The Final Week of Book Touring for Finch and Booklife: Weary Author Wonders "Am I in Pittsburgh or Chapel Hill?"
(The copy of Booklife I've been having readers personalize has over 800 signatures in it now; note to self--don't schedule a book signing in Baltimore opposite a Ravens pro football game unless you like parking nightmares.)
I've been reporting from the road for the last four weeks. You can check out my past posts here.
The last week has been crazy for momentum for my two books, with a national NPR feature on Weekend Edition, reviews for Finch in major newspapers like the LA Times (warning: massive spoilers) and the Washington Post's Book World, coupled with the news that both Finch and Booklife are already going into second printings. This all made even sweeter by the news that my UK publisher, Grove Atlantic, will be marketing my novel next year to the literary mainstream as well as a genre audience.
These kinds of developments are what you hope for while you're on a book tour. Your away from home for long stretches (in this case since October 28), you're at times in a bubble where you don't get online or even are able to read a newspaper. So when you do come up for air, it's nice to see that your book hasn't been forgotten, that you're not toiling away on the road in a kind of more general obscurity, no matter how successful the events themselves are, or how many people come out to see you. It also bring up an important point about the nature of a dual-book tour: one book is always going to be on the rise and the other is always going to be a little lower on people's radar. If your book tour is long enough, you'll see both books rise and fall and rise again.
As I've gone from event to event, depending on the emphasis from local media and what's been happening with national media, I've gone back and forth between emphasizing Booklife and emphasizing Finch. It's been fascinating to see the overlap of audiences but also the ebb and flow of attention, and how that affects the perceptions of the audience. Sometimes, too, when you have a cross-genre novel like mine, you go from being a mystery writer to a fantasy writer to just a plain old fiction writer in a space of just two or three events. One thing I know for sure: the section on book tours in Booklife will undergo massive revision in the second edition. (After the tour, too, I will have podcasts for you of discussions of both fantasy and noir from a couple of the events. In the meantime, check out this podcast in which I relate the Romanian "professional cockroach story".)
In terms of the reality of the tour itself, everything has finished blurring to the point that I am somewhat disoriented as to day of the week and where I'm going next. The only real anchors are the books I'm reading. By the time you encounter this blog post I might be in Chapel Hill or I might be in Burlington or I might even be in Richmond or Atlanta. Regardless, I'll still be reading these two books, which I either brought with me on the road or bought while touring...
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx--I found a lovely little hardcover edition of this novel published by 4th Estate and had to have it just because design-wise it appealed to me. But I've found the story itself compelling, even though I'd never really felt the urge to read Proulx before. The narrative is warmly old-fashioned and satisfying, with the main character a well-meaning, clumsy man who tries his best to overcome his deficiencies. So far it isn't sentimental, and the stories of the sea interwoven into the narrative, the history of Newfoundland, are fascinating. Very enjoyable, if perhaps more straighforward than I would have thought.
Seven Tenths by James Hamilton-Patterson--I love Picador's Europa Editions, almost regardless of the author. The design of the books is extraordinary, and the choices sophisticated without being snobbish. Hamilton-Patterson's book of essays on the sea is one of their few reprints, but especially timely as it become apparent that humankind's impact on this still not fully understood realm is becoming catastrophic. The author provides sobering information with real poetry and even at times humor, delivering not so much polemic as a steady and steadying assessment of our relationship to the sea and how it must change.
Currently staying with: Darin Bradley and Rima Abunasser, Darin a writer with a book out from Spectra next year (check out the nascent website--it's going to be amazing) and Rima a professor of 18th Century English Literature at Furman.
(What strangeness will I encounter next?)
Friend of Europa on December 09, 2009 at 06:52 AM
Europa Editions is not owned by Picador - it is an independent publisher!
molosovsky on December 10, 2009 at 04:56 PM
Cool to see, that you like Proulx. She‘s one of the best in my opinion.
Reading the last few chapters of »Finch« at the moment (after I enjoyed the first two Ambergis books in German and could not wait). Absolutely terrific.