Was It Something We Said?

You’d think promoting a book like L.A. Bizarro would be easy in a town as incestuous and self-celebratory as Los Angeles.  We figured that twenty-one weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list—including the #1 spot—should be enough to warrant some legitimate local media attention.  Our much-anticipated new edition made #1 on Amazon’s local bestseller list before it even hit bookstores, and we were the #1 bestselling non-fiction paperback at one of L.A. preeminent independent bookstores within two weeks of our release.

And yet all of this was achieved via word of mouth, with a little help from Facebook and Twitter. Our smart, attractive, savvy, and loyal readers clearly know which way the wind is blowing, so where is the media hoopla?  Why isn’t the press all over us?  Why can’t we get arrested in the very town we’ve defecated dedicated the best years of our life to?

Make no mistake; it’s not that print and broadcast media have ignored us entirely.  Jessica Gelt at the L.A. Times has been a veritable angel in spreading the good word, and Casey Dolan out in Palm Springs was the first to promote the new edition on radio—but, for the most part, that’s were the good deeds end. Truth is, we’ve been ripped off more than we’ve been reviewed, and broadcast media has never had a problem stealing our material and claiming it as their own. 

Promoting the first edition of the book back in 1997 was a special kind of torture.  Remind us to tell you about the many negotatiations between us, our publicist, and the powers that be at “Good Day, L.A.” over our what they proposed would be a weeklong series of live location segments featuring your humble authors, broadcast from a different L.A. Bizarro destination every day for a week. “We love you guys!” they swooned.  “Everyone here thinks your book is hilarious!” they exclaimed. Then all those people who loved us and thought our book was so hilarious stopped returning our calls.  True to their word, however, they did produce those location segments, sans the hilarity—or us for that matter.  Not only were we left out of the equation, but so was any mention of the very book from which their segment producers “sourced” their material! Not being the kind of guys who take this kind of guff lying down, we got up and pressed them for an explanation. “Those segments were pitched to us by our own segment producers before we ever saw your book,” they haughtily claimed. We found this to be such an unbelievable experience that we decided to go ahead and lay down again.

Or sit right back and you’re hear our tale about E! Entertainment Television.  Just like “Good Day L.A.,” E!, too, seemed to keep losing the review copies of the book that we kept sending them for free. By our tally, various members of their production staff received a total of seven books before finally telling us that they “just can’t do anything with it,” because, as they said in that patronizing tone indigenous to Hollywood production companies, “E!’s content is celebrity driven.”  Really?  We’d guess those seven copies of the book had more than a little something to do with the hour-long special they produced a mere six weeks later called “Weird Hollywood,” a show fraught with an absolutely astounding number of L.A. Bizarro entries—and which used the word “bizarre” so many times throughout the narrative that we could have played a drinking game while we watched had we not been so paralyzed in horror. They never asked us to appear, nor did they ever make mention of the book, but to their credit, the special was hosted by a celebrity--if you consider soap opera actors to be celebrities.

This time around, with our new edition, we figured things would be different; we have a proven track record, impressive sales numbers, and a loyal following.  The book had since been anointed “a classic” by the Los Angeles Times, and (thanks to the aforementioned Ms. Gelt) they even gave us the cover of their Calendar Section upon the book’s 10th anniversary, even though it was out of print.  That was quite a shift from the first time around, in which the only occasion the name “L.A. Bizarro” appeared in the paper was when we made their bestseller list.  Now, with a little perspective in our favor, the media seemed to be paying attention to us. They were riffing on us, not just ripping us off.  We were committed to putting our troubled past behind us and looking forward to a bright future of the press clippings and television appearances that we had coming to us.  Finally, L.A. Bizarro would receive the credit it was due.

Or not.  To be sure, our readers—who are all we really care about—continue to show the love, but how do we let them know the book they have so patiently waited for is finally available?  Our sales numbers aside, we still can’t seem to get arrested when it comes to media attention.  We’re like a band who sells out huge concert venues but gets no airplay, only we stop short at face makeup and platform boots. 

Case in point: Los Angeles magazine.  It’s a magazine that covers all-things-L.A., so their title would suggest.  So our bestselling book about L.A. with an enthusiastic following numbering in the tens of thousands should surely warrant some prime coverage in L.A.’s premiere glossy, shouldn’t it?  Especially following the many go-rounds between us, our publicist, and the editors at Los Angeles. They were the first to receive chapter excerpts months before the book’s release and long before anyone else, and they were the first to receive the new cover.  They also got our celebrity endorsement quotes, our press release, authors’ bios and photos, and they also had both our personal email addresses and both our home phone numbers.  And home is where we sat, waiting for their call, so we could provide hilarious and insightful answers to all their probing questions.

Our phones never rang—and they threw us a bone with seventy-six measly misprinted words in a perfunctory blurb buried at the bottom of a page that even we missed the first time we flipped through the issue. Surely this is a tease, we thought. Their real L.A. Bizarro coverage would appear the following month; the month of the book’s release.  That would make sense.

They did in fact devote four pages to a book about L.A. in their next issue—not our book though; an L.A. picture book.  Our #1 bestselling book about L.A. gets seventy-six words, and they give four pages to an L.A. picture book.  And to add insult to injury, they saw fit to give Brooklyn, NY two pages in their “Weekender” section.  Have you ever done Brooklyn as a weekend trip from Los Angeles?  We didn’t think so.  Especially seeing that it takes the better part of a day to travel there and the better part of a day to return and a weekend is only two days long last time we checked. But whatever, we were never really that good at math.

But the editors of L.A. mag aren’t totally out of touch.  In their new issue they cover Whittier’s iconic Polynesian superstore, Oceanic Arts, as well as Pioneer Boulevard’s “Little India"—and hey, we love those places too! That’s why we extensively covered them in the first edition of L.A. Bizarro. Twelve years ago. 

Our feelings hurt and our egos bruised, we fired off a letter to Susan Melton, the editor of L.A. Magazine, for whom L.A. Bizarro does not seem to register.   They haven’t printed our letter—and least not yet—but they’ll probably need that page space anyway for L.A.’s “Best Flan” (an actual entry in their recent “Best Of” issue), or a Weekender piece on Mogadishu.