Recommended by OPRAH!!!

Oprah would love it. She really would. She’d almost certainly recommend my crispy new novel to her 17 billion fans and maybe even slap that little round stamp of approval thingy on it. She just hasn’t heard of it, at least not yet. Of course if she doesn’t recommend it she might never hear of it. The problem is that I lost her phone number. Or, well, I would have if I’d ever actually had it. If she had given me her number I never would have felt comfortable using it anyway. Plus it would be too painful to dial it (I miss dialing, don’t you?) only to find that it was just some random number she’d written down so I’d stop bugging her about my new book, which wouldn’t even have existed yet.

But if Oprah doesn’t recommend it and The New York Times and Washington Post don’t review it, how the hell will people know how gosh-darned good it is?

The truth is—and I’m not proud of this—but the truth is that I considered Recommended by Oprah as a title. Then I thought there might be some legal “issues,” so I actually considered trying to find someone else named Oprah and paying her to recommend it. But then I had this depressing fantasy that I’d go through all the time and expense involved in that fairly minor scam and that my auxiliary Oprah would hate the book and refuse to recommend it. But then it occurred to me that Rejected by the Auxiliary Oprah might be a decent title, and it would be true, though it really wouldn’t fit my book. So then I’d have to write a book that would fit that title, which:

1. Might not be a particularly good book
2. Might be somewhat difficult (as opposed to writing any other book, which is easy as pie)
3. Might then be accepted by the auxiliary Oprah, which would make the title deceptive, which could create legal “issues,” and I really wouldn’t want that.

I mean unless it helped sales.