Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Nothing to Fear, But the Fear of Death Threats

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Today Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett are going in front of Congress to request millions of dollars in security protection for themselves, their families, and also other federal judges whose lives are being threatened frequently. Which, among the steady drumbeat of death threat news, reminded me of this piece that I wrote last year. —DM

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Let’s talk “death threats.”

Bill Maher has a feature called, “I don’t know it for a fact … I just know it’s true.”

That’s how I feel about most things I think I know about death threats. I don’t know it for a fact, I just know it’s true:

• That the top 1,000 people who have ever made a death threat are accountable for 75% of all death threats.

• That nine hundred and twenty-two of those top 1,000 death-threateners are operating out of man caves.

• That the vast majority of death threats aren’t “credible,” because people who threaten death are lazier than they are angry. Really? You’re mad enough that you want someone to die? But so lazy you won’t even get off your couch?

• That still, because a “credible” death threat is best defined as one made to you and your loved ones, death threats are terrifying to anyone who receives them. And public officials constantly terrified by death threats—or just the terrifying prospect of getting death threats—can’t accurately represent the sorts of courageous American citizens we need represented.

• That if we didn’t want a society led by terrified public officials, the FBI would get very serious and create a Branch of Death-Threat Investigation. The BD-TI would hire some very smart young programmers to effortlessly trace the dumbfuck sources of death threats, and also retrain a small percentage of ICE officers to specialize in raiding man caves.

• And that if BT-DI officials started giving “the worst of the worst” death-threateners a very public taste of their own terrifying medicine (see below), there’d be many fewer death threats, all of a sudden. And maybe—just maybe—a lot more political courage.

• And unlike urban crime, government bloat, inflation and high healthcare costs, we could largely solve this death-threat problem in a matter of months.

I don’t know it for a fact. I just know it’s true.

Don’t you?

She Made You Feel Welcome to Stay

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My friend (and my running mate Paul Engleman’s beloved wife)

[and my younger friends Joe and Lucie’s beloved mother]

Barb Carney died last Monday night.

She was (still is) poetry, more than prose.

Dappled more than sunny or shaded.

Like the garden that she wrapped around her home.

Philosophically eclectic, spiritually consistent, essentially vigilant.

Gentle. Steely. A little world-weary. Still curious. And always prepared for the very next thing you said to be funny as hell.

I could go on, and I hope others will.

But you gotta be careful, writing about Barb:

I once told her I was considering writing a diary of my wife’s cancer treatment

And she said as strongly as she ever said anything to me, “Please don’t!”

She also thought Joan Didion’s book about her spouse’s death, The Year of Magical Thinking

Was endlessly self-indulgent.

So I’d rather offer a single observation, to remember Barb

(and Barb knows what I’m about to say next because we joked about it):

When Barb offered you coffee

After dinner at their house—

And she always did—

you felt loved in a way

that you vaguely understood

that you hadn’t felt loved in a while.

Or maybe ever, before.

Barb had as good an understanding

Of what we are doing on this planet—

(Kurt Vonnegut said it was to “help each other

get through this thing, whatever it is”)—

As anyone I’ve known.

And she loved this song.

Let’s hum along.

Two questions You Don’t Ask A Recently Published Author, and Why

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A few months before Soccer Dad came out, an Ohio soccer mom put out Surviving Soccer—a very different book for a similar audience. Karen Scholl’s is a humor book—a comprehensive send-up of the bizarre behavior and deranged thinking of sports parents who think they are normal. People like me and Scholl.

Now, Scholl is writing about the bizarre behavior and deranged thinking of authors who think they are normal. People like Scholl and me.

She’s captured a lot of what I’ve been writing in my “Sales Mode” series here, about the endless rabid relentlessness required to publicize and promote a book, and the rewards. In a recent Substack account of a torturous yet triumphant book-signing appearance at the American Library Association show in Chicago, Scholl hit on an aspect of this process that “Sales Mode” hasn’t touched yet. She wrote:

But you know what people say to you when your book comes out? How’s it selling? Seems innocent. Kind, even. Here they are asking about something that’s important to me. And yet it feels like a small, polite stab. Wasn’t it enough that I wrote a book and got it published? Now you want to know how many copies I’ve sold? Truthfully, I don’t actually know. I’m not sure I really want to know. I only know enough to know it will never be enough to brag about. You know?

Asking an author, “How’s it selling?” is like asking a long-unemployed person, “How’s the job search going?” But also, not asking, “How’s it selling?” is like not asking a long-unemployed person, “How’s the job search going?”

You worry you’ll wound ’em either way.

No, you won’t. Especially the author, who like Scholl, generally doesn’t know how the book is doing in any way that will satisfy a questioner, because the vagaries of book sales are full of delayed reporting from variously reliable channels, all with their technical caveats. It’s all shadows on cave walls. The best I can tell you about Soccer Dad is that “the publisher seems happy” and that sales in June exceeded sales in May (I am pretty sure), which indicates momentum is building since the launch, rather than falling off (I am pretty sure).

Yes, comes the reply, but what about the numbers? Here’s the problem with the numbers. The only numbers anyone has ever heard about books are about books like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, which has sold “millions of copies worldwide,” and (mostly because it’s taught in schools) sells 125,000 copies a year, according to my close friend AI Overview. How about The Shining? “Exact figures for Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining are difficult to pinpoint, as the publishing industry does not publicly disclose raw numbers. However, early hardback sales are widely cited as approximately 700,000 copies …”

So how is it going to sound to you that my book is selling several hundred copies per month? Or, that I’d be pleased if it got up to 3,000 this year, in hopes that enough of those 3,000 love it so much they’ll recommend it to others, and so we maybe sell another 1,000 every year until—I don’t fucking know, why don’t you just tell me what I want to hear: That you enjoyed the book (if that’s true), and that you were glad to see it got covered in The USA Today. I didn’t write this book to make money, I wrote it to communicate with people. I want to talk what people are saying about it, not how many of them bought it.

If my book starts selling really well, you’ll be the first to hear it—probably from my interviewer on the Today Show. Meanwhile, please just hope it sells well enough to meet the Sisyphean goal I had for it going in: that a publisher wants me to write another one sometime, and that I come up with another idea worthy of another five years of my life.

Oh, and speaking of which, that’s the other question you don’t ask a recently published author: “What’s your next book?” Unless you’d also ask a mother in the recovery room what she’s going to name her next baby, and when’s it coming out.

(It’s also possible I’m getting a little brittle, after all these months of promoting Soccer Dad like it’s the Holy goddamn Bible. The other day a friend had the accidental temerity to suggest that Soccer Dad‘s good sales might have something to do with the World Cup. I threatened to drive over to his house and shit in his driveway.)