The Glamour of the Book Tour

Most writers I know have wonderful Disastrous Book Tour stories to tell. I guess it's a misery-loves-company kind of thing, but they're often pretty funny.

One of the funniest I've heard has almost achieved urban myth status among writers. It involves a writer who has been invited to a college to give a reading from his new book. But when he arrives he's met by a rather harried department chair who tells him he's really sorry, but there's a meeting that he has to go to that conflicts with the writer's reading. It's one of those last minute emergency meetings that can't be avoided. So he leads the writer to the room where he'll be reading and tells him he can start at 4. There are only two people in the audience, a couple of students sitting in the front row. But he figures he's been invited to read so he's going to read - if it's only to two people, fine. At four, he gets up on stage, introduces himself, and says he's going to read from his new novel, but since it's an intimate audience, he tells the two guys in front that they can interrupt him if they have any questions. He starts to read and he thinks it's going pretty well - he gives it his all, just as he did in the writing of the book - and after about ten minutes he looks up and there's one of the guys with his hand in the air.

The writer stops reading and says, "Yes, you have a question?"

The kid in the front row clears his throat and says, "Yeah, we were wondering if you would mind keeping it down? We're trying to study for a test."

I have a story that's almost as bad.

When my book TURNING LIFE INTO FICTION first appeared, I gave a reading from it at Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle. At the time, I was a new professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, having been hired to replace someone who hadn't been let go. That person was now suing the university and oddly enough had named my new book in the lawsuit, though I had never met this person. It was odd, but I forgot about it.

Usually, I love to give readings, but this was a how-to book basically, and I made the mistake of trying to read from it rather than simply answer questions. I guess I was inexperienced, but even so, halfway through the reading, I was boring myself to tears. When the reading was over, the audience fled, all except for one woman, who smiled and asked if she could chat with me.

I smiled. Well, I had one admirer at least. The day wasn't a complete waste. She smiled and handed me a piece of paper, not a book to sign. It was a subpoena. This was the lawyer of the person who was suing the university. She had read in the paper that I was visiting Seattle where she was based and she thought she'd save herself a trip by serving me the subpoena at my reading.

And she didn't even buy the book.