could it be? Most TV sucks. All I had to do is shoot an episode and send it to a network and they'd pay me a ton of money and run it on TV. My family is pretty excited about starring in a TV series.
I plan to use the video on my son's smartphone. We start shooting next week.