iU author gets great write-up in national newspaper!

iUniverse’s Douglas Gardham, author of The Actor and The Drive In, was recently profiled in The Globe and Mail, by writer Mark Medley. See below for a portion of the article and a link to the rest. Congratulations to Douglas on some great publicity — which he has earned through being a diligent self-promoter!

THE HARD SELL

Mark Medley goes on the road with Douglas Gardham, the would-be king of CanLit

On a recent Saturday evening, Douglas Gardham is sitting behind the wheel of his black Acura TL, on a highway west of Toronto, making his way back to Alliston, the small town where he lives. The road is slick from the rainstorm that passed through the area earlier that afternoon, and traffic is relatively light. The radio is off, and the car, for the moment, is quiet. He seems tired. It’s almost 10 p.m., and it has been, for Gardham, a long day; he’d arrived home just after one that morning, having spent the previous week-and-a-half in Mexico with his wife, where they celebrated their 30th anniversary, and left his house at 10 a.m. to drive to a Chapters bookstore in a big-box shopping mall on the border of Oakville and Mississauga. He spent the subsequent nine hours standing behind a small table, near the entrance, hawking his two self-published books to strangers.

“It was a better day than I thought it would be,” he says, his eyes darting between the road ahead and the rear-view mirror. “I didn’t think we’d get to that number.”

He sold 29 books that day, surpassing the 16 sales he averages at each event. This is Gardham’s career. Every weekend for the past three years, with very few exceptions, Douglas Gardham has travelled to a different bookstore, from British Columbia to New England, to sell his books. Three years ago, just after his first novel, The Actor, was published, he quit his full-time job of 20 years to try and make it as a writer.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/every-weekend-author-douglas-gardham-is-at-stores-to-sell-his-books-but-who-is-he/article30937086/