Of the readings Tom organized, one brutal night comes to mind. At a sports bar we took turns standing on the pool table to shout our stories against the noise of pinball machines and televised football games. The drinkers talked over us. One writer, Cory, sweet little Cory with her thick glasses, she shook while telling the story of her nephew dying of juvenile leukemia. Tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. The drunks shouted at the televisions, oblivious. These were video-poker-playing beer drinkers. No one gave a rat’s ass about the well-crafted emotional striptease we were doing on their pool table.

  My turn came, and I read a short story about waiters pissing in food before serving it to wealthy guests, what would someday become chapter 10 in Fight Club. By the end someone had turned down the volume of the televisions. No one played pinball. What’s to say? A coarse story about piss and farts won them. They were listening, listening enough to laugh.

  Process: Piracy

  A few years ago, the assistant to Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the greatest living publicist, decided to return to college for a graduate degree in writing for television. The young man enrolled at Columbia, and on his first day of classes sent Todd a photograph of the program’s assigned textbook.

  The title? Chuck Palahniuk’s Advice on Writing. The book contained essays I’d written for Dennis Widmyer’s site, The Cult. Years ago, the site’s focus on me was unnerving, and I’d hoped to provide content that would redirect visitors to the craft of writing itself. In all, I wrote some thirty-plus essays, and the site kept them behind a firewall for subscribers to read. Nobody was making any real money. Whatever the case, they’d been liberated. The university had downloaded, printed, and bound them, giving them a title and a cover I’d never intended, and charging students for the use of them.

  This isn’t some Russian pirate site, this is Columbia University in NYC.

  The discovery was flattering and frustrating and drove me to do what I always do in such no-win situations—I started crowd seeding. Introducing the topic into conversations with creative people who depend on the royalty income from their work.

  In Mantova, Italy, I had dinner with Neil Gaiman, his daughter was just graduating from a college program there. He seemed resigned but hopeful on the topic: Gaiman proposed that if someone loves a writer’s work, really loves it, that person will eventually buy it. He speculated that in the countries where such piracy was rampant the economies were terrible. As those economies improved and people had more disposable income, they’d someday begin to buy the actual books they enjoyed. Gaiman likened a free, pirated book to the first no-cost shot of heroin that, with luck, will create a lifelong addiction. He advised patience. The loss to piracy was just a cost of doing business.

  This came to mind in Toronto, where a very tall man with a shaved head brought me a downloaded copy of Choke printed on standard-size typing paper and bound with Chicago screws. In a thick accent he said that my books and the books of Stephen King were the most popular novels in Russia, but that no one ever had to buy them. He then stood in line and refused to step aside until I autographed his “book.”

  To me it looked like a false economy.

  Unless printer ink, paper, and binding are also free in Russia, it’s likely this man had actually paid more to create his version than he would’ve paid for a commercially printed one. An irony he shrugged off. More recently a young couple from Ukraine told me the same. They described seeing subway cars filled with people who’d printed their own copies of Fight Club. When I mention this to my artist friends, they shake their heads.

  As bad as writers have it with piracy, comic creators have their own special circle of hell.

  Comic conventions are rife with hack artists who sell fans counterfeit prints of Hellboy or the Black Panther. These are versions drawn by amateurs, drawn badly and printed cheaply. They cost five dollars. Of course they’re unsigned. So…the buyers carry them to Artists Alley where they ask the actual creator/owner of the character to sign the work, thus giving it real value. When the artist dares to point out that Kabuki does not have one hand larger than the other, or that Cassie Hack would never copulate in such a position with a donkey—yes, it’s a sizable industry, depicting superheroes in sexualized ways and then bullying the creator to sign his or her approval—when the creator balks, the shit hits the Comic-Con fan. Hits the metaphoric fan, not the reader.

  When the creator refuses to sign the five-dollar knockoff, the collector erupts, accusing the creator of being a selfish prick. A rich, miserly jerk who demands big money for his actual work, prices no working-class fan can afford. Perhaps fueled by shame—yes, they’ve been fooled into buying a lousy fake, and they’re embarrassed to have this pointed out by someone they admire—the would-be collector pitches a fit. The creator who’s trying to protect her livelihood as well as the value of the actual work she’s sold to others, she’s accused and shamed and pilloried in person and online. So not only are you confronted by your Batman having oral sex with your Robin, but you’re made out to be the bad guy for not laughing along with the joke and autographing it.

  No, none of this is a satisfying answer, but it is a comfort.

  For a long time if anyone wanted to buy my books or the books of Salman Rushdie at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square in New York City, they had to ask for the books at the checkout counter. Yes, like cigarettes in a bodega. If left unguarded, my books would be stolen. Salman’s would be taken to the public bathrooms and stuffed in the toilets. Barnes & Noble was tired of shoplifters and sick of unblocking clogged toilets so behind the registers the books went.

  It helps to know that Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” was among the most read works of the nineteenth century. It was the Fifty Shades of Grey or the Harry Potter of its era, but Poe made an estimated $120 from it. That was his initial fee, the only money he got. Unscrupulous printers reproduced the poem endlessly without paying a royalty. Shakespeare also had to contend with stenographers who’d attend his plays, writing down the lines at a feverish pace, and selling the pirated plays filled with stenographic errors.

  It’s this flood of unauthorized Shakespearean works that drove the price down to a penny, according to the book The Stealth of Nations. And it’s probable that the penny price kept the plays so popular and preserved their author in the public’s taste for so many centuries.

  Without piracy, William Shakespeare might’ve been long forgotten.

  It seems the late George Romero would agree. A few years back, at ZombieCon in Seattle, I sat down with him. We talked about how American International had distributed his classic Night of the Living Dead without putting a copyright statement on prints of the film. It fell immediately into public domain. Anyone with a print could show it without paying a fee. Anyone could copy and sell it. In the early years of VHS tapes it was the top-selling film because no royalties were due. Romero never saw another nickel from his black-and-white masterpiece.

  In retrospect, he wasn’t unhappy. The copyright loss had kept the film in constant circulation. Between its initial theatrical release and its jump to videotapes, it was always being shown somewhere as a midnight movie. It had made enough money to cover production costs, he told me. And the film’s continuous popularity made Romero a lasting celebrity. It gave him a reputation that attracted financing for his subsequent projects. He shrugged off the loss of the copyright. If the film hadn’t exploded in the public domain, he might’ve been a one-shot director. What looked like a disaster at the time might actually have saved his career.

  Mapmakers, cartographers, create fake towns on the maps they make. Then if they find a map published by a different source, but featuring the same fake town, they know it’s a copy and can take legal action. With this in mind, you can plant a unique name or phrase that when searched will turn up every site on the web where your work is available. One click, and you’ve found all the illegal copies. The legendary writer Parker Hellbaby advised me of this trick.

  That might not be the answer you want, but if you were my student I’d tell you that’s as good as it gets for now.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  The last man is always a wild card. He loiters all evening as the book signing line stretches, zigzags, dwindles. He might disappear from sight, but he’s never gone. The booksellers will step up and ask if he’s looking for anything in particular, but he’ll wave them off. He’s just browsing, he’ll say. The garden variety will carry a manuscript in his backpack. Ever since the Art Buchwald lawsuit over Coming to America—look it up—we’re all terrified of touching a manuscript. The especially nervous writer will bring a box and place it an arm’s length away. Then as the manuscript is presented, the writer will feign excitement and ask the last man to put his “gift” into the box. When everyone’s gone, the touring writer will ask the store to throw the box in the garbage. Everyone’s a witness to testify that the writer never touched the unsolicited work.

  It was Doug Coupland, author of Generation X and so many other good books, who told me about hotel armoires. In the days before flat-screen televisions, hotel televisions were hidden inside fake armoires. It was such a hotel cliché that my agent once told me that “armoire” was the French word for “place to hide the television.” Coupland clued me in to their other secret purpose. The cabinets never reach the ceiling, but they’re too tall for most hotel maids to bother cleaning the tops. Consequently, every author on tour, given manuscripts and self-published memoirs and anything too big or too heavy to lug inside a suitcase for the next few weeks, all these well-intentioned gifts, the writer leaves them hidden on top of the room’s armoire. A kinder fate than putting them in the trash.

  At Coupland’s urging, I started to check atop armoires. Coated with dust, there they were. Expensive art books. Hand-knit sweaters. Beautiful things inscribed to the most famous names in literature, abandoned to the Sargasso Sea of book tours. Like the cobwebbed contents of a pharaoh’s tomb.

  Other times, the Last Man in Line delivers something less innocuous.

  In Portland, as the line ended at the First Congregationalist Church, a young man stepped up and began to deal out Polaroid pictures. He tossed them down on the table in front of me, mostly pictures of old men sleeping. Some were women, young but haggard. They all posed, eyes closed, slumped sideways with their heads pressed against white-painted plywood. He explained that he worked at a popular adult bookstore. They kept a Polaroid camera ready to snap pictures of people they’d ban from the premises. As an example, he tossed down a Polaroid of a smiling thirty-something man wearing a windbreaker. Written in Sharpie below his smile was THE TASTER.

  The Taster looked like half the software engineers and game designers I knew. He could’ve been my letter carrier or a branch manager at a bank.

  He was banned, the Last Man explained, because the clerks were always finding him on his hands and knees licking the floor in the porn arcade.

  Kid…don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

  I asked, “But what about these sleeping people?” Referring to the old men and young women slumped with their eyes closed.

  “They’re not asleep,” the Last Man in Line told me. “At shift change, we have to go back and check all the movie booths in the arcade, and when I find them I take their picture.” He added, “Before I call an ambulance.”

  On closer inspection, they looked pale. Their faces hung slack. The white plywood was a wall or partition they’d fallen sideways against.

  He said, “They’re dead.” Old men who’d suffered heart attacks or strokes while masturbating. Or they were female sex workers who’d sat in a porn booth to shoot up and had overdosed. There were so many that he’d begun to arrange them in rows across the long table. A gallery in Los Angeles had invited him to hang them in a show, he told me with pride. Arranged on the wall in a single eye-level row, they’d soon encircle a gallery space.

  Tours and tours after that night I spoke at a Chapters bookstore in Toronto. I told about the Polaroids, and a young woman in the crowd shouted out, “Is that the Fantasy store at Northeast Sandy and 32nd?” It was. To the delight of everyone, she shouted, “I know that guy. I was the jism swabber there!” She was Canadian, she’d explained, working off the books, and it was the only job she could find.

  In our incredible shrinking world. For the rest of my life, I’ll close my eyes and still see those dead faces.

  In San Francisco, the Last Man trailed the line onto the stage at the Castro Theatre. A blond man in a business suit, he seemed so normal. Then he wasn’t. His junk was out. He hadn’t just opened his fly and hauled it out. In the short time it took me to meet the person before him and sign a book, the Last Man whipped off his clothes, from shoes to necktie. Naked, he berated me, “You think you’re so outlandish? Well, autograph this!”

  And he flopped his pale, pink tackle on the table.

  The Truman Capote story flashed in my head: No, but I could initial it…Still, the smile of The Taster is never totally forgotten, and I’d gone skittish. A bookseller once told me of a reader asking for a kiss from the actor Alan Cumming on his tour. The kiss established a precedent like Stephen King’s smeared blood, and Cumming had ended up kissing hundreds of readers that night.

  I could see this penis going on Instagram, signed by me. Skin is ridiculously difficult to write on, even more so when it’s loose, wrinkled penis skin. People forget that writing books is my job, not autographing thousands of penises. I politely declined.

  Nothing could’ve made this Last Man happier. He snapped, “I knew you were a phony.” His parting shot.

  Which leads us to East Lansing, Michigan, and three high school kids who waited until the book signing line came to an end at one in the morning. My flight out of Detroit was in six hours, and I still needed to get back to my hotel in Ann Arbor, but they pleaded. A friend of theirs had gone out for pizza days before. A drunk driver had T-boned his car, killing the friends he was with and sending him to intensive care in the local hospital. These three asked if I’d stop by, right now at one or two in the morning, and say hello to him.

  And no, I won’t autograph penises, but I went to the hospital, which was as dim and quiet as any hospital at that hour. The kid had long, black Trent Reznor hair—otherwise he was pretty well wrapped up in plaster and bandages. His mother sat at his bedside. He didn’t die; in fact, I saw him on a later tour, grown up. He’d cut his hair.

  As I came in and took a seat and started to make small talk with her son, his mom went out in the hallway where I could still hear her crying.

  A Couple of Surefire

  Strategies for Selling

  Books to Americans

  If you were my student I’d know what you’d want: a guaranteed formula for success.

  That, I would love to give you, but then everyone would use it, and…Chick Lit was such a breakout golden ticket. From Sex and the City to Bridget Jones’s Diary, it sold so reliably publishing switched its terminology. Historically SF had meant “science fiction,” but after the success of books like Confessions of a Shopaholic and The Devil Wears Prada, SF came to stand for “shopping & fucking.” Every hopeful author and editor rushed to market with a pink-covered project, some not as good as the groundbreaking classics, some just plain terrible but hoping to ride the wave, and the flooded Chick Lit market drowned and died.

  In short, if I told you a surefire formula, it would fail from overuse.

  That said, I will whisper a couple tried-and-true patterns that American readers always seem to embrace. Let’s call these “Tropes for Dopes,” shall we?

  The first is that the classic American bestseller tends to depict three main characters. One character follows orders, is shy and agreeable, a general all-round good girl or boy. The second character is largely the opposite: a rebel who bullies and breaks the rules, always brashly hogging the spotlight. And the third is quiet, thoughtful, and acts as the narrator, relating the story to the reader.

  The passive character commits suicide in some way.

  The rebel is executed in some way.

  And the thoughtful witness leaves the circumstances of the story, wiser for having seen the fate of the other two characters, and is ready to relay this cautionary tale to the world.

  Don’t laugh. Arguably the bestselling American books of the twentieth century have followed this formula.

  In Gone with the Wind the unassuming Melanie Wilkes knows that she’ll likely die if she tries to bear a second child. However, as she says so raptly, “But Ashley always did want a big family…” So guess who dies in childbirth? In Valley of the Dolls the beautiful, obedient Jennifer North is a showgirl, for the most part a walking piece of lovely scenery who sends her income home to her domineering mother. When breast cancer threatens to change her looks, she takes an overdose of barbiturates. In Rosemary’s Baby, Terry Gionoffrio leaps from a high window, and the truth-telling Edward Hutchins is murdered by the coven of witches.

  Note: Edward “Hutch” Hutchins is also the “gun” of the novel. He’s kept alive, off-screen, largely forgotten in a coma, and regains consciousness for a moment to deliver key information before dying. His information sets in motion the discovery process in the third act. A little clumsy, yes, but it plays.

  In each case, the suicide of the passive character prompts the execution of the rebel.

  Sometimes, not a literal execution. Especially in the case of female characters. Scarlett O’Hara finds herself shunned, an exile despised by her husband, family, and community. Her child is dead, and she’s cast out in her despair. Likewise, Neely O’Hara, a fictional character who’s named herself after her favorite fictional character (very meta, Ms. J. Susann), also finds herself ostracized. All her husbands have rejected her, as have Hollywood and Broadway. She’s a drug- and drink-addled has-been who strove to gain the love of the entire world, but ends up despised by all.