Authors & Book Tours
Tags: authors, book promotion, book tours, promotion, publicity
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.
Shouldn’t Ann’s beef be with Oprah? And anyway, I thought about this recently and I think that an anonymous writer is a benefit for both the reader and the writer. The writer can explore without being compared to previous work or expectations or their own personality. Isn’t that the point? Unless it’s something like personal creative non-fiction where context would help.
Perhaps the experience is better, Stuart, but from the perspective of selling the book (so that people may actually have the experience of reading it!), an anonymous author is something that needs to be overcome, not something that aids sales.
Interesting topic — Unfortunately I was away and I missed out so let me catch up
I think as book publishing has evolved (the little that it has) over the 20th century and into the 21st century — the one major consequence has been that more and more books are being published. I guess to some degree you could say that just as our planet is being over populated, so is the market.
Simultaneously the change in attitudes and expectations of readers (and other customers) has led to an expectation that an author of any book must show themselves and reach out in some manner, otherwise unless that book is one damn amazing book with some major backing from a marketing department — the word of mouth surrounding the book is likely going to be few and far between.
I assume you mean “asocial”, not “anti-social”. Writers may be a bit introverted, but we’re not psychopaths!