sellingair

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

Reviews Selling Air by David Katz Some books mesmerize you with the beauty of their language. You keep reading to hear the glorious song of the words, the fitness with which each is selected to convey the author's meaning or invoke an emotion or recollection in the reader. Other books are written awkwardly. The words jar against each other and you mentally argue with the author about the choice of an adjective or the construction of a sentence. Nevertheless you keep on reading because, without quite knowing how, you have become involved with the characters and interested to see how the story turns out. “Selling Air”, by Dan Herchenroether, is just such a book.

A novel set in the go-go dot-com years of the nineties, “Selling Air” traces the fortunes of the good guys, salesman Wayne Angelis and his faithful technical support sidekick, SE Porter Mitchell, as they push their company, the ethical and customer-caring InUnison, to a narrow victory over arch-villain Tom Gatto and the evil VibraWeb Corporation in an effort to acquire a key customer and lock in a second round of venture capital financing. Wayne is tough, but concerned for the well-being of his customers. Porter is resourceful and technically savvy, but naïve in the ways of sales, having come from an in-house IT environment at a bank. He is constantly amazed and dismayed at the tricks and misrepresentations that abound in software sales. Wayne refers to this process as “selling air”; after all, software is not like a manufactured item that you can see, smell and touch – it is only code that makes a computer do something. The phrase resonates with another that was current around the time in which the novel was set, “vaporware”, software that is promised but that does not yet exist and is being sold nonetheless. The CEO of InUnison is striving for “100% referability”, that is, no dissatisfied customers, an unachievable goal in the real world, but one which underlines for the reader the fact that his company is on the side of the angels.

Tom Gatto, on the other hand, is a salesman who never met a corner he couldn't cut. He is impossible to work with (his SE's dread being assigned to him), he lies to his customers about product availability and the level of support the customer will receive. He has a take the money and run attitude; repeat business is not his goal. When he moves to VibraWeb, he seems to have found the perfect employer for his sales style. It is a measure of the author's indefinable skill that this cartoonish bad guy achieves a measure of sympathy and respect in the reader's eyes by the end of the novel.

This book gives an inside view of a software startup, and in passing, of what happens to their customers when IT is incompetent and in conflict with the operating departments of a company. The desperate quest for revenue, and the even more desperate quest for venture capital financing form the core of the story, with side plots involving the conflict between engineering, marketing and sales. Will they make their product release deadlines? Has marketing promised too much, or engineering delivered too little? Will the potential customer's internal politics sabotage the sale? Each chapter ends in a cliff-hanger.

“Selling Air” is interesting and absorbing despite its literary flaws. It can be bought on line through Amazon, or directly from the author (for a $3 savings) on his web site, www.sellingair.com .