I wrote the below as a project update for my friend Sarah Gerard’s Kickstarter. She wrote a powerful debut novel called Binary Star that’s coming out in the spring from the great Two Dollar Radio, and now she’s trying to self-fund an author tour. She asked me to share some thoughts about the value of a book tour for a working writer and I tried my best to do that. I hope, after reading, you’ll want to check her campaign out and will consider contributing.
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Every art form has its peculiarities but the strangest thing about writing—maybe, though maybe it’s just me (spoiler alert: it’s not just me)—is that its fundamental attribute is solitude. Plays, concerts, operas, movies take dozens if not hundreds to make, and are seen by thousands (or millions) in their turn. Even the painter, who might work alone or with assistants, eventually sees his work on a wall in a room in the company of that of his colleagues; in the white galleries and big museums the steady stream of pairs and trios shuffle from piece to piece like pigeons after crumbs. The view down into the gut of the MoMA or the lobby of the Met is of something between a river and a flock.
But writers. At our site of production we are found scribbling or typing in some office or coffee shop or other corner (or, rather, are not found, because we have either hidden ourselves bodily away or else made clear through posture and expression that we are absolutely not to be disturbed) and at the site of consumption there is, hopefully, the enthralled reader, curled up on her couch with the book she likes better than whatever plans she has blown off that evening, or else privately in public, nose nearly flush against the astonishing page (Don’t talk to me!), her subway stop three stations behind her—she’ll only notice when the train gets so far out into Brooklyn that it spits itself above ground and sunlight floods the car.
These two vast and wonderful solitudes are joined, precariously, as though by a wobbling bridge or the rope-ladder they throw from the door of the helicopter to rescue the guy on the roof of the burning embassy, by an interval of publicity: the truly “public” part of “publishing,” consisting of interviews, readings, “talks” perhaps. Whatever you can cram into that vanishingly brief period of weeks or months in which your book can be considered new.
I’m going to dial my rhetoric down from 11 to about a 5 here and say that everything about this part of it is kind of weird. Even when it’s going great it’s weird. Even if you’re the kind of person—and I’ll cop to being one—who feels about as comfortable on stage as off, it’s weird. But of course not everything weird is bad, and in the case of book tour, the weirdness of it—the fact that all this driving around, and crashing with people you barely know, and shaking hands with strangers, and being asked to answer Big Questions about art and life because someone has presumed in you some degree of authority that you yourself can hardly fathom much less claim, and having to insist, with decency but not humility, day after day, that groups of people should take time out of their life to come sit in a room and listen to you talk for an hour—are the very things that make a book tour great.
Apart from reviews (which the wisest among us take care not to read, and the rest of us pretend to not have read) the book tour is one of the few times in a writer’s life—for many writers, at least for the first twenty years or so of their careers, it might well be the only time—that we see our work out in the world: two or three or ten or twenty copies of this thing you made, not at the one store where your friend works (or where you used to work) but on the front table of Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY; on a little stand by the register at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA; Powell’s City of Books in Portland, OR; Longfellow Books of Portland, ME; Elliott Bay in Seattle; City Lights in San Francisco; Book People in Austin; the Tattered Cover in Denver; Prairie Lights in Iowa City. McNally Jackson, New York New York.
Cars, busses, trains, and planes; but cars and busses, mostly. Hotels or more likely couches. Lobbies. Terminals. Rest stops. Public bathrooms. Plastic chairs. Other people’s favorite local bars—unless you’re someone who doesn’t go to bars. I don’t know what they do with you then. Going to the bookstores is the best of it. Not just because they ordered a few copies of your book, or because if you’re nice to the booksellers they’ll remember you after you’re long gone, and hand-sell your book to people who would have never ever found you any other way, but because the stores themselves exist. They are unique and have personalities. They are staffed by geniuses and weirdos (there’s that word again). They are hanging in there—many even thriving—despite rising rents and rising cultural illiteracy and bright buzzing shit in people’s pockets and evil online empires and all the other wolves forever at all our doors.
In all its goodness, badness, and weirdness, the book tour is the part of the writing life least reconcilable with all of the others. Some caution is therefore called for but more than that: abandon. It should be embraced for what it is and mined for all the joy and experience it has to offer—which is plenty. It’s not for everyone, I bet, but it seems to me that everyone ought to try it once.
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I also gave Binary Star a blurb, which was this:
Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard’s young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity—ideological, mental, physical—comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is “I want to look at the sky and understand.”
— Justin Taylor, author of Flings
