More Book Stories
Part Two
At times, synagogues,
bookstores, magazines, and publishers and synagogues have been a pain.
I sent out emails to more
than thirty synagogues in Northern California looking for speaking engagements.
One was circulated by the program committee at one synagogue and a woman who
didn’t understand what “Reply All” meant, sent this response to me along with
all of the committee members, “Do we want to pursue this? I don’t especially.”
Then another member wrote, “For free on a Sunday morning it would be well
received.” But not by me.
After pleading and cajoling
the tattooed, twenty-something head of consignments at a local bookstore, she
reluctantly accepted one book, but only after I filled out a two-page form.
Three weeks later, my wife went to that store and looked for the book in the
Judaica section, the health and exercise section, and the humor section, to no
avail. She checked with a clerk at a computer, and discovered the book —
sitting on a shelf in a back room waiting to be put out.
When I contacted a Jewish
magazine in Los Angeles to do a possible review, a young man invited me to
visit his office when I was there in June. He would be happy to have a review
written if I would spend more than two thousand dollars, and he’d throw in a commercial
on a religious Jewish television network. Oy!
I even ran into some
difficulties with my publisher — Create Space — a division of Amazon. When I
ordered a much-needed two hundred copies of The
Oy Way, I received them promptly as usual. The only problem was that the
cover was a different color than all of the previous ones, and two pages in the
back were missing. When I contacted Create Space and explained the situation,
they matter-of-factly replied that instead of being printed in their plant, it
was outsourced to another printer who misread the correct color. I told them
that it was unacceptable, and they said that they would send another two
hundred that they would print at their facilities.
I few days later, I received
the rush order and was pleased until two days later I received another two
hundred copies. When I called up Create Space and asked what I should do with
them, they said I could keep them, which I did in a way. I gave away copies to
more than thirty libraries around the country, gave others to a struggling
Yiddish bookstore in Brooklyn, to the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur for
fundraising, and also to KlezCalifornia as incentive gifts to contributors.
I won’t make any real money
out of The Oy Way, unless more people
buy it from my website here, or my upcoming You Tube videos go viral when they
are posted next month. Stay tuned.
