Tod Bowden owner of Patagonia’s Choice Fitness Center in Arizona sold five copies of Robert E. Kimball’s News To Die for novels in the month of March. He sold three paper editions at $20 each and influenced two others to purchase the ebook at amazon.com for $7.99 each.
When asked how he did it he said, “Well you know my patrons spend up to one hour with me several times a week. I have a captive audience. I just keep pitching until they give in. No, in all seriousness my patrons know Bob Kimball and they were interested to find out how good News To Die for was. Two of them rated the book on Amazon, one gave him five stars the other four.
Kimball said he was extremely pleased with Bowden’s sales performance. It helps to make up for the canceling of the Tucson Festival of Books due to the coronavirus. Kimball had reserved a booth at the book festival as a way to showcase his book. He spent more than a week designing and building a display for his booth. It showed how the first page of the book changed though out the seven-year writing and editing process. Also part of the display was a clear plastic manuscript box containing 1,000 double spaced pages. It was the master copy containing all the recommendations from five readers and one editor. Each suggestion or correction was marked with a colored flag to indicate where changes needed to be made for the final copy. There were over 1,000 flags.
“It was a bit overwhelming,” Kimball said. “It took nearly a month to make all the changes in the computer copy.” Next, it had to go back to the editor to make sure all the changes I entered into the computer copy didn’t contain any errors.
Kimball donated books to the Patagonia Library and to the Nogales Library. The Tucson Public Library tucsonpubliclibrary.org ordered a few copies, but the library is closed until further notice.