First impressions.
Actually, I haven’t done much wandering around yet. Mostly, I sat behind the table and tried to come up with a sales pitch. I hate pitching sales. Especially when it’s me I’m selling. “I hate to impose, but wouldn’t you really like to give me some money for the privilege of reading these things I wrote?” But a few words makes the difference between politely smiling at what’s on the table from the middle distance and actually stepping in to pick something up and look at it, and you’re going to be saying those few words a lot, so it helps to figure out a simple and easy-to-remember, sigh, sales pitch. —Corina Fastwolf was sitting at the library table just to the other side of me; she co-edits Sugar Needle, which is all about candy. “Have some candy!” she’d bellow at the polite smilers, there in the middle distance. There was a bowl of mildly obscure candies right there in the middle of her zines. I got a vanilla Tootsie Roll. “I do Sugar Needle, which is a zine all about candy and sugar.” See? Simple, direct, effective.
“I don’t eat refined sugar,” whispers a woman in a flippy brown miniskirt, leaning forward apologetically.
“What’s wrong with you?” says Corina, laughing. —So it doesn’t always work.
Erika, meanwhile, on the other side of me, has a winner of a pitch: “Wanna star?” she says, offering up an origami star. “I can show you how to make one.” In no time she’s got four or five people standing in front of her, peering at strips of paper as she shows them how to make the folds and tucks and pinches.
Me, I’m settling on a groove. I’m lucky: the covers do half the work. “It’s a serialized fantasy,” I tell the polite smilers. “Set here in Portland. Each chapbook is an episode in the story.” That’s usually enough.
“Ooh! Zoobombers!” more than one person has said.
“They, ah, put in a brief appearance,” I tell them. Let’s dance delicately around the whole I-never-actually-went-on-a-bomb thing, shall we? —I printed extra copies of number 1, because I figured more people would buy the first one; I’m going to have to print extra copies of number 3, too.
“Ware the good neighbors?” says the older guy, peering at the Elevator Pitch card I put up in an attempt to have something other than me explain what it’s all about. “At least you have an idea what that means.” At least I thought that was what he said. And I was laughing that somebody got it, so it wasn’t until he was walking away that I parsed the rest of it: “So long as you don’t try to sell me any insurance.”
I, um. Oh.
“It’s a fantasy,” says the guy with the unwashed hair to his similarly unkempt friend, who hasn’t been paying attention. “Oh,” she sneers, eyebrows curling. ”Fantasy. In that case.” She marches down toward the table with the used paperbacks on 9-11 and anarchist cookery. He trails in her wake.
“It’s a, uh, serialized adventure,” I say to the next polite smiler. “Set here in Portland. Only with more swordfights.”
I can’t remember: did I promise not to make any Blue States Lose cracks? Whichever—I’ll be wearing the seersucker today, and the boater and the walking stick; all the better for walking aound. There’s some awesome silkscreen posters to check out, and Jesse Reklaw has a whole table of ziney goodness, and I’ve got to find out what’s up with the guy with the cardboard Alhambra.
—posted 6488 days ago
