Amazon, The Weird Accordion to Al and the Lingering Trump Stench

One of the major advantages to publishing a book through Amazon rather than Scribner, Abrams Image, Scholastic or Boss Fight Books (the publishers of The Big Rewind, My Year of Flops and You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, the hardcover version of Weird Al: The Book, the paperback version of Weird Al: The Book and Postal, respectively) is that if there’s something in your book that seems to cause a universally negative reaction and can be surgically removed without harming the whole you can simply edit it out of subsequent editions without too much trouble. 

Accordingly, when anywhere from ninety to ninety-five percent of the vitriolic, one-star reviews for The Weird Accordion to Al on Amazon complained that I mentioned Donald Trump several times in a book about a deliberately apolitical artist I broke down and edited out every reference to Trump in both the original and extended versions of the book. 

Bear in mind that I did not make the initial decision to reference the disgraced former president a handful of times over the course of a 388 to 500 page book. There’s a reason Trump made it into the first six or seven drafts of the books, including the ones that were published: it’s because as a pompous, painfully un-self-aware, un-self-conscious narcissist famous for being obnoxious on television, Trump personifies everything that Al has satirized over the course of his extraordinary career. 

But from a cost-benefit analysis, it simply did not make sense for me to keep the references to Trump in because there was no benefit whatsoever and the downside was huge. It wasn’t as if some people loved the Trump references and some people hated them. In all of the reviews there is not a single positive reference to my Trump mentions but the vast majority of negative reviews at least mentioned them when they did not focus monomaniacally on them. 

I naively assumed that doing what damn near every negative reviewer wanted me to do (make my “Weird Al” Yankovic book Trump-free) would keep people from writing weirdly personal pans of The Weird Accordion to Al focussing on the three or four times I mentioned the former President. 

I know I shouldn’t take negative reviews personally but it’s hard not to when so many of the Amazon pans had a distinctly personal quality. One gentlemen wrote that I wasn’t just a bad writer but also a bad person whose Kickstarter campaign for my book was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme designed to fleece gullible fans. 

I foolishly hoped that after I cut Trump out of the book I might have another month or two of negative reviews focussing on a handful of references to the former host of The Apprentice but then the new, Trump-free edit of The Weird Accordion to Al would become the version of the book you would buy new from Amazon and my website and consequently the incarnation of the book that people reviewed. 

I was wrong! Oh good lord, was I ever wrong! In a sense, The Weird Accordion to Al was a victim of its own success. It did crazy well for a self-published book, selling thousands of copies with little in the way of promotion or publicity outside of my website and social media. 

That means that there are probably fifteen hundred to two thousand copies of the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al with the Trump references in them in circulation and substantially fewer with them all removed.

I didn’t cut out all the references to Trump until the original version had been out a good six or seven months and the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour edition had been out for about a month. 

This helps explain why the extended version has gotten dramatically better reviews on Amazon: there are way fewer copies with Trump references in them, and consequently fewer copies liable to inspire vitriolic pans. 

To people who buy the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al used or pick it up in a free library, this is the only version of the book that matters. 

In my mind the official version of The Weird Accordion to Al and The Weird Accordion to Al: Ridiculously Self-Indulgent Ill-Advised Vanity Tour edition are the Trump-free final versions. To me, those are the only ones that should be reviewed, because those represent the book in its final form. 

Cutting Trump out of my “Weird Al” Yankovic book did not prevent me from getting vicious pans complaining about the presence of Trump in my book. No it did not. At best it merely slowed the process. 

I still get negative, Trump-focussed Amazon reviews but they aren’t as frequent as they used to be. 

Just last week, for example, I got two separate pans for the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al complaining about Trump being in a book I very publicly edited him out of. 

In a weird way I’m flattered that nearly two years after the release of the original version of The Weird Accordion to Al and over a year after I judiciously removed all references to Trump from my self-published labor of love people still care enough about the book to publicly condemn “problems” I fixed ages ago. 

If The Weird A-Coloring to Al is anywhere near as successful as The Weird Accordion to Al it will hopefully dramatically increase interest and sales in the books it’s spun off from. And if that happens there is a very good chance that the version curious coloring book fans will purchase will be an old version with the Trump references in them. 

I have wearily accepted the fact that as long as people are reading and reviewing The Weird Accordion to Al on Amazon they’ll be reading what I like to call the Trumped-up version rather than the final edition. There’s consequently a very good chance that it will continue getting negative reviews focussed on those phantom Trump references for years to come. 

I’m not gonna lie: it fucking sucks to wake up in the morning to discover that a stranger has attacked a book you spent years writing for something that is no longer a part of it and has not been for over a year. But it no longer hurts the way it did before. I’m still bummed to get a Trump-themed pan but it annoys me briefly rather than ruining my day the way it did before. 

That’s progress, I suppose, but I still have a ways to go before I’ll be able to read a negative review of one of my books and not feel sad or hurt on some level but I am a human being and a writer, if not necessarily in that order. 

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