Adventures in Marketing: Week 74 (Bob Goes Electric)
I usually view my requests for royalty statements as exercises in enforced humility. But this year my former publisher said I would find it surprising.
The first surprise was that I was due more money than I had been due for many years combined. More surprising was that nearly all of this money was due to e-book sales, since no one had ever discussed with me – or informed me about – the electrifying of my books. Most surprising was that nearly all of this “nearly all” was earned by a book to which all rights, such as electrification, had reverted to me. (That seemed one of those amusing foibles with which my publisher had entertained me during the course of our relationship and was quickly resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.)
Including you, the reading public. So immediately (Or soon thereafter. This hasn’t been clarified) e-books of my complete Cartoonists-and-the-Law trilogy will be found (Most likely at Amazon and maybe other places. This hasn’t be clarified either): “The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney’s War Against the Counterculture” (Copyright); “Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers, Pirates & Pornographers,” erroneously published, due to one of those foibles I mentioned, as “Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates,” (Free Speech); and “Most Outrageous: The Trials and Trespasses of Dwaine Tinsley and Chester the Molester” (Criminal Practice and Procedure).
Stock up, gang.
Or plug in.
Outlaws
Adventures in Marketing: Week 58
Sold a “Cheesesteak,” a “Schiz,” a “Most Outrageous,” an “Outlaws, Rebels…,” all to the same woman. (I gave her a discount for buying in bulk.)
She had arrived at the café, handing out Meyer lemons from a tree in her yard, to all the customers. Squeeze one each morning into hot water, she explained, to clear the body of toxins. She had blue eyes, a round, smiling face. She had short gray hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat. She wore a loose-fitting black top and wheat-colored Himalayan butterfly pants. She had also, I later notice, taken 18 books from the “Free” shelf and piled them on a chair at her table.
My work seemed to have interested her in me so much that she paid several visits to keep me posted on her thoughts. (And I felt grateful enough for her purchases not to interrupt.) So I learned of the health problems of her sister who operated heavy equipment at a nuclear waste disposal site, the personality of her brother-in-law, a Mohawk high-beam walker, the dialogue her own interest in the dharma had led to with a local Catholic worker-priest, and her suspicions that the Amazonian special ops warriors she read about in intrigue novels were real.
So I did not get a lot of work done that morning.