I google my name. And bing it. I run my name in Goodreads and Amazon. I check in on the state of my online presence. I confirm that I have an online presence. Not a big one. But this Glenn Ingersoll’s footprint compares favorably with the other Glenn Ingersolls, the Canadian musician, the lawyer, the right wing pontificator.
Recently I thought to run my name at Abe Books, an aggregator site for sellers of used and antiquarian books. I was just bored? I didn’t expect anything to show up. In order for there to be used copies of anything I have written there have to be enough copies circulating that the few people who have one of my books have to decide it’s worth the trouble to try to sell it.
Thousand, my 100,000 word prose poem epic, was put out by Mel C. Thompson Publishing (a friend in a small apartment in Lafayette), on a print on demand basis. If anyone has a copy it’s because they either bought it from or were given it by me or Mel. There aren’t errant boxes shipped here or there that could be emptied onto a remainder table.
At Abe Books I find there is a dealer in the UK selling copies of Thousand. Currently they have for sale the whole 10-volume set (vols. sold individually), and they have 20 copies of the set. When I showed Kent he said, “Maybe they don’t really have any copies; they’re just ready to buy it new from Amazon & resell to anyone who wants to buy it from them.” The bookseller does list Thousand as “new,” so Kent could be right. You can get Thousand from Bookshop.org, which also isn’t Amazon, so maybe it’s the same sort of thing. The UK dealer is putting Thousand up on a site for used books, but so what? It doesn’t have to be a used book just because the site is explicitly for used books.
As of this writing I also find one copy of vol. 1 for sale (“used”) by a bookseller in Montgomery, Illinois. I rather like the idea that there might be a secondary market for copies of Thousand. It implies that there is/was a primary market.
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