A Sale can be Made Anywhere
I found a new way to market and sell my books two weeks ago, but I don’t recommend it because it is most definitely not cost effective. So if you ever thought that the valet may have rummaged through your car and critiqued your CD collection, or the detailer may have pocketed some cash that you left in the center console when you handed over the keys, the answer is possibly yes. If you left five cases of books in the back of the car because you were just too lazy to put them in storage after a long road trip, then chances are your mechanic may have taken a peak when you dropped off the car to get some work done.
Tailgating Author Style
I delivered my car to my mechanic, Boris, for some emergency work. By the time I got my car back I sold a copy of Average Joe’s Story and never even had to make the awkward pitch that I so loath. Boris came out with a copy of Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence in hand and asked, “Is this you?”
“I wrote it, but no that isn’t me walking across a volcano.”
“Well is it for sale? Can I buy a copy? Books, they are one thing I really enjoy.”
I said sure, and he came back with a pen to have me sign the book for him. Then he handed me the tally for services rendered, $1,800 for parts and labor. A hole had materialized in a cheap designed-to-fail plastic tube connecting the oil supply to the engine, and I ended up pumping out all of my oil. Boris replaced the part with an indestructible metal connection tube, filled the tank with oil, checked the engine for any potential damage from running dry for the 15 minutes it took me to get to his shop, took it on a few test drives and gave me the invoice for $1,800. Now if I was smart I would have used some of my bartering skills that I learned on my book tour, like when I traded a pair of books for a haircut and shave in Minnesota. Even if Boris only knocked off an hour’s worth of work for the book I would have been much further ahead, and in the grand scheme of things it still would’ve been cheap in comparison to the true cost of producing Average Joe’s Story: Quest for Confidence.
It may not have been the most cost effective book sale, but it was a book sale. I’m sure that there are all sorts of ways for authors to move books with a little out of the box thinking, I’m just hoping my next book sale isn’t quite as costly as my last one was.
