I Beat Up Adam Selzer

Just a few days until Adam Selzer and I have our new books out out.

He is not taking it well. He is rocking back and forth, obsessively checking Google Blogs and and his Google alerts, eating so much candy that I think he'll probably need insulin, and pacing back and forth (more so than usual). I'd say he's done at least a half marathon just inside of HQ today alone. By the end of the week he'll have paced so much he could have made it to Carbondale.

If, you know, he had any reason to go to Carbondale.

So, I did what my contract as Smart Aleck Staff manager says I'm to do:

I beat him. I beat him up but GOOD.

You see, in all this "anti bullying" stuff we're doing in YA lit these days, no one's really telling the bully's side of the story, except for the usual bunkum about them being scared and alone deep down. Well, sometimes, I'M a bully, and it's not because I'm scared and alone deep down, it's because Adam Selzer is driving me nuts and needs the snot beaten out of him.

He's on the couch now, with a steak over his eye. A minute ago he said, "Thanks, Sij. I needed that."

"You'd better believe you did," I said.

"Your book is going to outsell mine," he said. "I concede."

"Hey," I said, as I poured him a ginger ale. "Mine's in paperback. Easier sell. And it's got good trade reviews."

"I don't have BAD trade reviews," he said. "I just don't have any for this book yet. I did get that one on goodreads that you told me about."

Adam doesn't go on goodreads. It's blocked at HQ. But I saw one review for his new book, and it was a rave. Really, a rave. But reviews from goodreads, blogs, and trades don't really sell books, anyway. Not really. Last year Adam was on AM radio, and after 60 seconds of talking he'd had more than 10x as many web page hits as he got from all the bloggers talking about I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It combined.  He didn't get many from being on NPR last weekend, though.

He's got about half an hour before he has to go out and do a couple of ghost tours now, so that'll get him out of HQ for a while. Long enough for me to hide the candy, though. On Tuesday morning, the two of us will probably trek around to the many indie book stores in Chicagoland to see if our books are on the shelves. And I'll probably end up beating him up again at the end of the day. You should have seen how bruised he was the day that Smart Aleck's Guide came out.