The Book Tour Diaries

By AL Kennedy.


Home

Rafting to fame and fortune

Cockamamie scheme to conduct reading tour by rafting down the Mississip fails to draw attention. Except, you know, from the New York Times. Next, author will conduct reading while skydiving without a parachute. Jaded audience members will still look at their watches and wonder when this fucking thing is going to end.


Home

Edited by author 06-20-2005 01:37 PM
No. 1 Tourist Detective Agency

swarms Botwana.

In Mochudi, fans can visit a traditional home like the one the detective grew up in, complete with cow-dung floors and homemade beer brewing in pots out back.

Still, the books, for all their adoring legions of international fans, have never made much of a splash in Botswana.
"People here don't read novels a lot," said Gladys Mokhawa, a university lecturer. She hopes to get to the book series one day, she says.

Even staff members of Botswana's tourism office confessed they hadn't heard of the mystery-solving Botswana sleuth until recently.

Home

Edited by author 04-15-2005 12:10 PM
Book tours

Not what you think.

Larry Portzline, creator of the “Bookstore Tourism” concept and author of the book by the same name, has launched a blog to share updates about the project, tips and ideas for booklovers, and insights about the bookselling and publishing industries.

Home

First fiction on tour

Take a bunch of first-time authors and send them on a tour of bars together. Sounds like reality TV for nerds. I'm there.


Home

Robin Robertson is a Scottish male poet. Is this gaffe on purpose (to fit with the subject matter)? Otherwise, it's incredibly sloppy journalism.

Dance, writer, dance!
I'd go to more poetry readings if they involved more moonings.

While humiliation is not unique to writers, the world of books, writes the English poet Robin Robertson, seems to offer a near-perfect microclimate for embarrassment and shame because of the inherent absurdity, she theorizes, "of trying to bring private art into the public space." Robertson edited Mortification, a book of cringe-making anecdotes about book tours and public readings. Robertson herself was once mooned through the window of a bookstore where she was reciting her poems by a passing group of football hooligans with pants down.

Home

Licking the Devil's Nether Bits Tour '05!

Rock on! Cynthia Ozick goes on tour.* Hotel rooms left a-shambles, strings of exhausted groupies naked and spent in wake of tantrum and profanity.

Thirty-eight years after the publication of my first novel, I (hereinafter to be referred to reticently, humbly, as Author) did it. What made it happen? A change of publishers; a munificent proposal to go on the road, all expenses paid; a lightning revelation -- enough of silence and exile! What, after all, have silence and exile ever done for Author but get her scorned as midlist, damned as a writer's writer, omitted between ''Oates'' and ''Paley'' on Barnes & Noble's shelves? As for cunning -- ah, let Author grasp this at last! Does Author, with all her white hairs, mean to kowtow forever before the footstool of Art? Or languish eternally as No. 543,972 on Amazon?

Funny stuff.




Home

When You Can't Give 'Em Away 2

I like the title of his book though...

A POET preached his work on a tractor in a bid to reach new audiences but his efforts fell on deaf ears.

No-one turned up to hear Halifax-born poet Craig Bradley while he was sitting on the Fordson Super Six agricultural machine outside Queensbury Library.

Poor fella. I prefer to watch my books fail from a bar down the road...



Home

The Book Signing Circus

As more and more celebrities--Sting, Madonna, Hillary Clinton and her mate--latch onto their inner author (and the attendant hefty advance), then take to the road to publicize their efforts, book signings are requiring far more preparation than the purchase of a large box of Sharpies. There are rules, there are regulations, there are wristbands.

I know how this feels. Sometimes I sit at my book signing table for hours and hours. Whatever it takes until the job's done. Or until someone shows up. Whichever comes first.



Home

Signer's Cramp

Lawrence Block writes about writing his name. "How the hell did this happen? Not to me, that's my problem, but to the business in general? When did signed books become such a hot ticket? Unless you count Saint Paul, book tours are a recent phenomenon. The first authors who toured were those whose books seemed likely to get them on local television—celebrities who'd written (or "written") books, authors of topical nonfiction, and cookbook authors who could go on afternoon TV and whip up something on the spot...A dozen or so years ago, somebody worked out what to do with the author's spare time. Instead of sitting around the hotel all day waiting for an evening event, he could improve each shining hour by hopping from store to store signing stock. Early on, store personnel were hard put to know what to make of the notion, but they got the hang of it, even as the writers learned to overcome their natural reserve and set about forcing their signature on stores whether they wanted it or not...My wife, who has an abiding passion for hagiography—we have a surprising number of editions of Lives of the Saints, not one of them signed—has her own theory. As she explains it, a book signed by its author is a second-degree relic, not as precious as a finger bone, but on a par with a pair of cast-off sandals."



Home

Not that kind of book tour. Check out the website: www.BookstoreTourism.com.

Bookstore Tourism

Why does this make me think of zoos?



Home

Edited by author 11-10-2003 11:16 AM
Hey Selby, how's Lio doon, wha? Luffed the book, man, luffed it! Nutbadtall. Shouldna bin "Scoats", tho? Just been picky, ne'ermind me.

Ernest Buckler didn`t do too many book tour, I don`t think. Ye-----oooow.

Book Tours Are, Like, So 1990s

The New York Observer says book tours are pointless. Neal Pollack agrees, but says they're still fun.




Home