Battling with the pre-book tour nerves
Eight cities, eight speaking engagements, 17 radio and TV interviews – I’m embarking on that modern day odyssey, the US Book Tour. Washington, New York, Atlanta, Tulsa, St Louis, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco – here I come.
Of course I’m excited – it’s my first book [see below], and my first book tour. More experienced writer friends have told me to prepare for disappointment, but never let it show. If only three people turn up, give them just as a good a performance as if there were 300. After all, they deserve it – they bothered to show when no-one else did.
This month’s Prospect magazine carries an alarmingly entertaining article by the novelist Edward Docx, in which he describes a tour where in some places hundreds turned up to hear him read from his latest book, but in Oakland only four. “This is not as big a number as it at first sounds,” he writes. Two turn out to be staff, one comes to everything and the fourth is – the organisers inform him – “crazy as a cut snake.” LA, though, is worse because not a single person turns up, leading Docx to wish that he could join the rest of humanity in not being there. “But I can’t. I am the only person who has to be here and witness nobody being here,” he reflects. “That’s what a book tour is, I now realise: a kind of existential joke.”
The flights are eye-reddeningly early so I make the breakfast shows. One radio programme says it features conversations with “writers, actors, ex-presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, grammarians, curators, and do-it-yourself experts.” That sounds like interesting company and I always like a conversation about grammar and punctuation. But I worry that no-one will find my jokes funny (humour is very cultural, and I’m very British.) I worry that they won’t like my book. I worry that they won’t like me. I have PBTN – Pre-Book Tour Nerves.
But it will be an opportunity to visit parts of the US I’ve never been to before – Tulsa (remember the song?), St Louis and Chicago – and see friends in more familiar cities.
And hopefully I’ll find people who, like me, are fascinated by Libya and the lives of Libyans, which is what made me write the book in the first place.
Sandstorm;Libya in the Time of Revolution is published by Penguin USA today, May 31st.
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