Sunshine and sensations

It is a beautiful day in New York City. This is another cause for celebration, because New York City is allotted, oh, five beautiful days a year. (One of them is usually a random 70-degree day in December.) Our winters are brutishly cold. You see these poor saps walking in long down coats, scarves, gloves, boots, and immense, usually not-very-stylish hats, desperately unfashionable in the fashion capital of the world. (or is it about myself that I’m speaking?) Winter begins with a vengeance at the end of October and lasts usually through the end of April. We’ll get one or two nice days in April, where people emerge from tall office buildings and hesitantly remove their coats and say, “A foreign yellow object in the sky from which heat radiates...could that be the sun, about which I have heard so much?” And then two days later summer slams into us, with 90-degree days and 90-percent humidity. I come from Utah, where a 90-degree summer day is the norm, but there is a giant difference between dry heat and humid heat. One is, it gets cool at night. Another is, in Utah, you get into your air-conditioned car and your biggest discomfort is the hot steering wheel that you have to grip through a random fast-food napkin you didn’t remember to clean out of your car. But in New York, going out the door in summer is like walking into warm pudding. And it’s pudding weather until we get two and a half nice autumn days and then it’s officially freezing again.

This blog is officially about my book. Perhaps I should dwell on that.

There hasn’t been much to report, so far. I have the copies at my desk at work, and I am officially listed on Amazon. Several very kind friends have bought it already, without me begging, which is nice. (Some even kinder friends have bought multiple copies.) I see people at church on Sunday and tell them about it, and on Sunday my Amazon ranking hovers around 100,000. Over the course of the week I drift to about 300,000, then back to 100,000 on Sunday again. At this level, I think the difference between the two levels is about 8 sales. Sigh.

I spoke with my publicist yesterday, and we agreed on a plan of action. I sent her copies of the book and she is going to send them to various radio stations to do a “tour”— interviews on 15-20 (knock wood) radio shows. The good thing about radio is that you get to do it by phone, so there’s no lengthy travel or dealing with airlines/delays/people/screaming babies. We’re then going to focus on a local market, Salt Lake City. I have family in Utah, so it made sense to make it a home base of sorts. The rationale on focusing on one smaller market (smaller than NYC, that is) is that it’s easier to break out and become some kind of “sensation” there, and becoming a “sensation” in one market often leads to other markets paying attention, thus increasing your odds of becoming a “sensation” there, too. So here’s to a “sensational” few months....