When I was working in Colorado in the late 1980s, a colleague of mine who wrote a weekly column published a collection of his pieces.
I purchased a copy of his book and asked him to inscribe it to me.
He did just that, and when I looked at what he had written, I had to laugh.
Essentially what I read was him telling me that if I ever thought of having a collection of my sports columns published, I should tell him and he would do me a favor.
“I’ll shoot you in the head. You’ll be much happier.”
My colleague said that he had his wife had been making appearances all over northern Colorado, signing and selling books and talking with readers. He said they were close to breaking even on what it had cost them to publish the book.
You see, he had published it under what was known at the time — unfairly in many cases — as vanity publishing.
True vanity publishing is some rich guy writing a book — perhaps a history of his family or an autobiography — and paying to have five or 10 copies published that he would give to friends and relatives. My friend Mike Peters wasn’t doing that with his book “Seventy-six Gnarly Trombones.” He was trying to make money.
I no longer have the book. I lost it in one of my many movies since 1988, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a “like new” copy of it on Amazon and I ordered it right away.
I also saw an interesting number. My friend’s book is listed as number 6,947,632 on Amazon’s best-seller list. I want to be fair here, so I need to point out that it was published nearly 35 years ago.
The fascinating thing about the number to me was that even if his book is last on the list, that means Amazon has access to nearly seven million books.
It also makes me feel better about the status of my own book. “The System” which I co-authored with my lifelong friend Bill Madden, was released a little more than a month ago, and the most recent number I saw was that we ranked as No. 866,322 on the same list.
I had felt kind of bad about it until I realized there were more than six million books below us.
If we can climb a little higher on the list, I may not be tempted to have anyone shoot me in the head.