This is the first post on our new blog, “Booked” — where I’ll be sending updates on my 22-city book tour. Think of it as your behind-the-scenes look at the least exciting of all the performance arts:public readings!
A book tour is a mixed bag: part Spinal Tap, part—well, I guess there is no other part. So it’s just a bag. I don’t mean, or have any right, to complain; there’s nothing more pompous than an author whining about having to go on tour. But if I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times: Put the writer’s name first, the puppet show after.
Of Jews and Love Matches
I started my tour three weeks before my book comes out – excellent planning! – and at one of the most stressful events there is: the Jewish Book fair try-out. Run by a generous woman from Long Island named Carolyn Hessel, the tryout has been called a combination of speed-dating and “The Gong Show.” I, and about seventy other writers, got two minutes each to pitch our books to hundreds of Jewish Community Center representatives from around the country. (If they like you, you're picked to go on a Jewish book tour.) We all gathered in a large auditorium in Los Angeles’s “American Jewish University”—who knew such a place existed? And what does that do Brandeis’s confidence?
And so, one by one, each writer stood from his plush seat,walked up and down the basement of his confidence, and diluted years of work into a 120-second spiel. The night’s M.C. held up signs the writer could see: “1 Minute left”; “30 seconds left”; “Time’s up!”
Kandinsky said: “All artists dream of money.” True, but author dreams are more specific: we focus on book sales. Hessel and her colleagues are offering writers the fantasy rewards of an automatic sales bonanza. If a Jewish Community Center from, say, Tampa picks your book, you get a free trip to Florida and a guaranteed jackpot—all the members of that J.C.C. buy a copy. So, if you make a love match with ten J.C.C.’s on try-out night, you’ve sold thousands of books. It all goes back to that splendid, that gregarious, that community-minded woman, Carloyn Hessel. She came up with this exquisite torture. It’s her way of putting good books into the hands of Jewish readers. And so she invites every kind of writer in Jewishdom—Pulitzer prize winners, Jewish cookbook authors, guys who sell self-published Israeli thrillers from the trunks of their cars—and we all come and do our little-dog-and-pony show, our two-minutes of anti-assimilation: we all make our books seem as Jewish as possible.
My novel is, to some degree, about the frayed relations between Jews and African-Americans (it’s about a lot of other things, too), but I didn’t plan out what I’d say at the try-out. “I’m good at winging it,” I thought. Bad idea.I went something like 67th out of 70 authors, and I could feel the collective nap overtaking the crowd; I got up to speak and, at the same time, chugged water so my voice wouldn’t crack; I started, as everybody advises, with a joke. We had all been told to say our names and our book’s specific page number in the Fair catalogue. I said: “Hi, I’m 199. Which is ironic, because people always say, ‘Funny, you don’t look 199-ish.’” (Not great, I grant you: but tailor your jokes to your audience, right?)
However.
The water I’d chugged went down the wrong pipe. I coughed over the joke, and immediately saw the “1 minute left” sign. I muttered something about God (or G-d) and then out came the cane; I was yanked from my misery.
And that’s how my book tour began. Not with a bang, but with a failed Jewish joke. I hope I do better next week, when I’m on the Craig Ferguson show on CBS. I’ll let you know how it goes.