Signing Books Without All the Heavy Lifting

It would be easy to think that top-selling authors are a lot of lazy louts. First, as The Guardian points out, you had JT LeRoy hiring stand-ins for public appearances, then Margaret Atwood cooked up her LongPen so that authors could sign at a distance. Now an anonymous publisher is using Craigslist to hire people to fake signatures. From The Guardian:

One smart publisher seems to have devised a way of easing the pain for the millionaire bestseller writer: they have posted an advert on the listing site, Craigslist, inviting a team of part-time workers to fake the signatures and get paid in cash for the privilege.

The advert says it is looking for 14 people who can do a blitz of false autograph signing on behalf of two unnamed co-authors of a newly released, and equally anonymous, book.

And I love this part, where The Guardian gets down and dirty and does the math:

The advert says the fake signing, to be held in Los Angeles, will run over two days at eight hours a day.

Each signing will take 15 seconds or less, and at that rate the team of 14 could sign up to 53,760 copies.

What’s next? No, never mind. Don’t answer that. The possibilities are endless. And I guess we’ll tell you about it when they come. Meanwhile, here’s The full piece from The Guardian.