My Grampa Tom Beahan’s, picture is on the cover of my book. I think he is what people buy when they buy it. The title of the book is “My Grampa’s Woods, the Adirondacks.” Maybe it would be more respectful to call him the salesman rather than what is being sold. But when I’m peddling the book through the Adirondacks it feels like I’m selling Grampa Beahan. I am uncomfortable about it.
Having given it some thought, I believe he would be ok with the idea. He was in business as a jobber in the woods hoping to wind up with enough cash to feed six kids and squeeze out enough to put a down payment on the Black River Valley
Grampa was proud of the picture I put on the book cover. It had a place of honor in the dining room of the Beahan house on Beaver Lane in Carthage. That’s where I came to visit them long after they came down out of the woods. He does looks pretty good there standing in front of the logging crew that he and his two brothers, John and Barty, ran on the Little River from 1900 to 1911. The fact that they could be taken for a northern edition of the Frank and Jesse James gang just adds a dash of daring. He’s there in his beat-up lumberjack clothes, thumbs hooked inside his suspenders, high-topped calked-boots and wearing a proprietary look on his mustached face. One middle-aged lady running a gas station convenience store said, “My folks used to work in the woods, too.” Then pointing to the patches on Grampa’s pants she said, “Look, there’s where he wore out his pants holding crosscut saws across his lap while he set the teeth.” She took five books.
Another lady, who runs a little grocery, said, “My husband works in the woods. They still dress like that. I’ll take one. He’ll like it.”
I wrote this book, published it myself. Suddenly I had three thousand of them and a big hole in my bank account. North Country Books of Utica agreed to distribute them for me. And they sold quite a few but my attic and their warehouse still creaked with crates of my book.
Waldenbooks stocked it and had me stand out in front of their mall stores in Watertown, Syracuse and Massena, book in hand, doing my pitchman thing. I never sold more than five in two hours and that was after driving all the way there from Buffalo. One guy came up to me in front of the Massena store and said, “You should get on Public Television. The Watertown
I called them up and that worked out. WPBS sold books in two drives and told a lot of people about it. I would stop into a little gift shop like Creekside Gifts on the Round Lake Road
I had one particularly memorable successes before I settled on my final approach to selling books. It was when I was scheduled as a preliminary act for a book signing in a Nature Preserve outside Syracuse
Selling books one at a time was working very slowly. Of course, I was grateful to all my relatives who bought books from me but he was their Grampa too. You get more money back when you sell directly to the consumer but to sell three thousand of them retail would have been an impossible amount of work. So I became a wholesale peddler of “Grampa,” traveling the back and front roads of the Adirondacks and seeing the Adirondacks from a new, a commercial, perspective.
To me, Jim Scanlon’s bakery in Harrisville was no longer a place for a donut fresh out of the grease and a bowl of bean soup. It was a place where maybe they could sell books. I learned, after calling the present owner by the wrong name, that Jim is no longer the proprietor. I also learned that this owner wasn’t too interested in going into the book business. “But if you’ve written about this place in there, I’ll buy one,” he said.
I knew I had something in the book about Scanlon’s but it took me twenty minutes of searching to find. It was worth it because between him and two customers and the girl he had waiting on the counter they got together the wholesale price of $38.85 for five and paid that instead of the $12.95 each it would have cost them retail. My wife, Lyn, and I gave him back some of that for a couple of glazed sinkers and coffee while I autographed the books.
Lyn comes along and drives while I hop in and out of the car. While I am in a store she does the accounting in the car. Then every once in a while we stop to have a picnic, go for a walk or put the canoe in the water. We become tourists again instead of business people.
In Booneville, I sold two books to a place called Persnickity’s, one in a jewelry store and a few more to Grandma’s Attic; then, on impulse I tried Chuck Hughes’s Hardware store. Chuck took a half dozen. I signed them, leaning on a worn counter I shared with a pile of paint cans. When we got home two days later he had left a taped message on our answering machine, “We sold out your book. Can you send us 12 more?”
We stopped by a few months later and Chuck took twenty-five. Maybe it’s because of Lumberjack Days that they celebrate there. That worries me some because the book is not just about lumberjacks. A whole lot of it is camping, canoeing, hiking and mountain climbing with the Adirondack Mountain Club, an outfit that is a staunch defender of “Forever-Wild” type wilderness toward which some loggers may not be very sympathetic. I may have let Grampa get me into some trouble here. Ace Hardware in Old Forge has sold just about as many as Hughes but I think they get more of a summer resident and tourist trade.
My best-selling locations are gas station-type grocery stores and “Nice ‘n Easy’s.” They set the book on the counter. When people are cashing out their gas and beer they get a look at Grampa and the Boys. They pick him up and see a piece of the Adirondacks to take home or else if they are locals they want to look up and see if someone they know is in the book.
Most of the time I get paid in cash or with a check on the spot. But, not infrequently, it goes like this. A man in dungarees and a flannel shirt with a pencil over his ear will thumb through the book, suck in his cheeks and say,“ I like your book but I don’t have the cash just now. How about if I send you a check at the end of the month?” I was skeptical of that arrangement at first. I turned it down a few times but I hated to pass up some good-looking locations. Even the Railroad at Thendara did that to me. So I started going for it. I have never been stiffed. A handshake or your word seems to be binding in the Adirondacks and cash is often not plentiful early in the season.
In Childwold once I ran into a misunderstanding. I mailed an order of books with an invoice and never heard from the lady who ran the place. I called her about it and she had no record of the shipment. We chalked it up to, “The mails in these parts.” I came through with some more a few months later and she came rushing over red-faced from her cottage in the back. “I’m so embarrassed. I found the invoice.” And she had the clerk pay me for both orders.
Adirondack stores like Hoss’s in Long Lake, the gigantic Hardware Store in Old Forge, and even some tiny places like Bonnie's grocery in Forestport are accustomed to buying books from North Country Books. But I found that there are many small operations that don’t even think about selling books until an author comes in with one in hand. Then they still may not think much of the idea. I’ve several times heard, “If I buy yours, I’ll have to buy every local author that walks in here.” That’s when I have to get persuasive or lucky or pray for divine intervention. Peter O’Shea has a book with a pretty cover showing a panther. He knows the country around Star Lake
There is a little woodcarving shop on Route 28 south of Old Forge. Hoping for a sale, I spent forty-five minutes there expounding on the intricacies of the publishing game. The young woman-owner dressed in her red plaid woolen shirt was only interested in her own book, not in selling mine.
I thought that Lake George and Lake Placid with all their hotel space and tremendous volume of tourist traffic would be a gold mine for me. I trudged up and down their main drags and found the pickings mighty sparse.
In Lake George I went into a well-appointed gift shop and talked with an attractive blond woman in a pink pants suit, the owner. I gave her my spiel doing my best not to make it sound too canned. “This is my Grampa, This is his brother Barty. Gramma was the cook. She hated it at the camp. I have a bunch of stories from those days and then a lot more modern ones about camping hiking and canoeing. They sell for $12.95. If you buy five or more you get them for 40% off.” Having repeated this literally more than two hundred times it is not easy to keep it fresh.
But she listened patiently, then it came down to this. She smiled bewitchingly and said, “It’s a nice book and I think it would sell but I’m used to keystoning.”
“What’s that?”
“I buy something to sell and I turn it over for twice the cost.”
I explained that I have an agreement with my distributor, North County Books, not to undersell them so I could not do that. But she was very friendly and we continued to talk for a while. I was curious about where the concept of keystoning came from and what might be the source of the word. The closest we could come to it was that it was an old term in marketing, a kind of rule of thumb to strive for but that the real prize was to buy for one price and sell for three times that. I could see I was over my head here in the big city. I went on and sold very few books. Then I came to a store specializing in clocks. What have I got to lose, I thought. I went in and there was the keystoning lady, apparently the owner of two stores. We both smiled. I said “You haven’t changed your mind have you?”
She said, “I was thinking about you and feeling bad that I turned you down.”
I said, “I was thinking of coming back to your other store and making another offer. How about six for $40.”
“Sure, I’ll take them.”
In Bloomington Lake Placid , Kim, puttering around in the flower tent she has attached to her grocery store, the Bloomin Market, took twelve books without batting her pretty eyelashes and ordered more by phone a month later. Norman’s Grocery, half a block away, took another half a dozen and when I complained about how tough it was to make a nickel in Lake Placid the no nonsense owner behind the meat counter agreed, “They are a tough bunch.”
Near Speculator I thought I saw a likely little shop at the far end of a building that also housed the Fox’s Lair tavern. Outside the tavern were 15 beautifully polished motorcycles. I went in what I thought was the shop door and found myself in a barroom full of big guys in black leather jackets and with either pony tails or Vietnam era bandanas on their heads. They were flushed-faced from beer and son and having a good time. One tattooed guy at the bar teasingly asked me what I was carrying. I brazened it out, handed him a book and laid on my spiel for him and a pal. The pretty barmaid steered me to her somewhat lit up employer who, seeing the interest of his customers, authorized her to give me my $38.85 out of the till. I bowed out quickly.
On our sales trip last May, Lyn and I took a couple hours off to tour the Paddlefest at Inlet. It was so windy that when we tried out a canoe we took it up the channel into Fifth lake rather than venture out and risk capsizing in Fourth. We stopped in most of the shops and sold to Kalil’s Market and the new book store, Adirondack Reader.
Indian Lake was fun. A news store and a gift shop, who I had sold books to previously, were not ready to be resupplied. I went into a third, a general store, smile on my face and pile of books under my arm and asked for the owner. A kid inside said, “You just missed him. He’s across the street chasing a moose.”
I ran back to the car. “There’s a moose loose in town,” I yelled at Lyn as I rummaged in the back seat for my camera. We followed down the way the kid pointed and across some backyards where we joined a couple with two little children, a DEC officer and two other men. There, chewing his cud while lying down in some heavy brush, was a great big old moose. I had never seen one up so close.
One of the men was the storeowner. I walked back to the store with him thinking that since we shared this adventure I had a sale for sure. He didn’t buy and. I don’t know why.
In a small way, missing that sale made me feel like Gramma and Grampa. They worked 11 years in the woods and came out with the down payment on the Maxwell farm. Then they couldn’t make enough cash off the farm to keep it from the bank. Grampa said, “Well, at least we got a year’s living out of it.”
The book won’t make us rich but it took us through a whole series of new Adirondack adventures, commercial ones. And we’d never have seen that moose except for trying to sell books to a storekeeper who would rather chase moose.
