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Adventures in Marketing: Week 52

Sold a “Schiz” and a “Fully Armed” to an old friend/retired psychologist in Philadelphia. Sold a “Cheesesteak” to a stranger (contractor) in the café. Sent a “Schiz” and a “Cheesesteak” to a recently resurfaced fellow who’d helped me a lot on my Air Pirates book. (He send me a pdf of his new book on Darwin.) Sent a “Cheesesteak” to a rock guitarist who’d given me a copy of his CD when I visited him in the hospital on my Mended Hearts rounds.

In other news, a woman with whom I attended 4th through 12th grade has offered to pitch “Best Ride” and “Cheesesteak” to bookstores in Manhattan, where she lives, Brooklyn, and Philly. (She expressed discomfort with “The Schiz” but is willing to look at it.) Her other activities include playing the harp at and singing in the chorus of her church (Episcopalian)and being an on-again, off-again booking agent for a chamber music group so this endeavor sounds adventurous and amusing to us both.

And the Berkeley indie author/publisher said he would do “Heart,” except he wasn’t publishing anything for the time being. But maybe when he secured his next grant… So pitches to agents and publishers continue there.

[Bob’s books remain available from this very web site.]

Café Morning

“You must be the food critic for the ‘East Bay Express,'” the fellow said as he sat down at the next table. He was about my age, a straw fedora and string tie. The morning before he had made his presence known by loud, angry declarations to an audience sized somewhere between himself alone and the world at large. So this showed an improvement in, if not mood, medication.

But how he had arrived at my assignment in life was unclear. True, I was marking yellow pad with ballpoint pen, but I had no vittles within reach. And my black leather motorcycle cap and Kelly green Penn Relays t-shirt did not scream, I would have thought, “Taste buds!”

It took me a couple hours to figure it out. “‘Cheesesteak,'” I told Adele, “was one of the books I had out for sale.”

“And the other was ‘The Schiz,'” she said, “so he must have thought you spoke his language.”

I just finished…

…a few books, two of which I have thought about reviewing at length but haven’t, so let’s see what I can encapsulate in the meantime.

The first of these is “We Told You So” (ed. by Tom Spurgeon, with Michael Dean), an oral history of Fantagraphics Books. The best part is the first third or two which provides the near-plot tension of “Will this plucky band of outsiders” survive, and dramatizes it thru warts-and-all depictions of colorful characters. (Among the partially blemished — believe it or not — is your humble reporter who — FULL DISCLOSURE — has had three books published by Fanta — all available from this very web site — and continues to be a contributor to its “Comics Journal”) The weakest part is the rest which settles into a sea of self-congratulatory pats on the back by those still employed or published by the company in question. Not that I begrudge them a single pat. Not that I don’t still proudly wear my “Fuck You I’m With Fantagraphics” t-shirt. But from a pacing/
variety/gratification of one’s baser desires POV, this seems lacking.

Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 50/51

No sales.

Part of the problem may be that the café where I do most of my business is closed for renovations. But part may be I have exhausted my pool of buyers.

But I gave away a copy of “Fully Armed.”

In other (related) news, Adele and I queried an agent, whom, we had been told, was actively seeking authors to represent. Aside from being young enough to be our granddaughter, she seemed a perfect match for “Heart.” She wanted “illness,” “survival,” “humor.” We had all that. But our e-mail received an auto-reply that her seeking was at an end. Her client list was full. (The duplicious swine.)

The manuscript itself received one of the nicest rejections in my history of rejections. An acquisitions editor in North Carolina praised everything about our content but its bulk, which was too scanty to carry the price his company would have to apply to reap the rewards it desired. (Oh well, with his state’s Bathroom Bill and all…)

So the book is now with someone local, incorporated as a non-profit
where, hopefully, commerce will be less important than our art.

The Writing Whirl

Adele and I struck out trying to get an agent for our jointly-written account of our adventures in cardio-vascular land. Half the time we got a form rejection; half the time they ignored us. “You don’t have a national platform,” one agent we met informally warned us before we began looking.

The next step was to query publishers who didn’t require authors to approach them through agents. The first — no, second one — we queried, on the basis of our proposal and two chapters, he would publish our book if we met one of two conditions. Get an endorsement from a celebrity he could splash on the cover. Get a five-star review from Kirkus. (The way Kirkus works now, he explained, is if you pay it $500, it will give you a review you can publicize or keep quiet, like the College Boards. The odds on five-stars, though, are 99:1 against.)

We liked that he believed works judged meritorious deserved publication. But unlike, say, James Laughlin or Barney Rosset, he didn’t rely on his own judgment. He left it up to celebrities or Kirkus. (I should add there were other enthusiasm-dampeners about his operation as well.)

We decided to continue looking.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 49

Sold one copy of “The Schiz.”

The buyer was a 40-something UC employee. Something in computers.
He is a fan — and unpublished writer — of sci-fi, who had previously bought and, he now told me, been delighted by “Cheesesteak.” It was, he said, “Like a vanished time that will never come again. Did you see the movie ‘Blade Runner’? That was the future, and yours was the past, but, like it, you captured this entire world.”

I, of course, had never seen it that way. The West Philadelphia of “Cheesesteak” was — and is — pretty real and living to me. But I welcomed his enthusiasm.

“This new one,” I said, “is different.”

Adventures in Marketing: Weeks 47-48

Sold zero books.

But…

A former journalist stopped by my café table, where my books were on display, to say “Cheesesteak” had “inspired” her to write her own memoir and she already had 200 pages.

I thought, That would be five memoirs out of this café alone, plus a one-woman show about her abortion.

A composer of jazz operas called “Cheesesteak” “fabulous.

I told him “Stage and screen rights remain available.”

A man in a plaid flannel shirt said of my “Buy Bob’s Books” sign, “The Checkered Demon. The Checkered Demon. I haven’t seen the Checkered Demon in a long time.”

I complimented him on his eye.

A Doctor of Oriental Medicine told me he had self-published two books about “brain health.”

I told him I would swap him one of mine for one of his.

A 50-something, part-time substitute school teacher told me about bicycling from D.C. to Philadelphia (site of “Cheesesteak”) in the 1970s and staying at a youth hostel in Fairmount Park.

I recommended he visit the Barnes Museum the next time.

It all adds up.

I just finished…

…”Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the third volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. We had been warned it was “too political,” but I didn’t find that so. Sure, Italian social disruptions of the 1960s influence the action, but the center of the book remains the internal lives and relationships of the characters, with Lena coming more into the fore and Lila receding into the background. In fact, by the last quarter of the book, Lena and two male characters so dominate the action, to the exclusion of all others, for the first time, I wasn’t turning back to the front to the Cast List to remind myself who was who. Which was a relief.

Recommended. But read the other two first.

(And Another) Morning at the Cafe

“You an artist?”

A short man with a twisted, grey beard, Eugene Levy-eyebrows, missing two lower front teeth stood by the table with my “Buy Bob’s Books!” sign.

“Writer.” I pointed at the stack. From the teeth, I was figuring, No sale.

He said he was in from Vermont where he moved with his wife, a YA author, after she had banked a huge advance. He told me how important an agent, which I did not have, was. His name was G.

“I write about cartoonists,” I said. “Not your Young Adult type.”

“Do you know Ace Backwards?”

Now there was a question I had never been asked.

“I knew B.N. Duncan better.”

“Duncan still owed me money.”

“I don’t think you’ll get it.”

“I don’t think so.”

He set down his coffee and muffin. We remarked about how good Duncan had been about paying money he borrowed. I had forgotten that quality. I saw Duncan’s wild orange beard, his taped together glasses, the box of books he carried to his corner by Cody’s. Cody’s which was also gone. I saw him handing me a crumpled, folded five.

“You know who had marketing down?” G named a local poet. “Everything she did was deliberate.”

“I haven’t seen her for a while. But, yeah, I bought her books.” Now her long, thick, black coat came to mind. Her black and yellow cap. For a time, she blew soap bubbles to announce her presence. I didn’t think soap bubbles would work for me. Maybe if I sat outside. Anyway, they were her thing.

“She must’ve sold 80,000 books. She did a new one every six months.”

“I suppose you know Hate Man died,” I said.

“NO! WHEN?’

“Just the other day.”

“What happened?’

“His heart. They were talking about surgery. Then he was out of Alta Bates and into rehab. The next morning he was gone. I guess they decided he was too frail for the operation.”

G. was shaken. “I was going to go by the park today and say ‘Hello.’ I did that every time I was in town.”

The obit was in the Chron. I handed it to him. He read it intently. “He was a lovely man,” he said. “Very smart. Very profound” He read some more. “That’s right, a ‘peacemaker.'” “That’s right too. Not ‘insane,’ ‘eccentric.'”

“You can keep it,” I said.

“The last time I saw Hate, he’d just been told he had prostate cancer. That was all he could talk about.” G shook his head. “I guess he didn’t need to worry about that after all.”

At the next table, a man turned a page in Herodotus.

Recognition(s)

It occurred to me that the reason I seem to immediately follow one writing project with another writing project is that because, when I am writing, I can spend my time, even away from pen and paper, formulating and refining sentences and paragraphs in my head and that, if I was not filling this space in this fashion, my thinking would dwell in areas of gloom.

Adele thought there was something to that. But she believes most people have something going on in their heads that serves the same purpose.

And that reminded me of a sentence I had copied from “Infinite Jest.” Hal Incandenza, the novel’s protagonist — or one of its protagonists — reflects that “We are all trying to give our lives away something, maybe God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to giving one’s self away utterly. To games or needles, to some other person.”

I agreed with Hal too.