Despite proving incapable of registering it for sale at Amazon – how do you “upload” documents, anyway? – I unleashed a veritable blizzard of pre-publication promotion for “Goshkin at Large.” An announcement at Facebook to all “friends,” known and unknown, and a massive targeted e-mailing garnered a dozen (misplaced) congratulations (What’s the big deal when you publish yourself?) and a more satisfying (if non-enforceable) half-dozen promises-of-purchase. But when I made my weekly trek to my P.O. box, all that awaited was a letter from my pen pal former client (pun semi-intended), currently serving life in Vacaville.
Maybe next time. (And have I mentioned how character-building a challenge it is to know everyone who bought your book and, more importantly, everyone who didn’t it and try not to let it affect your judgment of them?)
In other news:
1.) The buyer of “Most Outrageous,” responding to my request for his mailing address, identified himself as having come across my book while engaged in “background reading prior to an online seminar on pornography.” Since “M.O.” isn’t directly on point, being more about child sexual abuse, with a side trip into recovered memory, and, crucially, the evidentiary-admissibility measurement of relevance vs. prejudicial effect, when spplierd to the person of 1500 “Hustler” cartoons, I sent him a bonus pdf of my seminal treatise on hard core, “‘Yes! Yes!’ She Panted,” for which he has yet to thank me.
2.) A basketball buddy/poet invited me to sign a Writers Against Trump petition. This may not seem like much, but, for a guy for whom any purchase of his work by a stranger, even a porn-studying one, is a thrill, to be recognized as a “Writer” by his peers (Well, one “peer”) is gratifying… And, yup, there’s my name on-line at this very moment, among hundreds, within shouting distance of Salman Rushdie’s.
3.) Chet Baker, in a 50-year-old interview with Dick Conte, re-broadcast this morning on KCSM: “If my following ever gets too big, I’ll figure I am doing something wrong.”