Anytime someone refers to something they've been through as a "learning experience," I assume this means there was pain involved, so I don't want to give you the wrong impression when I speak of Things I Learned On My Book Tour: it was mostly a whole lot of (exhausting) fun. Nonetheless, there was some stuff I found out about the whole Being the Author of a Book That's Now in Print business that was like, news to me.
As the series of Adrian Tomine images posted here mordantly explicate, man, there are a lot of books being published out there. Which may account for the benignly indifferent look on the face of the Barnes and Noble employee at a NYC store when I told him I was the author of a new hardcover they had in stock and I was here to sign the copies.
Not that I was expecting the guy to fall over in awe ("Really? You wrote a book we're carrying?!"), but it's humbling, once you realize how little one's bouncing baby book really means in the larger scheme of Bookdom, let alone current events in general. Sure, they'll put the little "Autographed Copy" sticker on your tome, once you've signed it, and some of the bookstore folks I chatted with when I did these drop-ins were friendly and upbeat about the task. But they tended to be the ones who were writing books themselves. Because everyone's writing one by now. Aren't you?
Meanwhile the readings themselves, in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City and Baltimore, were really well-attended, which is no mean feat. (My honey Tater tells of being one of exactly seven people attending a David Sedaris reading in L.A. half a dozen years ago; the well-known humorist spent most of his reading time ripping philistine Los Angelenos, and who can blame him?) But my big numbers -- 40 people at 3 out of my 7 appearances, with 25 the smallest gathering -- is more a testament to the strength of my mailing list, and the fact that I waited until this publication event to call in such a social favor from my friends and acquaintances. (I had over 70 peeps at the rom-com seminar/book signing in S.F., but that was on account of my being at a university, and showing a bunch of groovy movie clips, as advertised.)
The biggest fun of these gatherings was the odd juxtaposition of people from all the many times and places in my life. In NYC, for example, I saw one of my oldest friends, an artist in his 50s, deep in conversation with a blog-friend I'd just met in person for the first time, a filmmaking student at NYU (Hi Tuna!); a girl I went to elementary school with had shown up the night before, at the same reading attended by a girlfriend from college days, a bass player I'd worked with in the '70s and his wife (Hi Bonnie!), and my mom's 80-something cousin. It felt, as I informed that crowd at KGB Bar, a bit like attending my own wake.
Here's the odd thing, though: despite the enthusiastic response from all these people who were generous enough to devote half an evening in support of yet another debut novelist, one is occasionally conscious of who's not there -- an entity I've come to think of as The Invisible Audience. That would be the ever-elusive "they": the public one hopes will ultimately embrace (and hopefully buy) your work. Apart from a relatively small percentage of strangers who came to these readings out of curiosity, I was mostly preaching to a personal choir. So when a tree falls in that particular forest, you start to wonder, is it really being heard anywhere else?
There are the Amazon numbers to troll, compulsively, but for other indicators you have to read reviews. Mine have been "mixed," thank goodness, but it's still a scary experience. Imagine Me and You has now been publicly eviscerated in a perplexingly mean-spirited L.A. Times review (a friend phoned to ask me if I'd ever given its writer a "D" in one of my screenwriting courses) and gotten thoughtful, considered criticism from Cleveland. But the most bewildering responses have been found on-line.
You begin to realize that a surprising minority of readers read the book you wrote -- that is, the book as you intended it to be understood. Quel irony: one of my novel's primary themes is "projection" (its protagonist is constantly trying to be the people other people perceive him to be, and his imaginary lover is, in one sense, a projection of a part of him), so it makes a perfect perverse sense that the book has become a screen for the sometimes wildly subjective projections of disparate people.
Someone will say, "I get that the story is really about bleu cheese," and you're left over here, helplessly sputtering "But there is no bleu cheese in my book! I hate bleu cheese (especially how it's spelled)!" Welcome to the writer's side of the reading world, where no one will hear you scream (unless you're fond of writing letters to the editor, etc., which makes me fear you've either got too much time on your hands or too little perspective).
This makes the occasional heartfelt praise you receive from people you trust all the more valuable. Because I guess the one thing I learned, while out there on the road with my first novel, is how little the presence of that Invisible (though at times disturbingly audible) Audience really matters. If you love writing, as I do, at its core writing a novel is really a giving of love to the people you care about. I feel like I got a bunch of it back, as I went out among 'em for a couple of weeks, and what could possibly be the downside of that?
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