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Blog Number One: “Who me – market?”

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The book, “Seven Million (and the remainder of the somewhat wordy title),” has now been out for five months, and this has been a learning experience.

What have I learned: I was not born to market. I should have been alerted to this when Evan Dawson had me on his WXXI show some months before the book’s release, and I could not remember the book’s full title.

I knew a good deal of the marketing of the book would fall on my shoulders; that only made sense. After all, my publisher, ForeEdge (a subsidiary of University Press of New England), does not have the regional contacts that I have, so I expected to do the outreach across western New York.

But cold-calling (or emailing) folks in hopes they’ll have me out to peddle the book is still a tad uncomfortable. The first few months were the easy ones; the book’s initial publicity helped out.

The Barnes & Noble stores throughout Rochester and in Syracuse and Buffalo have been great to me. I have found out, however, that you can’t just call a B&N in Manhattan and expect them to welcome you for a talk and signing – unless, perhaps, you’re John Grisham or any of the other NYT bestselling authors. I now know my place on the author totem pole.

I’ve probably done close to a dozen signings: Some were well-attended, with people who knew the stories, the history, the characters, and had tons of questions. Others, even when the attendance was sparse (as in three people over two hours), were actually fun in their own way.

I will be at the Greece B&N Friday, Sept. 22, with other local authors from 6 to 8 p.m., and hope to see you there.

I’ll be adding blogs here in coming weeks, and will, if all goes as planned, be getting together next week with some key figures in the book for a beer – probably a Guinness.

Make that definitely a Guinness.

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