The ‘06 Summer Tour
I once worked for a Midwestern concert promoter who booked acts like Aerosmith before his indictment and so permanently associate “tour” with “Jack-and-Stoli backstage bar & buffet” and “vacant-eyed young women in halter tops.”
Neither was in evidence at my two-day whirlwind through the Bay Area promoting LAUREL CANYON, at least at the bookstores; there were instead 7:30 a.m. wakeup calls for the 8 a.m. drive-time interviews and plenty of bottled water (which come to think of it is what a lot of rock tours are like today).
There were also the gracious and stalwart independent bookstore owners who doll up their stores and put your book and mug shot in the window and stay open late in the wan hope of selling a few extra copies while providing their customers and the community with a way to interact with the culture at large. Or something. Whatever it is, these guys deserve your business, so give it to them.
They also go out of their way to make “authors” such as myself feel like bigshots; at The BookSmith in the Haight, they give you a packet of author “trading cards” as a lovely parting gift:
The guys at the Depot Bookstore and Cafe in Mill Valley pull down the promotional poster for your gig and present it to you afterward, rolled up, like a diploma:
But most impressive are the readers who foresake drinks and dinner and hie themselves into neighborhoods where there is never enough parking at 7 p.m. to listen to you read badly from your book then stumble through pretentious, tortured responses to questions like “Why did you write the book?” when “I dunno, I needed the money” is the truth. Then they hang around afterward, buy your book, let you sign it, and hang around some more.
It’s an uplifting experience, trust me; especially if you’ve been shoveling coal into the publishing furnace for a decade or so at magazines and newspapers as a semianonymous drone.
So thanks again to everybody who participated in my tour, and I’ll see you on the road again soon.