Shopping advice

First of all, shopping is neither a hobby nor a vocation. It is a chore, and like all chores, it must be done, and it's not the worst idea to get all Mary Poppins over it and make the best of it. Nevertheless, a chore is something you don't want to be doing, which is taking away time from doing something you do want to be doing. Wanting to do chores, therefore, is a suspect behavior, aside from wanting to get them over with quickly so that you can do something else. Therefore, if you want to shop, there is something wrong with you.

There are exceptions to this. Shopping for any tech items, for instance, however little you may actually need them, is always entertaining, and should be considered an end in itself. In fact, not buying a piece of tech that you are particularly lusting over can be way more satisfying than buying it and wondering a week later what the hell was so good about it that you dropped eight hundred bucks without batting an eye. So we recommend that, if you go shopping for tech, you keep your hands in your pockets. Enjoy the experience, but do not make a commitment. This is the same advice we would give to sixteen-year-olds enjoying their first romance, for roughly the same reasons, if we were in the habit of advising sixteen-year-olds on their love lifes, which, I assure you, is a mug's game that the Coachean Life Coach will be steadily avoiding in this column. 

On the other hand, if you do find yourself in a store or market or whatever, through no fault of your own, we do advise that if you see something you want that is the slightest bit unusual, buy it. An iPhone will be around forever, and will in fact be upgraded a month after you buy yours, so you should think for a while about whether you really need yet another one. And just about every book ever published is available on Amazon (plus the longer you wait, the cheaper it might get), so think long and hard before plopping down a couple of Hamiltons because some clerk at Barnes and Noble is recommending the latest E. L. James book. But when you're talking about something unique, something you've never seen anywhere else, something that you had no idea that you wanted but the minute you see it you know you have to have it, buy it. If you don't, it won't be there next time you're looking. In fact, that should be your guiding principle: will you ever have a chance to buy this thing again? For instance, an usher's uniform from the 1939 New York World's Fair in a size that would fit maybe a ten-year-old, going for under a hundred bucks at a tag sale, will be gone in a second. It will never be seen again, no matter how thoroughly you search the corners of every collectibles shop and tag sale in America. Buy it the second you see it, Trust us on this. (Although if I had bought it, I have no idea what I would have done with it.)

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Advice from a life coach: Titling Your Book

As a lifelong publisher, I have seen endless letters and blurbs touting a given book as the next and latest some other book. Practically all of the second half of the twentieth century was one "the next To Kill a Mockingbird" after another. Needless to say, this was never true in the literary sense, and was simply wishful commercial thinking on the part of the publishers involved. If there had been a success in the past even marginally similar to the book at hand, the temptation to link that past success to the present contender was irresistible. Hope sprang eternal, in other words.

Fast forward a bit. The thing that is different nowadays is that not only publishers but authors are starting to imagine that their book is the next whatever. They not only slavishly reprocess the content of those books in their own work, but they even go so far as to title their books after those other successes. Which brings us to the important advice I wish to impart. 

If you are writing a book, do not put the word "girl" in the title. It's too late. The ship has sailed. It started with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The literal translation of the Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women. While, granted, Men Who Hate Women is about as mellifluous The 1947 Complete Guide to Real Estate Deals in Boise, Idaho, Part One: Laundromats, and immediately brings to mind the subtitle And The Women Who Love Them, and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is an immediate grabber, that doesn't mean that every other book by every other author should be titled similarly. The Girl With the Potato Tattooor The Girl With the Lawn Mower Tattoo just aren't the same. There are, in fact, some very real parodies, including The Dragon With the Girl Tattoo and The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut, so you can see that following Stieg Larrson's lead is a mug's game, plus he died young, and you don't want to do that either. 

Unfortunately, before all the authors in the world could get Lisbeth Salander out of their minds, Gone Girl came along and sold a megabazillion copies. Great. You want to emulate that one? Going Girl? Going Going Girl? Girl Where You At? Okay I Know I Had a Girl Here a Minute Ago? And then, of course, The Girl on a Train pulled into the station. Fine. Call your book The Girl on a Bus. The Girl on a Jitney. The Girl on a Hoverboard. Make it a flaming hoverboard. 

Jeesh. 

The thing is, these books, or at least books very close to them, arrive on my desk almost every day. I simply categorize them all as The Girl in the Unimaginative Book Title. DON'T MAKE THAT MISTAKE YOURSELF. You have the potential of being a great writer for the ages. You can win the National Book Award, the odd Pulitzer, the Nobel prize. But not if you follow trends and fashions. This is a recent thing, of course. Back in the day one did not see the Book of the Month Club offering To Maim a Mockingbird, Moby-Pete, Atlas Sneezed, The Pretty Good Gatsby or Dan Quixote. No one would have thought of doing it for a second. But nowadays? Just by writing this I suspect someone is going to grab the idea and Moby-Pete will be on the bookstands when I wake up tomorrow morning. Please: don't do it. No one wants to read Moby-Pete. Really. They don't. 

I once worked for a man who, when asked to help title a book, would ask, "Are there any drums in this book?" When you said no, he would ask, "Are there any trumpets?" When you said no again, he would announce, "There's your title. No Drums, No Trumpets."

Brilliant! Okay, maybe not. But funny, at least the first few dozen times. 

(And now I see you closing your eyes and thinking, There's no girl in my book. There's no hookah. Aha! No Girl, No Hookah. Sigh. Please don't send me a review copy. Please. Don't.)

I realize that I am fighting a lost battle here. Please stay tuned for my next posting, "The Girl in The Coachean Blog." It's going to be my biggest hit yet.