Adventures in Marketing: Week 42

T. asked how the book sales were going.

I looked up from my table. I said I seemed to have saturated the market.

We had met at the other café where I do business, when he had said my “Buy Bob’s Books” sign was too confusing. It should say “For Sale.”

I had offered to swap him a book for such a sign.

He had not availed himself of this opportunity.

He asked if I no longer went to the other café.

I said half the time I did.

He said he no longer did.

When he had been living in his van, he said, he had needed the café for Wi-Fi. Which meant he had to buy a coffee ($3), and then a pastry ($3) and, if he stayed for lunch, a sandwich ($6) and another coffee. But now he had a room in a house. He had a big screen TV. He never even went on his lap top.

And reading did not appear to factor into his equation.

2.

“I have never seen so many people stealing books, burning book. And this is Berkeley,” said the woman seated outside the café, a backpack under her poncho, shopping bags by her sides. “Mostly redheads.”

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

Laughing in the Dark

My latest piece has gone up at http://www.tcj.com/reviews/turkish-trilogy/

It begins: Fortunately, laughing out loud – even talking loudly to yourself – is not frowned upon in Berkeley cafes. (Indeed, frowning upon someone, no matter how offensive and high-decibel his ravings, is so eschewed, you would think it would have frowners hauled before some Human Rights commission.) So I was free to snort my way through “Turkish Trilogy,” by Wostok and Friends, unrestrained.

Readers Respond (cont.)

Ten of my old pick-up game regulars attended this winter’s reunion at the west Berkeley bar. We discussed a few hearts, a hip, a cancer, two backs. Five of us still worked. Only one played basketball.

One fellow, who’d worked for the park district, told me he’d enjoyed “Cheesesteak” and regretted missing the launch party of “The Schiz” (flu). Copies were still available, I told him.

Three fellows had bought copies at the launch party. Two did not mention it. Which did not surprise me. But one, a lefty trial attorney, said, “I read your book.”

“What’d you think?” I ventured.

“It was funny.”

Which did surprise me. “Which book?”

“The new one.”

“‘The Schiz’?”

I mean, it is funny, but most people…

He said he had liked the skewering of lawyers and doctors.

He also said, when it got slow, he skipped ahead.

I did not believe it was ever slow, but, over all, I was pleased.

“How’s the heart?” I said.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 41

Sold one “Cheesesteak.” The purchaser was a young woman, visiting Berkeley from San Diego, seated beside me in the café. I gave her my card. She was so far outside the demographics of my general buying public, I was hoping to hear her response.

Otherwise, it was a bevy of chitchat. There was a financial planner from Cincinnati, who had brought out his son, an Antioch student, to begin one of his work stints. We talked Yellow Springs, Woodstock, People’s Park, and Robert Maplethorpe. There was a homeless fan of Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs, whom I hadn’t seen since another café we both frequented made him and his several stuffed shopping bags feel unwelcome. (He hadn’t known I wrote books.) There was an Eritrian-born systems engineer, a fan of Raymond Carver’s, who’d worked all over the world and was now taking a break, deciding whether to become a writer himself or an entrepreneur (and, if the latter, whether here or in Africa).

And there was an elderly gentleman, who paused on the way to his table and stared at my sign and books. This was not unusual, but he kept staring.

“Wanna buy a book?”

“Are you Bob?”

I was.

“I’ve heard of you.”

This I doubted. “$5-to-$20.”

“Are you here often?”

“Three or four times a week.”

“Maybe when I get my check.”

I could have said I take credit cards. I should have said that, at least, to the financial planner.

My Latest

I put this link up on Facebook yesterday but I thought I should blog it too.
http://travelswithtrump.blogspot.com/p/guest-shots_15.html
It’s a contribution to my on-line pal Bob Ingram’s anti-Trump site. Much of it comes from previous FB posts of mine which I strung together and expanded.

I Just Finished…

…two books.

The first was “Border Cantos” by Richard Misrach, a photographer, and Guillermo Galindo, a musician/composer.
It is a remarkable book about a remarkable project. Misrach has been photographing the Mexican-US border for over 40 years. Since the 2000s his work has focused on its “militarization.” On his trips, besides taking photos, he has collected objects left by migrants and forces of the border patrol, including books, dolls, shotgun shells, water bottles, and steel slabs, which Galindo has used to compose and play music. The art, the politics, and the humanity encompassed within this volume is over-whelming.

The second was “Crash” by J.G. Ballard, a highly regarded dystopian novel, blending the violence of lethal automobile accidents with the perversities of sex. (I can not recall reading another book in which the words “semen” and “vulva” appeared so frequently.) The subject matter did not engage me; the characters did not involve me; even the sex, perhaps to my credit, did not arouse my fantasies. I was relieved to finally finish it and move my reading on.

A Nice Welcome

My on-line pal Bob Ingram greeted my first submission to his anti-Trump site HOCUS-POTUS with “Dang, Bob…
Remember Steve McQueen in Mag Seven saying, ‘We deal in lead’? We deal in nasty and you’re one of us.”

Warmed my heart.

Will link to it soon as I hear it’s up.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 40

Sold one “Best Ride.”

It went to a fellow I’d played Saturday pick-up basketball with for 20 years. He said he hadn’t known I wrote books until he saw my display in the café, which suggests I need to expand the reach of my brand. On the other hand, I hadn’t known his last name for 15 of those 20 years. It was that kind of game.

In other news, the distribution de3al for “Cheesesteak” and “The Schiz” is moving forward. I completed a 7-page Author’s Questionnaire designed to supply sales reps with information to convince book stores my works will sell despite my entire career’s seeming to argue the opposite. I’m pushing a “Long Over-Looked Master Finally Gets His Due” campaign.

We are also lowering prices, knocking $10.01 off “Cheesesteak” and $5.01 off “The Schiz.” That penny seems important to the experts. Buyers seem to believe there is a difference between $X.99 and $X+1.00.

Prices have been adjusted accordingly at my website. And both books have been pulled from Amazon for the time being.

Finally neither book left on consignment at Pegasus sold and were returned to me. I have not dusted for fingerprints to see if they were opened.

Readers Respond (cont.)

I.
“Fun,” the semi-retired financial adviser said about “The Schiz.”

I was impressed.

Most people who were given or bought a copy have said nothing. Many, I expect, have not read it. Many, I bet, began but were put off by the structure or content.

So I welcome what I get.

II.

Remember the fellow in the health club locker room I recognized by his accent as being from Philadelphia?

He sent me a two-page, single-spaced e-mail that called “Cheesesteak” “terrific.”

He knew Jim’s and Larry’s, The White House. He thought my description of Pat’s “superb” and of my bar mitzvah “hysterical.” He knew a dog like Ming, had a grandmother who died young, and his wife danced on Bandstand. He sold sodas at Franklin Field, went to fights at the Blue Horizon, had Mel Brodsky as a Camp Counselor — and had friends who came to unimaginable ends.

It had all resonated.

It had lit corners of his life.

I thought of the knots that life ties and unloosens and reknits.

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

Adventures in Marketing: Week 39

No sales.

The closest I even came to a nibble was a UC English major who engaged me in conversation at the café and said next time, maybe, he’d bring cash.

Rewards came in other fashion. For one, the estimable Jon B. Cooke asked to reprint Adele and my 1992 essay “I Don’t Fuck My Dog: The Life and Art of Dori Seda” in his “The Book of’Weirdo,'” forthcoming from Last Gasp. I’ve been looking forward to this book since first hearing about it some years ago, and it will be an honor to be included.

Then I made my Skype debut, a partial one anyway, sound of me but no video, being interviewed by the film maker/cartoonist Wostok for a documentary about his book “Robusto,” which I reviewed a couple months ago. This was one of those unanticapatable-ripples-cast-by-unlikely-stone moments that art (and life) magically set in motion. Here was this middle-aged Serbian artist, who had basically given up on cartooning, having work he had done a decade a ago discovered by a young woman, Dragana Drobjnak, a punk musician/artist in Buffalo, New York, Who decided to collect these stories and publish them in book form, which she then brought to the attention of a well-into-senior citizenship writer in Berkeley (You Guessed It), whose book from 2008 she credited with inspiring her own creative vision, and hoped he would write about hers.

So three generations are spanned here and 6500 miles. It is hard not to smile at the wonder of connection.