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In three months through June 2006 my book moved about 1,450 copies, so I said to myself, "It'll probably top out at about 2,000," which I guess wasn't too bad considering I didn't get many reviews, the most high-profile being Tom Breihan's Pitchfork rave ("Don't even attempt to fuck with Real Punks Don't Wear Black") that didn't even go up until July.

My statement for the year through June 2007 finally arrived yesterday, and I was thinking I might get a royalty check for another two hundred, which'd be nice. Shows how much I know about the book business. What happened was I got clobbered by returns, over 600 of them, with only 89 new copies sold (so much for Pitchfork's effect on book sales). So now I'll be lucky if I even top out at 1,000, and I'm sure I'll never get another royalty check on it.

What those returns mean is that UGA Press did a good job of getting my book into the stores, but the stores couldn't move 'em off the shelves. Of course, I didn't do anything much on my end other than feature the book on my MySpace: didn't try to arrange a reading at Tattered Cover or think about talking the thing up myself, getting my life together and flying around to book fairs here and there. This had to do with my own financial lassitude (which is a nice word to cover what is basically an on again, off again dysfunction); I wasn't thinking of how to push this as a project, just stumbling from check to check. But really, I needed some high-profile reviews and didn't get 'em. The reviews I got were nice but there weren't enough. Smartest was this one from Frieze.

The book still looks beautiful, has a great title, you can probably get it real cheap used through Amazon, and your library might order it if you ask them to. In the meantime, I'm reminded that my way of thinking just doesn't entice a whole lot of people, much less inspire them to join in.

I kind of had a grump about that at the end of my column, which goes up in about nine hours. Something about seeking a vector to the unfound reader, though I said it more articulately than that.

This does remind me to rev up my thinking about the Department Of Dilettante Research, and the search for said vector.
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Frank Kogan

July 2025

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