Businesss had been so slow I’d shut this operation down at the 10-year mark. My only sale had been a t-shirt to my SSI-dependant café friend after I had given her $20 for Xmas and she gave $5 back to me. She was planning to send it to her mother but then decided to wear it as a nightshirt herself.
Then, Jan. 1, PayPal notified me I had received near $200 from a fellow who wanted 10 of my books. (He missed two, so I included them in the package and said he could repay me at cost). Naturally, I was curious. Was this some comic-crazed madman? Was it an academic who had decided it was time my work receive a monograph? But, no, he was a young man in Chicago who had heard good things about “Lollipop.” He had visited my web site to order it and been intrigued by everything else. More startlingly, he was studying to be a hospital chaplain, which did not exactly fit my sense of my demographics. Anyway, I figured if things kept up at this rate, I would gross $7 million this year.
It also reminded me – in an Adventures Greatest Hits sort-of way – of a couple other big sales. One was the woman who swept into the café and gave everyone a Meyer lemon from her tree. She bought the books I had on display – and then went to the Free Books shelf and took several of them. The following day, someone who knew her from a group he attended told me she was bi-polar. (I never saw or heard from her again.) Another was the hippy era artist from Santa Cruz who never showed or sold his work but stored it all in a garage. He sent me a check from a woman friend for several books. (I never heard from him again either.)
So many Bob Levins on the Internet; I'm the Bob Levin who writes.