Guerilla Marketing

Sometimes it pays to be unrealistic

So, I get a weekly Books newsletter from the New York Times, and this is what I read a few days ago:

Well, well, well, how could I resist the call of that last paragraph? Because I think I have a pretty good audiobook story. So I wrote her.

Dear Joumana:
In 2017, I unexpectedly started working in an office again with a commute from my house of about a half-an-hour, via the LA Metro and some walking. I started to read audiobooks, which both transported me into the world of the book during the commute, and cancelled out the noise and occasional unpleasantness of some of the urban denizens of the subway. Early on, I discovered Rebecca Makkai’s The Great Believers. She takes us into Chicago in the 1980s, as the AIDS crisis was descending on the gay community. Of this I know something, as I was a gay man in my early 20’s in New York at the time, and it was as if she had a microphone eavesdropping on all of our conversations. The sensation was incredibly enhanced by the narrator, Michael Lockwood Crouch, whose ability to evoke different characters with the slightest change in register and voice was masterful and uncanny. (Including an elderly woman in the present and in her younger past.) I had just finished writing my own book, Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir, and vowed that when and if I could afford it, I would hire Michael to narrate it.

Two years later, in November of 2019, I was hit by a car two blocks from my house. I was very lucky. My injuries were severe enough to merit the full insurance payout, but not to inflict long term damage. Minus the lawyer’s cut, I had enough to pay off all my credit cards and actually afford to get the book narrated. I contacted Michael, imagining he would be booked for many months, but he actually was able to accommodate me fairly soon after.

A week or so into the recording, he emailed me to say, “Mark, I didn’t realize how funny your memoir would be. I keep laughing out loud. Love your writing.” I won’t pretend that I didn’t already believe these things, but it was very special to hear it from a someone inside of the writing as he was. When I listened to his narration, I confess that I also laughed out loud at several new places, and relished many a turn of phrase I had barely noticed before.

I have since been able to say in total sincerity that if I was hit by another car tomorrow, and this time wasn’t so lucky, one of my last thoughts would be that I left one work behind that I was completely happy with, and I would be thinking of the audiobook more than the book itself.

I work at home again, and listen to audiobooks at the gym, because for some reason, I always need to be doing something else while listening. When I’m looking for my next “read,” sometimes I just look up what Michael’s latest project is. Very recently, I saw that he’d just done Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. I just finished it. It’s a book that reminded me, in its immersiveness and Americanness, of The Great Believers. Once again, Michael’s excellent narration made the world the writer created incredibly vivid and real to me.

I appreciate this opportunity to share about how one narrator can really impact a writer/reader’s life. But also, in general, since I started reading audiobooks, I feel they have helped keep me sane in these dark times. I can’t afford to travel much, but I feel as if I do with every new book I read, and that includes a significant amount of time travel afforded by historical novels as well. And because the gym is never boring, it makes a huge difference for my health.

I just am very careful crossing the street now listening to a good book.

Mark Olmsted

Obviously, the most I can realistically hope for might be that she samples a line or two from this letter in a future post, as I’m sure she received tons of mail with that invitation. But what can I hope for unrealistically? (This is what writers must be, unrealistic, just to be writers.)

If I got this email, mightn’t I be intrigued enough to look up Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir, and perhaps listen to a sample? She has a large budget from the New York Times to download audiobooks, she might not think twice about doing so. She has a staff to help her listen to these books and decide when she should review, perhaps she might ask one of them to do so (if her to-read pile is just too big.) And she may have an ongoing list of “best prison memoirs” she’s putting together, and she might add me to it. (All of those lists are conjured up for a deadline, they’re assembled over time.)

I did get a form email response, but I know that’s automatic.

But I have to believe mine and the other several hundred (?) replies will be passed on to her, at least the “best” ones as determined by an assistant.

I’m sharing this mostly to encourage other writers to try everything they can think of, especially every free thing, as long as it doesn’t mean becoming a pest or a stalker. Cause you never know when destiny’s fickle finger of fate will decide to help out. It has several times for me. (And sometimes seems to have intervened to close a door instead, on my fingers. the motherfucker.)

We have a love/hate relationship.

MCO 2025