Pay Your Way into the Pages of a Book

What's in a name? Depends on who you ask and how much you're willing to pay.

A recent trend in fiction writing, apparently, is to name characters after people who have paid for the privilege. The most recent instance of this is a set of eBay auctions, the proceeds of which go to the nonprofit the First Amendment Project.

Heard of Thomas Perry? He writes the Jane Whitefield mystery novels. He'll use your name for a character in his latest book. He's just started writing, so you can have your pick of victim, villain, or anywhere in between. And, you get your name mentioned at least four times. Surely that's worth a few hundred dollars, right? Remember, the money is going to a nonprofit.

Dave Eggers, the fabulously funny author of You Shall Know Our Velocity and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is onboard as well. So is Anywhere but Here author Mona Simpson.

Fancy appearing in a graphic novel? Chris Ware's your man. The author of the award-winning Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, Ware will happily write your name above a character in one of this future projects.

It does make me wonder, though, what's to stop authors from doing this all the time. Maybe they already do? Those character names have to come from somewhere.

Some authors spend ages agonizing over names, doing research and sounding out possibilities. (J.K. Rowling comes to mind, with all of her comparative religions and cultures knowledge (not to mention astronomy and astrology) being brought to bear in names like Albus Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, and Sirius Black.) Rowling, like Dickens before her, seems to have the knack for choosing names that fit the characters like literary gloves (like Remus Lupin, the werewolf).

But that's not what we're talking about here, at least not according to Andrew Sean Greer. The author of The Story of a Marriage, Greer is offering to include an auction winner's name in his next book but doesn't guarantee anything else. It is, after all, a roll of the dice: You could very well win the auction, get your name in the book, and then find out that you (or at least a character named you) has died in some horrible way midway into Chapter 3.

Maybe that's OK. Maybe it's worth the money. I won't be finding out, since I won't be bidding. If I'm going to see my name in a book, it's going to have to be an autobiography.