Adventures in Marketing: Week 150

Sold five “I Will Keep You Alive”s. One, by mail, to the president of a Mended Hearts chapter in Florida – who also invited Adele and I to speak/read. One, on credit, to a woman at the health club, and another, also on credit, to a fellow at the café, neither of whom had cash on them. Sold three, four for cash and one for whom I successfully worked my Square. Two were café regulars, one a lawyer-pal, and one a woman who hadn’t been to the café in eons. She’s an in-hospital social worker, who said she reads a lot of books about illness but never one written by both the patient and the care-giver, so she is very interested in ours.,
Three Amazon sales have been reported, one by a second cousin, one by a lawyer whom I’ve met through the MH message board, and one to a pediatrician who read about the book on my friend Budd’s blog (“Budd’s Blog” – highly recommended). Speaking of Budd, who has been extraordinarily supportive of IWKYA – and who, because of his own medical background and interest in doctor-patient relationships, may have appreciated the book more than even its authors, he has recommended it to his Lower Merion High School and Harvard Med classmates, resulting in a literary world-connected fellow from the former requesting a review copy, in case he could help. (I sent it First Class.)
Also, since the MH-connected lawyer said he’d also bought an “Outlaws” on line, I sent him a “Cheesesteak” gratis, and I swapped a “Schiz” to one of this month’s café readers for a copy of his new novel, “Disposable Man.”
Finally, I received some numbers via my distributor, the crunching of which led me to conclude that for each IWKYA sold on-line or in stores, we will lose 75-cents. (It seems I made an error when setting its price.) But if we get into a second printing, or Adele and I sell all the copies we have on hand or it gets into the right movie producer’s hands…
“I am not cut out for business,” I told our publicist.
“Then you’re perfect for publishing,” she said.