Press Release
Q: Did any media publicize your booth?
A: I sent a press release out to all the media. One reporter called me up and asked me about it.
She came to the house and interviewed me in my eyrie. My writing studio. The second upstairs bedroom of Pop Cason’s house.
I told her it was the house my father grew up in.
That was the hook to her story. Three generations attend Delray school.
She had a picture of me in the school gym with Owen and Balder, pointing up into the rafters where my father had chalked his initials. And where I had chalked my initials under his.
In my press release, I listed the same items that were on the billboard in my yard.
· Denied booth at Delray Affair
· Books not in local library
· Books not in mall bookstores
· Local papers refuse to review books
· Radio and television stations ignore author
·
Books rejected by
· Turned down for grant because of “NO ARTISTIC MERIT”
· Allowed to resign from last position
· No job, no money, no publisher, no prospects—the happiest man alive! Read the books and see.
The reporter asked me about each item in the list.
Then she went to the people involved and asked them.
The committee that screened applicants lied. I showed her my application, dated well before the deadline.
The librarian said they didn’t buy self-published books, but my book was not self-published, it was published by Vagabond Press, and most local libraries bought books by local authors regardless of who published them. Plus, I wrote a newspaper column, and several readers wrote and told me they had requested the book, and the library refused to buy it. One reader said she donated the book to the library and they didn’t catalog it.
The bookstores said they carried my book when it came out but didn’t reorder it when they sold all their copies because I was giving them away myself, in competition with them.
It was true none
of the local papers reviewed my book, but the local papers didn’t review any
books. The
The radio and TV stations did not cover my booth, my signs, my press release.
I had been
rejected by
I had no job, no money, no publisher, no prospects. I was the happiest man alive.
Q: She got all that in her story.
A: Yes. It
didn’t publicize my booth, but it treated me as a serious writer, and viewed my
booth as a clever ploy to attract attention to my plight. The plight of a creative artist in
Q: She got it.
A: She got it.
I was Hunter S. Thompson.
It was épatez les bougeoises.
I was twisting the tail of the burghers.
They were playing into my hands.
It was a stunt, and it worked.
They fell for it. I got them to lie, and I got a reporter to catch them in a lie, and expose their perfidy.
I leered at them with my death’s-head grin.
Q: And her editor was okay with the story?
A: Her editor sent her.
He was aware of my old columns in the News-Journal.
I quit writing them when I went to work for IBM. But he remembered.
Q: Somebody filmed Jake Shimabukuro playing
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” in
People see what you do.
People know what you are doing.
You don’t hear back from them, but they are aware of you.
It just takes time to reach critical mass.
A: 40 years?
Q: It’s only been 38 years.
A: I thought viral marketing was fast.
Q: Sometimes it’s slow.
Slow is better.
A: Hand-to-hand and word-of-mouth.
I had Owen and Balder hand out fliers with the press release on them.
They were like Huck and Jim passing out handbills for the Duke and the Dauphin.