My earthy tale of a 1970s love triangle, set in the backwoods counterculture of the Pacific Northwest, had won advance praise from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews; it was nominated for Nerve.com's Henry Miller Award for Best Literary Sex Scene. More good reviews followed: Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, the Washington Post. It looked like a hit.
So when my publicist—I had a publicist!—faxed me a seven-page National Tour schedule, with flight and hotel information, car service pickup times, bookstore contacts, media bookings, and even a literary escort service, I was in heaven. There were 15 destinations: on the West Coast, in the Hudson Valley, Manhattan, and Philadelphia. My head was filled with visions of room service, minibars, adoring crowds seeking my signature.
It didn't take long to realize that I was not, in fact, the Rolling Stones on tour, and that people don't line up to buy just-released first novels, unless they are personal friends of the author. I never had fewer than 10 in the room, though once or twice I achieved double digits only by counting myself and the bookstore employee who'd introduced me. My largest crowd was about 25, scattered over 200 folding chairs at Portland's vast Powells City of Books. But as book-tour veteran Laura Shaine Cunningham said, "When you're out of town, if there are more of them than there are of you, you're doing well."
Here's the unsung secret of book touring: No one shows up. Though a Powells employee told me they rent an auditorium for the 600-700 Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) fans who mob his hometown readings, I know celebrated authors whose events have drawn crowds of one at midwestern Borders and shopping malls.
So why do publishers do it? If only a handful of people turn up and buy books, why shell out thousands of dollars for airfare, hotel rooms, and minibar tabs? "The number of people who actually sit in the seats is the least of it," says literary escort Eileen Maloney, who's driven scores of authors around the mountainside maze of Seattle. "It's a ripple effect. Someone tells someone who tells someone else, and the book builds a buzz."
"You're building an author's reputation, getting the stores excited so they'll handsell the book, hitting the local media while you're in town," offers Russell Perreault, director of publicity for Random House's Vintage/Anchor imprints. "We want to show stores we're behind the book, that we'll go the extra nine yards to promote it."
Not all authors like touring. "They get exhausted," says Perreault. He cites the grueling routine of one-night stands, early flights, and overstuffed media schedules. "Most authors are not early risers." Touring also takes time away from writing, and taps different talents. Perreault quotes Empire Falls author Richard Russo as saying, "I'm used to staring at the wall in an empty room, not talking to strangers about what I do."
But tours are important to bookstores as well as to publishers trying to pump up a book's reputation. Oblong Books in Rhinebeck has a special shelf displaying books by authors scheduled to appear in the coming months. Events Coordinator Carrie Majer says, "Nine times out of ten, people stop at that shelf." After a reading, unsold books are displayed with "Autographed Copy" stickers in prominent places around the store. After hit events, such as Oblong's recent signings with Nick Flynn and Victor Navasky, customers come in almost daily for signed copies, saying, "I heard it was fabulous."
It's also worth noting that a weeklong out-of-town book tour costs significantly less than a single-column ad in the New York Times Book Review, where advertising rates can top five figures. But the main benefit of book tours is not commerce; it's human connection. "It allows people to be in close contact with authors and have these wonderful encounters, to ask the questions they want and express what they feel," asserts Majer. "Book tours keep writers in touch with their audience."
Mine certainly did. My adventure began at Ariel Booksellers in New Paltz, where the window display featured Clearcut above the latest Harry Potter. Most of the two dozen audience members were friends. I read three short selections, my voice shaking with nerves. When I sat down to sign my first pile of books, I realized I had no pen.
Two days later, I hugged my daughter Maya at 5am and climbed into a Lincoln Town Car with tinted-glass windows. Half an hour from the airport, we blew a tire; I hoped this would not be an omen.
My San Francisco hotel was literally on the same block as the deli where I'd worked the graveyard shift, after the postcollege walkabout in the Northwest that inspired my novel. It was poignant to retrace the footsteps of my younger self, but I didn't have time to dwell on it: I was reading that night at A Different Light, in the Castro, where rainbow flags fluttered on every street corner and a transvestite starlet stood waving to cars. There were ten in the audience; nine were old friends. I was installed at a table next to a rack of adult XXX DVDs and gift books displaying bodacious male pecs. Though my book has bisexual elements, I imagined the customers wondering who let this straight girl in here.
 Nina Shengold signing copies of her debut novel Clearcut at The Blue Mountain Bistro in Woodstock on September 9. |
Powells City of Books was just as outsized. Imagine The Strand, with its vaunted "eight miles of books," crossbred with a big-box Barnes & Noble. Hundreds of people were milling around, buying new and used books on a weeknight. It made my heart glad.
My audience included former Sierra Club president Michael McClosky, and a few former treeplanters who knew the world of my novel firsthand. I answered lots of questions, and signed unsold stock while a bookseller told me that the previous night's reader, Periel Aschenbrand, drew over 100 people with her protest memoir The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own; she's photographed nude on its cover. (Ms. Aschenbrand also preceded my reading in Seattle, where she drew similar crowds. "I'm not sure it's the quality of her writing," one bookseller deadpanned.)
My crowd in Seattle was small but unique. A middle-aged woman led off the Q&A by calling my characters drug-addicted hippies. "People think hippies were heroes, but they were criminals who sold drugs to pregnant women and babies." Oh, I thought. Right. You're insane. Unwinding at the hotel, I opened the complimentary Seattle Times on my room service-tray to a review of my novel (thank God it was positive!).
I did three more readings in Washington, interspersed with taped interviews for three radio stations and lunch with the book critic of the Post-Intelligencer. The first was on Bainbridge Island, a breathtaking ferry ride across the Puget Sound, with the Olympic Mountains—the site of my novel—blazoned across the horizon. I read with a retired Navy shipbuilder promoting his thriller about a presidential assassination attempt; it hadn't occurred to the cheerful events planner that this might be an unholy wedlock of Red and Blue states. The Navy guy was a consummate raconteur, charming the audience blind. I sold three or four books.
The ferry ride back to the city was glum. My mood didn't improve when the hotel's smoke alarms went off at heart-stopping volume, and panicked guests pounded downstairs in bathrobes at 3am.
Next up: a suburban mall bookstore that opened onto a food court. My patter was getting smooth. The last stop was scenic Bellingham, near the Canadian border, where I met more treeplanters, a playwright who knew my theatre anthologies, a friend of a friend, and a few new fans. I'm doing this the old-fashioned way, I thought on the moonlit drive back to Seattle, selling the merchandise book by book.
The breakout event was my reading/book party on September 9, sponsored by Golden Notebook at the Blue Mountain Bistro in Woodstock. Over a hundred people came out to celebrate: my editor; old friends from out of state; my parents, daughter, and visiting nephew; my colleagues at Actors & Writers and Chronogram; even my family dentist. Gazing out at that overflow crowd of so many people I love was a once-in-a-lifetime, indelible high. When it comes to book touring, the wisdom of one of my favorite books comes to mind: There's no place like home.