We all have our favorite French words to use in bed, and POSH wasn’t one of mine.

I was sitting around bullshitting with my pal, Wendy Pepper, like I always do. She was in her studio working on a new dress, reading an eBook, following a news feed, listening to a podcast, checking her email, touching base with a client on the phone, basically being creative. Then she turned to me.

“How are you going to promote your eBooks?”

I was like, oh.

One by one she switched off all other channels. I love it when I get the full intellectual benefit of eyes-on-me attention from my high octane friends. While I was still sitting there without a clue, Wendy leaned closer and said, “I AM your target reader. I read.”

You can imagine the roaring silence that accompanied this shocking American confession.

“Yes, read. As in books. Blogs, you name it. Yes, eBooks. And I would pay money for them. I’m even into the literary blogs. I hunger to know how the writer of today makes sense of his world,” said Wendy, very much in italics. She likes to tease me. “So how are you going to get my attention?”

Clearly by being a total screw-up, I realized. But instead I ventured out by stating the obvious. “Well in eBooks you don’t have the object. You have the machine, but not the tactile object, the talisman that will always harken to the book.”

“Harken to the book,” she said, rolling her eyes.

I took that for assent. Agreement. Enthusiasm. “Yes!” I said. “I need to make bookmarks!”
The needle started threading, the foot started tapping, the screen was refreshed, and one by one all the Wendy Pepper channels came back on. I sat dreaming of my beautiful bookmarks that I would somehow magically get out to all my eBook customers. My readers. I sighed just thinking about them.

“Bookmarks,” she said a few minutes later, ripping a seam with the needle in her mouth.
She watched me lost in thought. I had no idea she too was lost in thought. But a few minutes later she declared, “I want a piece of every author. I want to possess that author, if only for an attention span of four minutes. Give it to me.”

I was like, whoa. Humbled and stuff, with the whirring of the sewing machine in the background. Such passion! What did I, the lowly author making sense of her world, have to give such a reader as this?

And of course all I could think of at that moment was, “Condoms!”

She was looking at me like, you’re a lesbian? So I just let that one go. “Taboos! Condoms! As in, erotic epic saga, meet the latest thing in modern hookups. Nobody has anything tasteful to carry those things in. What if we Wendy Peppered them a velvet pillowcase?”

“For their contraception?”

“Right! Lovely by the bedside!”

She was laughing now, almost laughing with me as she began to see what I was seeing.

“So we…”

“Yeah, we like mock up these gorgeous…what?”

“Velvet.”

“Velvet pouch-thingies. And you just slip your condom packet inside.”

“Never carry fewer than three.”

“Right. Mark that. Needs to fit three packets. You slip them into this gorgeous velvet little—“

“Embossed.”

“Embossed! Naughty little pillowcase! And you tuck that thing in your jeans.”

“Or in your handbag.”

“Or it’s even lovely by the bedside.”

“You said that.”

“Decorative velvet embossed condom-sized pouch-thingy!”

“It’s the coolest,” deadpanned Wendy Pepper.

“The absolute coolest ever. And I hand you that pouch-thingy and you think, this is the only author in the world I want to possess for four minutes!“

“And in those four minutes you get the sale.”

“Cha-ching! Can be yours for $2.99! On Kindle, Nook or iPad dear, the platform of your choice, I aim to please.”

“And you’ve got the image I need to emboss—“

“Yeah. The tree of life. It’s a plot point in Book One, where—”

“Emboss on the? What did you call it?”

“The pouch-thingy.”

She looked over her sewing glasses. Pouch-thingy? Nuh-unh.

“What are we going to call them? They have these glove boxes you can buy in like CVS.”

“I’m all yours, dear,” said Wendy, “just not in CVS.”

“Right, so what’s a more upscale but not pretentious word for what we’re making?”

My royal audience was over. “I need the picture of the tree for my embosser, and get the fabric from here.” She scribbled a website and took a call.

I wandered around stuck on the word “pouch,” but it didn’t help me dream of slipping velvet into the hands of naughty readers. Pouch isn’t the right word for anything. It’s like “moist.” Who needs moist? Is it wet or isn’t it? If it fits in a pouch, why can’t you just put it in your pocket?

There’s a French word “poche,” which isn’t exactly the same thing, but it looks better than “pouch.” It’s like “pouch” without the paunch. Poche. Now try pronouncing it. POSH. I could just see Porsche handing these things out with the lube job.

So for now, it’s the next closest thing. It’s a POSH. A POSH for your love gloves. And it looks splendid by the bedside.

Down the road, Wendy slaves away on these prototype promotional items. Up here, I gaze out on the Shenandoah mountains and dream of my POSH readers of TABOU, stroking my velvet talisman.

Maybe someday you can tell me what I should really call this thing. I’m listening. I’m all yours.