erin!balser

I was reading this interesting article by Ann Patchett for The Atlantic and it was about book tours. The following quote struck me as odd:

We’re a country obsessed with celebrity, and trying to make authors into small-scale Lindsay Lohans does nothing but encourage what is already a bad cultural habit. Reading, no matter what book clubs tell us, is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

I understand Patchett’s point–and her other one about authors being inherently anti-social people–but book tours and publicity isn’t about turning everyone into a Lindsay Lohan.

Yes, we live in a world of celebrity (I, of all people, should know that!), but the author is as much the product as the book. It’s about culitvating a relationship between the author and the reader, so the reader, by virtue of knowing about the author or hearing the author speak, can divulge deeper into the book and become more likely to buy books by that author in the future.

Besides, what gives authors the moral authority to choose for what reasons people buy their books?

The article itself is fascinating and raises a lot of excellent points about the nature of selling books, book tours, and using authors as promotional tools.

I got an iPhone today. My luck in waiting only 10 minutes to get a phone is completely due to suckers like Matt who waited all day yesterday with a broken service system to get theirs, taking hours and hours to activate a single phone, leaving the Fido flagship no choice but to close yesterday with about a dozen phones left over.

The guilt eats at me.

It really does.

I went back and forth on getting this phone for a long time. What finally broke it for me was that I was truly disappointed that I didn’t have any way to Twitter throughout BookExpo while running around like a maniac. So this is my plan with my little phone. To Twitter and liveblog all the book events I attend, and maybe someday, to move this twittering from my personal account to the account of whichever publisher I’m working for at the time.

Also, unbeknownst to me, the iPhone has an amazing eReader application and public domain books are only 0.99. My dream of reading books from this phone is so much closer than I ever knew! Hopefully publishers will get on board with this format and make their books available to iPhone and iPod Touch users.

Any suggestions for making this machine as publishing-friendly as possible?!

And it hurt. But mostly it made me sleepy.

I wish I had a real excuse for why I’ve ignored this blog thing for as long as I have. The excuse is that I have a job now. Since March, I’ve been working as the Sales Assistant at Kate Walker & Company, a sales agency. It’s a bit hard to explain, because we sell books to book stores, not people. And the books aren’t ours. And my personal job is sales-free. It’s been going really well, I’ve learned tons, I like it a lot, but it’s made me sleepy. The change in schedule has nearly killed me these past three months (and it doesn’t help that I’m still blogging near full-time over at my other blogs). But I’m adjusting. I’ve actually started to do things during the week! So this is an exciting development that’s inspired me to actually use this blog again.

I doubt this will last very long. And I’m still not entirely sure what to do with this blog, whether it should be personal, publishing or somewhere in between. But I’ll figure it out.

On a side note, I’m working up the courage to submit a completely unsolicited “why Kate Walker & Company needs a blog” report. We’ll see how that goes.