The Best of Publishersweekly.com: On the Road
By Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 12/20/2007 8:54:00 AM
Since last spring, I’ve been dong a series of Q&As called “On the Road, in which I’ve talked with writers in the middle of book tours. The authors reported that touring was tiring, fun, and full of interesting encounters with fans, some of whom were pretty weird. Here are some of the highlights.
All the authors talked a lot about the different kinds of people who showed up at the readings. Some encounters were joyful and encouraging; others were creepy. Super bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith, whose “No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency” mystery series sells all over the world, was met with enthusiasm more typical of a rock band or sports figure, or at least really unusual for books:
I’ve been really very overwhelmed with the sheer size of the crowds. One was about 600 people. When I do ticked events organized through the Barkley agency, the events are even larger—we had 2100 people in Seattle. In store events are often smaller: a couple of hundred people.
I think most writers would consider a 200 member audience a sell-out crowd. On another hopeful note, YA author Deborah Wiles was really excited by another kind of small audience: one made up of kids, who had some pressing questions:
They ask me how long it’s taken me to write a book, how I got it published, when I knew I wanted to be a writer. What I know from these questions is that they’re curious because they have stories to tell, and they don’t know how to tell them or how to get started. Kids as young as forth grade ask me, “What’s your inspiration?” Younger kids ask funnier questions: “Did you get a million dollars? Did you come here in a limousine?”
Most writers on book tour never ride in limousines, but publicist-turned-writer Jennifer Gilmore did take one once:
An older generation responds to my book because there are characters who were alive in the 20s and 30s…I did an event in Atlantic City…and got picked up in a stretch limo and driven 3 and ½ hours to Margate, New Jersey. There were maybe 70 people there, maybe 50 were awake. Afterwards there was a huge line, and people were saying, “My granddaughter’s a writer,” and “I’m going to get it at the library.” Literally, I think I sold two books there.
Poet Dorothea Lasky, author of Awe, had a way of guaranteeing she’d be comfortable in front of her audience: she did her tour in her apartment, with a few friends watching, and filmed the readings for Web broadcast:
In all the readings, except for the living room, because it’s bigger and can fit a larger group, the live audience…just makes me gentler, because I know the people in front of me—they’re friends—and I don’t want to scream at them. When I give normal readings, I’m usually really loud.
But sometimes people in the audience just didn’t know how to behave. At the end of a reading in his hometown, poet W.S. Di Piero had to field an inexplicable person from the neighborhood:
The guy had this crazed gleam in his eye, and at the end of the reading he said, “do you have a question and answer? Can I ask a question?” and I said “ok,” and he said, “Where do you come from?” and I said, “do you mean where in South Philly,” and he said, “yeah, South Philly, South Philly.” I told him I was born and spent my first 10 or 12 years at 22nd and Morris. He said, “No Kidding. I grew up at 21st and Tasker. That’s really cool.” Then he got up and walked out.
People often had personal questions, and writers like short story writer Helen Simpson, who came from England to tour, didn’t appreciate them:
I had a reading at Harvard bookstore with lovely Ben Dolnick…I remember the first question…one of those questions like, “so how much of your book is autobiographical?” That is always an unfair question to ask a first time writer. I backed him up. I just came in and said, “who cares? You’re just nosey. All that matters is whether it’s a good piece of writing or not.”
Then, sometimes, fans could be needlessly cruel, as one woman was to novelist A.M. Homes, who was on tour for her first memoir, about her own adoption and search for her birth partents:
There was, as I put it, the Mean Lady in Pasadena, who said something like, “I read a review of your book in the Los Angles Times, and you’re a very unthinking and uncaring person and you’re very judgemental and you have no empathy.” I said, "that’s your opinion, and this book was incredibly difficult to write and very painful, and what you’re saying upsets me, but maybe you should read the book and then we can talk."
In the best cases, audiences help authors see their own books in news ways, as was the case for Steven Bach, whose biography of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was controversial even for its author:
She certainly had a dynamism and energy and ability to manipulate in both the good and bad senses. It also baffles me how she could reach the age of 101 and be so totally unrepentant and free of any kind of remorse…I’ve always thought that if, when she was 60, she had just looked up and said, “you know what, I did it I loved my movies, I loved Hitler, I thought he was terrific, I’m really sorry,” everybody would have forgiven her.
Immersion journalist Mike Segar thought a lot about the stories behind his stories, that his audience would never hear:
I just spent five days with Kobe Bryant, and it was really about five or six hours…I was not ever alone with him. I got a glimpse of a wonderful story. Nobody really understands this guy. Everyone hates him, and he doesn’t get it, because he’s a machine. All he wants to do is be the best basketball player ever…He’s an amazing craftsman. He’s trying to get Nike to design socks that stick in the shoes so he won’t lose one one-hundredth of a second when he makes a cut.
There were other stories too—Frank Warren, the man behind Postsecret, read never-before heard postcards during our interview. Novelist T Cooper talked about how her punk rock, do-it-yourself ethic can help sell books in ways her publisher could never have anticipated. Short story writer Benjamin Percy talked about publishign fiction with an ambitious indie press. Despite the proliferation of new ways to read--the internet, handheld e-book readers--these interviews proove that literature is still an oral art form.
