Signed Copy by Jeff Alexander:

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One of the best parts of becoming a published author is getting to stalk your book.

I learned about book-stalking from the website of my friend Pamela Ribon, an excellent online diarist and novelist who also writes on Samantha Who? Several years ago, after publishing her first novel, Why Girls Are Weird, Pam wrote about visiting bookstores, finding copies of her book, and bringing them to a store employee so she could offer to sign them. I thought, "Man, when I get a book published, I'm totally going to do that." And then I did. In the meantime, of course, I had to settle for stalking Pam's book. Oddly, nobody ever seemed to want me to sign them.

So far I've visited a couple of Barnes & Nobles here in Minnesota and at The Grove in Los Angeles, as well as a couple of Borders in L.A. What surprises me is that nobody ever seems to doubt that I'm actually the author of this book. There isn't an author photo on the cover, but I haven't been asked once for identification (although there was an awkward moment in the store on Sunset and Vine when the cashier initially thought I had just brought the copies of my book from home and wanted to stick them on their shelves). Apparently I could have been doing this all along, picking out books at random from the shelves and claiming to have written them. It probably would have worked as long as the real author wasn't a celebrity, a woman, dead, or someone with a name that indicated an ethnicity clearly different from my own. In other words, if you've got a signed copy of Benazir Bhutto's book, you can rest assured I had nothing to do with it.

I stalked my book again last week, but it wasn't the satisfying experience it normally is. Probably because I was in a used bookstore.

I brought the (fortunately only one) copy to the guy who had just given me five bucks for a grocery bag full of the used books I'd brought in, and offered to sign it. He was like, "Um, okay, whatever." I wouldn't have minded his apathy so much if I hadn't just walked right past their section of "Signed First Editions." I'm sure there were authors in there I'd never heard of either.

Now, a less self-confident writer than myself might have taken this incident personally, but not me. I could see that the "used" copy had never been opened, which could only mean that the person who sold it received multiple copies for their birthday and didn't have room for a baker's dozen. So he or she sold an extra copy back, to both spread the joy and to admire the flawless symmetry of twelve copies of A TV Guide to Life in various configurations.

So I'm not giving up stalking my book. I'm going to keep doing it until it's not in stores any more or I'm dead, whichever comes first (and if it's the latter, I plan to make arrangements in advance with a recent immigrant to the U.S., if she'll talk to me). That means you should still feel free to look for copies of my book with that coveted "signed copy" sticker on the front and that distinctive squiggle reading, approximately, "J~~~~~ A~/~~~~~" inside. Even if it's not one of the stores I mentioned above. Because I'll still go to more, and there's at least one I left out. See if you can find it first.

Jeff Alexander, A TV Guide to Life, television, life lessons, couch potato, books, Penguin Books