Voyageur's Rebel Without a Pause

Special markets have a truly special meaning for the independent publishers and authors in the far-flung Midwest, where bookstores can be few and far between and where, increasingly, fine-tuned target marketing is finding customers in logical if untraditional places. Craft shops, gift boutiques, home repair and garden specialty stores, hospitals, bike shops, restaurants, fabric outlets, sporting goods and camping outfitters, even bait shops ("Bibles and bait, anyone? Could I interest you in a copy of Moby Dick with those minnows, sir?") are becoming ever more reliable outlets for titles that either tend to get lost in bookstores, or whose audience is more likely to be concentrated in more specialized shops or out-of-the-way places.

One such case is Voyageur Press author Jean Davidson's marathon, cross-country book tour of Harley-Davidson motorcycle dealerships to promote her memoir, Growing Up Harley-Davidson.

PW caught up with Davidson and Voyageur publicist Dorothy Molstad one recent Saturday afternoon at a giant Harley-Davidson superstore in St. Paul, Minn. An expansion and a grand reopening, coupled with one of the first nice spring days of the year, had motorcycle enthusiasts out in staggering numbers (the estimates were of well over a thousand people), and Davidson was surrounded at her table in the—believe it or not—art gallery of the dealership.

"It's crazy, it's wonderful," Davidson said as she leaned into yet another inscription for a waiting customer. "I'm booked pretty much every weekend into October, and every weekend has been more or less exactly like this. We've been selling anywhere from 200 to 500 copies of the book every weekend."

Between posing for photos with everyone from elderly couples to children to large, hirsute gentlemen in the full leather panoply of the true Harley-Davidson obsessive, Davidson sold, and signed, copies of her book, a heavily illustrated memoir of life as the granddaughter of Walter Davidson, one of the four founders and the first president of Harley-Davidson. The book includes a history of the legendary motorcycle maker, as well as portraits and anecdotes of famous customers of the company, including motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel.

"I teach school all week and fly back out every weekend for another event," Davidson told PW. "I'm pretty tired come Monday morning, but it really has been exhilarating. Obviously, my focus needs to be where my audience is, and my audience is here."

"This is the sort of thing we've been working much harder at," Voyageur publicist Molstad told PW. "We're a large publisher with a very diverse catalogue, and we have to ask with every title, 'Who's going to buy this book, where do they shop and how do we get the book into those outlets?' We do a lot of nature books and Americana, and when you really think about it there are so many nontraditional places where we have a good chance to sell those books. Look at this? Who'd have thought you could sell hundreds of books at a motorcycle dealership?"

Everyone who approached the table seemed to have a personal story they wanted to relate, and Davidson seemed genuinely interested in talking and sharing stories of her own.

"This really is a wonderful experience," she said. "I ask everybody to drop me a line to tell me what they think, and I can't believe how many e-mails I've already received. I'm saving them all so when I get old and feeble I can open that folder and read all these wonderful things people said about my book."