Street Corner Hustle: An Author Hawks His Own Books

I’m standing on a corner in Placerville, California on a fine fall afternoon, gauging the pulse of chattering families, tourist couples and furtive loners who flow past in an unending river of humanity.

I’m waiting for my opportunity, poised to strike.

“Hey, big man,” I say to a large middle-aged type. “You played football, didn’t you?”

He sizes me up with a bashful smile. Go figure. Dude actually was an athlete after all.

Touchdown.

“Got a moment?” I say. “I’ve got something I think you’re gonna like.”

Then I fumble. The man moves on.

This historic Sierra mining town was a trading hub during California’s storied gold rush, a place prospectors called “Hangtown,” where cow thieves and killers swung from the noose. 

Today, I’m hanging out for a bit of modern-day panhandling, testing the tastes of a mercurial, quicksilver public. But I’m no freeloader soliciting spare change. I’m not that kind of panhandler, (though on this day I will feel like one.)

I am here to sell books. Namely a work of nonfiction I published earlier this year through the University of Nebraska’s Bison Press entitled “No Friday Night Lights: Reservation Football on the Edge of America.” It chronicles a rural band of luckless teenagers in an anonymous town amid “flyover country,” like ones you’ll find not far from Placerville.

Publishing a book is the ultimate high. But, after the pride of release day, it has come to this: I’m a veteran journalist-turned shameless street-corner book hawker.

Authors working with university presses often must do the heavy lifting to help market their books. Rather than being coddled by polished publicists, we work from home offices, those lonely sweat shops, cold-calling bookstores, literary festivals and libraries to achieve the holy grail: a bit of public exposure for all our hard work.

The prize is an “author’s event” in a popular bookstore where you can discuss your work before a small audience. But those prose lovers and other strangers are often unavoidably joined by family, friends and sympathetic colleagues. In a tight publishing market, it’s a kind of literary Tupperware party where each guest is expected to do his or her part and buy a book. Talk about shameless.

By far, the most challenging and humbling form of publicity outreach, the loneliest of literate redoubts, is the unassuming writer’s book table.

Most take place inside the bookstore, but my little Placerville shop is so tiny I have been shown the door, shunted out to the sidewalk to ply my wares.

I quickly become a shameless carnival huckster, one of those slippery street vendors handing out ads for girlie shows in the shadow of the Las Vegas Strip.

It’s a sunny mid-October afternoon as I unfold a plastic table along Placerville’s main tourist drag. I arrange stacks of my book and place an oversized poster of the cover behind me.

I’m ready to get to work. But how, precisely? 

How do you breach someone's personal space with your own agenda? My own hackles definitely rise when I’m hailed down by some slick salesman with something to peddle. Nobody likes to be strong-armed.

One of the most challenging journalist assignments is the “man in the street” interview, where you corner passing strangers for their reaction to some news of the day. You’re fishing for quotes and people don’t usually give them up easily. Instead, they barge past with an abrupt “I haven’t got time.”

Still, this is what you do as a journalist. You face the public with grit and fearlessness. You break down people's defenses so they finally open up and tell their stories.

But it’s somehow different when you’re doing it for yourself and not under the guise of some major newspaper. For my book, I spent months in a town of 45 people on the Nevada-Oregon border. It took weeks to make my appeal to residents there, to convince them to share their wonderful tales.

At the book table, I have a mere nanosecond to make a connection.

Talk about a tough gig.

In Placerville, most sidewalk booksellers are local housewives selling folksy cookbooks or historians with a new slant on the California Gold Rush. 

I am decidedly not local. I drove three hours from the San Francisco Bay Area, in the teeth of Saturday traffic, just to get here. I bribed my wife with a nice dinner, a night at a rustic bed-and-breakfast and an amble in a national park to induce her to tag along.

Not only that, my book is about life on the edge in another state — a hard sell here in this comfortable Sacramento bedroom community. I sit back and watch the parade of guys in baseball caps carrying their cup of Starbucks, cutesy couples and gaggles of girls dressed up for Halloween.

I need a strategy. I single out a rangy-looking teenager.

“You look like a high school quarterback,” I suggest.

He shrugs, then skulks away.

I face a hard truth: I’m invisible. Ignored. Dismissed.

It reminds me of an experience years ago during a brief reporting stint at a weekly newspaper in tiny Haines, Alaska. For a Christmas story. I dressed up as Santa Claus and manned a donation pot outside the local supermarket.

For hours, I “ho, ho, hoed” and rang that idiotic bell. Not a bloody nickel. I became the angry genie left languishing in a bottle. People avoided me like I was naked, or a corpse abandoned on the street, yet to be stuffed into the coroner’s body bag.

The experience left a bitter taste, one I now sense at my Placerville post.

I decide to seek justice, a small bit of revenge. That’s when I spot a fresh smear of dog poop on the sidewalk and secretly will a guy with a Starbucks cup to step in the mess. 

But no matter how hard I concentrate, nobody succumbs to my little mind game, not even the barefoot guy, who would have been my prize for the day, even when I silently chant, Buddhist monk-like, “Step in it! Step in it! Step in it!”

How far have I fallen? Instead of selling books, I am silently willing people to step in dog crap.

But slowly, humanity presents itself there on that sidewalk. One man politely excuses himself: He needs to access a small door behind me to reach a second-floor Airbnb he and his wife have rented for the weekend.

I apologize and step aside. I have neither the heart nor the moxie to pitch my book. But at least it’s a start. I exist, no longer ignored.

Then I change tactics, switch up my come-on. And it works.

“Pity the poor local writer who must peddle his own books on the street,” I say.

One man points to a nearby building front that features a man-sized effigy hanging from a noose, a nod to the town’s former macabre method of corporal punishment.

“Hey, at least you’re not that guy,” he says.

I laugh. He has a point. I loosen up. I forget about the dog poop.

Then I meet Doug, a self-published children’s fantasy writer who offers encouragement. There’s Steve and Sonia, who once backpacked together across Europe. And Darrell, the lanky building inspector from Stockton with the easy laugh. And the woman who offers an honest admission: 

“I just don't have the attention span to read anymore,” she says.

I suggest that finding the right book is like finding the right partner. “Once you get the right one, the rest is easy,” I say. “You find the time for them.”

Still, nobody actually buys a book. At this point, I don’t care. I love these shared stories.

Then the couple emerges from their Airbnb. The wife mentions that she’s a social worker. Like me, she’s been around.

“What’s your book about?” the husband asks. “Oh really? I love football.”

He pulls his last $20 from his wallet and I stuff the bill into my pocket like it’s still the 1970s and I just sold a dime bag of weed. I sign the book. Success at last.

I fold up my book-selling table. The sun is still high. It’s time for that walk in the woods.