Adventures in Marketing: Week 62

Sold one “Schiz” and one “Cheesesteak,” both to a desk clerk at the Sens CafĂ© and Bistro (formerly the French Hotel), which is home to one of the cafes where I peddle them.

In other news…

My cell phone rings.

I figure it’s a robot.

But the caller leaves a message. He wants “to develop” a movie about my baseball novel “Away Game.”

My excitement is tempered only by the fact that a different Bob Levin wrote “Away Game.”

I explain this when I return the call. I offer the other Bob Levin’s e-mail address. Then I add, “But if you want to develop a movie about a basketball novel…”

There is a pause while, in retrospect, I think he does something on his computer. “You’re exactly who I want to talk to,” he says. “‘Best Ride to New York.'”

It turns out his development plan for “Best Ride” involves a new cover and what sounds suspiciously like an e-book and print-on-demand deal.

Which will only cost me $$799.

Adventures in Marketing: Week 55

Sold one Schiz.

I’ve known the buyer, a recently retired tenants’ rights lawyer, since he ran a legal aid outpost office in Chicago’s infamous Robert Taylor Homes, and I was a VISTA on the South Side. He asked if I’d felt a loss of identity when I’d stopped practicing. I said my identity had never rested on my being a lawyer. “It was more a trans-sexual thing, like I was walking around inside the body of a lawyer, but actually…”

Also swapped two Schiz’s, one for a poetry collection, one for a classy zine — and shipped eight books to NYC for Logos, 4 Schiz, 2 Cheesesteak, 2 Best Rides. (And a BR has been spotted in Powell’s in Portland. They want $8.95 for it. You can get it here, signed, for less.)

In other news, the only one of the health organizations I’d sought a plug for Heart from to reply said it did not give endorsements. I told its rep I understood perfectly — and that would be one more charitable non-profit not to receive a sizeable bequest from my estate.