Multiple me
Today: Talia Lavin, author of Wild Faith.
Issue No. 272
My Clone Wars
Talia Lavin
My Clone Wars
by Talia Lavin
It’s never a good idea to search your own name online, but authors do it all the time—and by authors I mean me, a creature who, like Tinker Bell from Peter Pan, will instantly die without sufficient external acknowledgement. So, on the day it came out, I could not resist Amazon-searching my own book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America, hoping to explore some nifty new micro-categories in which it might be doing well, e.g.“Violence in Society” or “Christian Evangelism”.
Like other authors before me, I was confronted not only with my own book (doing quite well in “Violence in Society,” by the way), but also its clones.
The first, a print-on-demand number, had come out before my book was even released: Talia Lavin Prosopography: You Need to Have a Wild Faith to Succeed, by “James Clark.” My book is a blistering takedown of the Christian Right (the “Wild Faith” in question), which makes “James Clark”’s self-helpy subtitle inadvertently funny, in a sort of dismal, we-have-arrived-in-the-future-and-it-is-shit sort of way. I had to look up “prosopography” (“a description of a person's social and family connections, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions”); all the examples of prosopographies I could find outside of Amazon’s hellish bookscape seemed to involve scholarly studies of medieval guilds. At any rate, I complained about my new prosopography on Bluesky, and it disappeared. Easy come, easy go, right?
Within the next few days, three more clones cropped up, each one slightly shoddier than the last: There was Talia Lavin Biography: Why You Need Wild Faith to Succeed, by VerdanTales Presshouse (publisher of such titles as Margaret Atwood Biography: Literary Icon, Poet, and Paper Boat Crooner, and Martha Stewart Biography: The Cookbook Queen Unveils Cool Recipes in 100 Slices, all in the same format of white capitals on a blue-green ombre background). Then there was Tania Lavin Biography: The Wild Faith to Take Over America, whose subtitle implies I am a theocratic warlord, offered by “Summerhouse Publishers”—their list consists exclusively of biographies, including the incredible Rod Dreher Biography: Mastering the Art of Living Underwater. Dreher, a Christian reactionary, recently produced a book about “Living in Wonder,” so I guess… close enough?
Unsurprisingly, neither purported “publishing house” appears in any internet searches outside of Amazon itself. What’s the financial logic behind this publishing strategy? How much money could it possibly make, even over thousands of authors? How many people intending to buy one book wind up with one of these incomprehensible, slipshod knockoffs instead?
Keep us breathing fire!
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