Adventures in Marketing (Weeks 434 – 439)
As today’s title indicates, things have been slow at the marketplace. Perhaps when interest rates come down.
I can report two repeat customers. J__, the poet/therapist, bought a second café journal (Only one left) as a gift for her daughter. And K__, the bio/physicist with aphasia, added an IWKYA to her collection of my works. But a couple people who said they would buy books failed to act upon their promises.
I gave two “Lollipop”s away. One went to a former head of California Rural Legal Assistance, whom I met in the hospital through my work for Mended Hearts. He had been at UChi law school the year I had been in VISTA there. The other went to a retired physician who had already bought a couple of my books and who, it turned out, had grown up there.
My table display did draw a number of curious drop-by visitors, but mainly they wanted to know if I had done the illustrations. There was a Hispanic former school teacher who is seeking grants so he can work with underperforming kids. And a hard-hatted guy setting up an IT network in a building under construction. And a fellow in hoodie and jeans who had been spending the last several years on “self-development” and the “inner journey.” (He was a writer himself but of journals.) And Max, who had come to Utah with the goal of becoming a ski bum and was in town for the Billy Strings concert at the Greek. (I forget if he was fan or musician.)
In other news…
1.) No new word on “Meshuganahs…” If the silence holds, I’ll call the publisher in a couple days. But I did hear from the fellow making the documentary on the Air Pirates. He’s added a couple people to the project which may strengthen its appeal to potential funders. (And the guy doing a comic version of the saga asked me for sources of a couple things I wrote in my book and after an hour or so pawing though cartons in my basement, I found one.
2.) My article in “Comic Book Creators” has hit the stands, but one I submitted to tcj.com has hit a snag. It used to be that pretty much everything I submitted was welcomed with open arms, but new editors want writers to query them first. I queried and was told they weren’t looking for anything on those about whom I had written but would look at it anyway, which rocked my sense of where I stood in the universe. But almost simultaneously an editor at the print “Comics Journal,” where I hadn’t submitted in a couple years, told me he liked an article I’d sent him, he’d bump it up and run it an issue early. That re-set me on stable ground but where the path across it goes is uncertain.
3. The first place was a non-comics related story which should be up at First of the Month in about a week.