I got a wonderful new entry for the white box gallery from Robbye, our publicist. She's got a picture of her dog up on top of a building like a gargoyle. It's such a cute little dog, and she got the colors to match perfectly so it really looks like a decoration on the building!
Also exchanged lots of email with Robbye this past week about ideas for getting VRT into catalogs and such. You know, I had heard before that publishers hardly do anything to promote a book, unless it's written by a star author. But if you're less famous than, say, John Grisham, you should expect to do all the publicity yourself. Seems kind of ironic, doesn't it? Everybody already knows about famous people like John Grisham. But the new or unknown authors who could really use exposure get ignored by the publicity machine.
That's why I put so much work into this website, in anticipation of doing my own promotion of VRT. But it hasn't turned out like that at all! I have to say that Robbye really seems to be doing a lot. I was expecting nothing, so anything would have been great. But a lot is fantastic! I don't want to mention any specifics because I don't want to jinx anything that's "in the works," but I'm hoping I'll have good news to report before long.
She sent me a list of new age bookstores in the area, to see if we'd be willing to do "events" at these stores. (Which I guess means a short talk or a booksigning or something? I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of people coming to listen to me being an "event." So let's just call it a talk. Anyway.) We're happy to do talks, but unfortunately several of the bookstores on her list have closed. This area is just not kind to new age stores for some reason.
I wonder if local new age stores are closing all over the place? Maybe the Internet is making it hard for them to do business. The net certainly changed things for me. And no, I don't just mean Amazon. Georg and I have gotten to the point in our Tarot collection that it's very rare for us to find a deck in a store that we want, and we don't already have it. Most of my Tarot shopping these days is with Alida or other international sources.
If there were a local store with "collectible" decks in stock, I would certainly shop there. The Cosmic Lemniscate used to carry a few il Meneghello decks, and we bought several of them. But there's clearly not a big enough market here to support that kind of inventory in a small store. Eventually it became apparent that we were the only people who ever bought the il Meneghello decks, so they never got any new ones.
Tarot wasn't really their focus anyway. I got the impression from the store that they wanted to be a gathering place for local pagans. Unfortunately they seem to have put too much emphasis on "gathering" and not enough on "selling," and they've closed. Earth and Spirit in Durham has also closed. And last week we went out to Dancing Moon in Carrboro, to see if they would carry the deck and let us do a talk, and when we got there we discovered that they were closed too!
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