Dinty Moore's Book Tour Disaster Story!

My first book had only been available for about a week when I drove into Philadelphia for my initial bookstore reading, the preliminary leg of a very modest - meaning, drive yourself around, buy your own dinner - book tour. Still, despite the lack of airplanes or five-star hotels, I was excited. Years of dreaming and hard work had led to this moment.

My publisher had hooked me up with a longstanding, well-respected independent bookstore in center city, though in retrospect someone should have checked to see how the shop had been doing "lately."

I admit to a measure of dismay when the manager met me in a dirty, ill-fitting, pilled sweater at the front of an empty store and then walked me up a flight of steps to a narrow, dingy second floor. It wasn't the small number of cheap folding chairs that caught me up short, or the rickety podium. It was the vast array of "gently used" pornographic books and magazines that lined the walls. Though the main floor of this once-thriving bookshop contained the finest contemporary and classic literature, it seems the second-story skin books were paying the electric bills.

I won't dwell on the disappointing details of what followed. It was simple: no one came. Okay, one personal friend and his wife showed up a bit late, but they were also friends of the bookstore owner, so it is hard to say if they were there to see me, to see him, or to have a glass of wine, which is what we did when it became apparent that my reading was a total bust.

Live and learn, I thought. Of course bookstore readings don't sell books. This was normal.

I tried every justification to bolster my flagging spirits as I walked back to my sister-in-law's apartment that Sunday afternoon, down Walnut Street, toward Rittenhouse Square, where I hoped to grab a cup of coffee and just forget it all
But I saw the damn line a half block away. Hundreds of young couples, many, but not all, with strollers or toddlers, snaking along the sidewalk, into the sparkling new Borders, the one with the comfy chairs and coffee shop. I had to walk right by, and then, as if there was a lesson to be learned, I had to walk in, to see the line snake all around the first floor of the chain bookstore, up the steps, and once more around the second floor, until it ended at a wide table, where Chris Van Allsburg, flanked by four store employees, was signing copies of The Polar Express. Thousands of copies. He seemed very nice.

I pledged then and there that my next book would include trains, and polar bears.

But it didn't.

Dinty W. Moore's memoir Between Panic & Desire (University of Nebraska) was winner of the Grub Street Nonfiction Book Prize in 2009. His other books include The Accidental Buddhist, The Emperor's Virtual Clothes, and the writing guide, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. He has published essays and stories in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harpers, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader, and Crazyhorse, and teaches in the creative nonfiction MA and PhD program at Ohio University.