Adventures in Marketing: Week 89
No sales – but gave away one Best Ride.
But two people (one friend, one café guy) have committed to buying the new, photo-illustrated edition of Cheesesteak. Only 998 left, so get your pre-orders in.
In other news…
1.
A nicely dressed, white haired woman, who’d seen me around the café for months, stopped at my table, looked at “Cheesesteak’s cover illustration, and said she’d never eaten one.
“I thought it looked like a penis,” I said, “but my wife said it looked like a vagina, so we figured we had things covered.”
I have used this pitch before without as much success as, say, “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.”
“The artist said,” I added, “he was aiming for a Jaws poster effect.”
“I get it,” she said. “Because it’s vertical.”
2.
This fellow in the back of the café called “Bob” and waved me over.
He had said he’d buy a Schiz the next time he had cash on him, but, as it turned out, he only wanted to show me a picture on his phone someone had sent him of that moon people had been talking about.
Then he went from table to table showing everyone his picture of the moon someone else had taken.
3.
I called a writer/friend to discuss next-step medical appointments.
His surgery is looking definite. He may have to wear a bag.
He said how impressed he’d been by The Schiz. “I don’t know anyone else who could have written that,” he said. “That’s a novel that could make a career. Or obliterate one.”
4.
The New Yorker ran an article on William Melvin Kelly.
Kelly had published four novels and a short story collection by the time he was 33 – and no further books in his remaining 47 years of his life.
After my friend “Max Garden” (See: Cheesesteak) turned-on, tuned-in, and, in 1967, dropped-out to Jamaica, he and his family became friendly with Kelly’s, who already lived there. The magazine article says that when Kelly came back to the states, he and his family lived in a sixth floor Harlem walk-up, and he scrounged groceries from dumpsters. Max, who came back earlier, settled in the East Village where, he once told me, he was “too depressed to roll our of bed in the morning and go downstairs for a bottle of gin.”
Kelly taught at Sarah Lawrence for 30 years. Max… Well, you’ll have to read my book.
Max once sent me a signed copy of Kelly’s Different Drummer. After reading The New Yorker, I took it from the shelf. From the placement of the bookmark, I don’t seem to have finished it.
ALL OF BOB’S BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE FROM THIS VERY WEB SITE.