I Don’t Do It For The Money

I don’t do it for the money.

For six or eight months now, the high-point of my days has been the opportunity to go read from Beyond Beowulf to an admiring – or unadmiring – audience. In the last ten days, a flurry of such activities took me to five such events. Two of them actually provided honoraria!

One was a school reading that provided neither honorarium nor sales.

In the five events, I sold 24 copies of Beyond Beowulf. This is clearly not a good way to get rich quick(or slowly, for that matter), but then, I don’t do it for the money.

Think of the other rewards.

The last event in the series took me into Manhattan, 200 miles round trip, where I read to an audience of six including my wife, and sold two copies (plus four other books). But we got to stay in an elegant Manhattan town house built for a grand-daughter of Commodore Vanderbilt with furnishings imported from Italy. We got to go out to dinner at a good French restaurant and breakfast in another very good French restaurant. It was a interesting change from our retired life in the bucolic northwest corner of Connecticut.

On the way home I tried to calculate the balance between the generous honorarium and sales on the one hand and the cost of two restaurant meals, parking garage, and mileage on the other. I think we came out slightly ahead. But, hey: I don’t do it for the money.

And a good thing I don’t!

(There’s an updated calendar posted just below. Non-Beowulf events are beginning to outnumber Beowulf events!)