Adventures in Marketing: Week 112
Sold one “Cheesesteak” – and nearly sold a second.
The buyer was an older fellow, who had given up on stand-up comedy to become an MFCC. We had a “Hi!-How-are-you?” relationship, built from my friendship with his ex-wife. He came into the café, looking for someone else, and saw by books and sign. He offered a not-unfamiliar response, which, in his case, was nine other books waiting to be read, plus 16 “New Yorkers” and 60 NYT magazines. But curiosity got the better of him. “Support the arts,” he said, a sentiment with which I heartily agreed.
The “almost” was the fellow whose father went to West Catholic. (He was surprised I remembered, but I told him I took notes of all encounters as part of this very project.) We had a nice chat about steaks, hoagies and language specific to particular places. (He told me there is a web site where, if you answer its questions, can, like Henry Higgins, practically nail you to your block of origin.) Again, he had no money with him. “Getcha next time,” he said.
(In a less sanguine moment, a plump, smiley, white-haired woman, seated at the next table, took me and my wares in with a glance and said, “Cute.”)

In other news, “Weighty Tomes” received such a glowing response from a musician/writer reader at “First of the Month” that its editor assumed we had to be good friends. “Nope,” I said. “Just a fellow of fine taste.”
And Adele and I have connected with a potential publicist for “Heart.” She is perusing it this weekend to make certain its style and substance are matters she can work with. I told her for “Oprah,” we would be willing to leave Berkeley. She told me, “These days, Oprah is someone you have to pay.”

Sold one “Best Ride.”
The buyer, a manager of IT projects at UC, in lavender button-down shirt and dress slacks, while curious, was initially disinclined to purchase. But my charm (and the price) won him over.

In other news, “Heart” is moving forward toward publication. Formatted, while still being tweaked, it runs 192 pp. The catalog copy has been submitted. The price is within sight. A cover comes next, though a promotional blurb I thought I had lined up from a prominent cardiologist in return for a (purely voluntary) contribution to his foundation fell through after his hospital frowned at our arrangement. Now to decide about hiring a proofreader and/or publicist.
Milo says, “An author who is his own proofreader has a foll for a client.” On the other hand, don’t the blemishes, the errors, and the bone-headed stupidities more accurately reflect actual artistic vision?
As for a publicist… Some can cost more than I have earned in royalties from all my books combined. Thinking like this, these publicists’ web sites say, represents penny-wise thinking. Authors should not think in terms of one book but of an entire career. But I am 75 with a bum ticker. I don’t have a career. I have a bunch of quirky books. All I want for this one are some reviews, so people will read it. And I’ll do interviews, if I don’t have to leave Berkeley, except by BART.

No café sales.
But the construction worker who’s bought a “Cheesesteak” stopped by my table to say he was enjoying it, and the woman from the bicycle shop to whom I give the Datebook section of the paper, when I haven’t given it to the octogenarian aerobics instructor said, “Are those your books? I’ll have to pick one up sometime.”

In other news, I finally learned how the distributor did with “The Schiz.” The rumored 900 “pre-sales” seem to have turned into 548 actual orders, of which 280 (so far) have been returned. That looks like 268 copies sold, which seems pretty grim; but when you figure this was a book whose own back cover boldly declared it “much rejected” and “much reviled” and which had no advertising, no publicist, no reviews, and an author whose own former publisher had declared him someone “no one has never heard of,” it is somewhat astonishing it sold any copies at all. Then when you add the 80 or so books I sold myself, with no one else taking a cut, I am left less than a grand in the hole, which I can lose a hellova lot more than from my IRA in the blink of a tweet from the c**ksucker-in-chief, it’s pretty much “Pick yourself up; brush yourself off; and start all over again.” Besides, as my friend Robert the Glass Artist says, “That’s not the point, is it?”
Of course, it’s not. I know that. Yet the availability and convenience of numerical measures – sales, gross – even amidst others of more spiritual gradient, enables them to persistently weigh upon me.
Time to step up the meditation.

I recently received information from my distributor about sales of THE SCHIZ. Included was a list of stores which ordered it. This information was confusing since some of the buyers seemed themselves to be distributors (Ingram, Diamond) and some (Baker & Taylor, Bookazine) I didn’t know what they were. But some were clearly independent stores and I wanted to thank them for taking a chance on my book. If you live near any of these stores, I hope you patronize them. Those in the Bay Area are Books, Inc., City Lights, Dark Carnival, Green Apple, and Moe’s. Elsewhere, A Room of Ones Own (Madison), Atomic Books (Baltimore), Book Cellar and Quimby’s (Chicago), Changing Hands (Phoenix), Common Good (Saint Paul), Escape Pod (Huntington, NY), Forbidden Planet and Kinokuniya (NYC), Moon Palace (Minneapolis), Politics & Prose (D.C.), Tattered Cover (Denver), and Yankee Book Peddlar (Contocock, NH).

No further word from the friend’s friend with Alzheimer’s.
More surprisingly, no word from the son of the West Catholic father. He even was at the café once without acknowledging me or my books.
And no responses to inquiries about (1) a promised cover blurb for “Heart”; (2) the fate of a submitted article about Andy Kaufman and his biographers; (3) the sales figures for and royalties on “The Schiz.”
On the other hand, a reference to “Cheesesteak” in an e-mail led a woman I met in elementary school to say it “should be required reading for all 50s, 60s alums. You wrote the memory lane experiences beautifully with your personal enduring style of musical prose.” (She writes pretty good herself, don’t you think?) I sent her words to all my (surviving) high school classmates but did not check Amazon to see if sales had spiked.
One afternoon, when the noise from the World Cup on the café’s wall screen café was too distracting (Mexico was playing), I moved my books and sign and self outside. The only person who stoppedf was a poet of my acquaintance. “Selling anything?” he said.
“It’s all performance art,” I said.
I told him I had bought his latest collection.
He told me if he had money, he would buy a book of mine.
Watch the parade, I thought. See your thoughts.
I am both performer and audience.

Finished Season 2 of “Marcella.”
SPOILER ALERT WARNING!
Boy, does it go dark and twisted.
Brit TV does not deliver much sex and nudity, but when it comes to violence and snuffing secondary characters you care about…
Again, (See: Levin “Marcella” supra), there are enough plot holes to drive the Peterbilt that pursued Dennis Weaver through. With all the corpses littering the what-turn-out-to-be branch roads off the central plot line, I recall at least two murderers who seem to have gone unapprehended. There’s the rock guy. And if anybody can tell me who killed Nigel’s girl friend, I’d appreciate it. (She seems to have been the victim of a plot line the serial killer turned out to have nothing to do with, no?) Finally, while it seems the SK did off the truck driver, I’d like some clarification of how this was accomplished.
Shouldn’t script writers have an obligation to dot all “I”s and cross all “T”s? Or is it enough to keep an audience’s nerves jangled and knuckles chewed? Adele, who watched every episode alongside me, said none of this occurred to her or would have bothered her if it had. (She finds it a reflection of how I approach my own writing.) She is more apt to let things just happen, and, when watching shows – or reading books – she immerses herself in the central character’s psychology, emotions and situation. Here, she found herself pondering the implications of a deeply troubled detective wanting to save the world confronting a deeply disturbed killer wanting to do the same, each of them, in their climactic face-off traumatizing a child so that their entire future is in question.
Anyway, we are set up for quite a Season 3. (Not yet picked-up.)

The check arrived for “Best Ride.”
(So did a check for my next article in “Full Bleed.”)
A friend says a friend of hers wants a “Cheesesteak.” (“$10,” I said.) The friend’s friend also wants a “Heart.” But she has early stage Alzheimer’s, and by the time “Heart” is available, she may have forgotten. (She may have forgotten who Adele and I are.)
So would it be bad form to ask for payment now?