Wanted: a Few Irregulars.

I’m about to ask you for something, so let me start with the truth that makes the asking honest: there are 73 of you receiving this newsletter, and I know some of you have been opening these things faithfully for months. You’ve never asked me for a thing. Today I’m asking you for one.

First, the news. On July 24th I’m formally releasing Wicked Imagination, the strangest and best book I’ve written in sixty years of trying. Here’s the premise: I wrote nineteen brutally honest chapters about my life, and after each one, three dead people read it and told me what they thought. Fifty-seven different witnesses in all. Audie Murphy sits in judgment of my grandfather. A World War I poet reads about my father’s electroshock treatments. Nora Ephron informs me that a chapter I was proud of was, and I quote, homework. My own son shows up near the end and overturns the whole trial.

No kidding, true story. Well, true book, anyway.

Now the ask. I’m founding a small, distinguished, and entirely unpaid society called the Back Bedroom Irregulars, named for the world headquarters of this operation, which is also where I keep my socks. Membership duties in full:

On July 28th and 29th, the Kindle edition of my autobiography will be available for free: costs you nothing, I promote it to strangers those two days anyway. You download it, you read it whenever life allows, and within a couple of weeks you leave an honest review on Amazon.

Honest is the load-bearing word. I don’t want praise; I want reviews. If the book strikes you as the ramblings of an old fool who’s spent too long talking to dead people, say so: one star, two stars, whatever it earned. Amazon frowns on arranged applause and so do I. What a nobody author needs isn’t flattery, it’s evidence that real people read the thing. Reviews are how Amazon decides a book exists. Right now, officially, mine doesn’t.

Why would you do this? I can offer no money, no merchandise, and no meetings — that last one alone puts us ahead of most organizations. What I can offer is this: you’d be a founding member of something, your name known to me personally (all perks of that dubious), and the plain satisfaction of tipping the scales for a 78-year-old making one honest last run at finding his readers.

If you’re in, tap the link below and answer four painless questions — takes about a minute:

Four Painless Questions

If you’re not in, delete this email with a clear conscience and I’ll never mention it again. You showed up here every week; that was already the gift.

Your obedient servant and founder,

Chet

P.S. — “Irregulars” is stolen from Sherlock Holmes, whose Baker Street Irregulars were street kids paid a shilling a day to notice things. I can’t pay the shilling. But noticing things is the whole job.