Authors on the Road
KANFER, STEFAN
Culture Watching Authors on the Road By Stefan Kanfer “A boy has to peddle his papers," explained Truman Capote to an interviewer in 1966. He had just finished a crosscountry tour,...
...They learned the hard way that having a writer merely show up on-screen was not enough...
...I grabbed a greasy grilled cheese sandwich and some tepid tea in the lobby (the hydrochloric acid in your stomach will dissolve anything), hopped onstage, and began a scheduled talk about Brando’s eccentric performance in Mutiny on the Bounty...
...Pound knew exactly what to do with him...
...These included his fellow humorists Josh Billings, Artemus Ward and Bret Harte...
...Eventually more serious authors joined the circuit, among them editor Horace ("Go West, young man") Greeley and novelist George Washington Cable...
...This experience, I have since learned, was typical...
...Another tip: As the Midwest Book Review states, going on the road can be arduous...
...Anxious to have an essay written about his poetry, he hired TS...
...Caparisoned in a white suit (ah there, Tom Wolfe), he spoke of characters he had met or invented from the antebellum South to the Connecticut Yankee to Joan of Arc...
...They had a lot to learn—much of it from their clients...
...I changed direction with barely a hitch...
...From my distance," he recalled the much ballyhooed Englishman "was a small and slender figure, rather fancifully dressed___He read fiom David Copperfield with great force and animation, in the lively passages, and with stirring effect...
...They became household names overnight, and their books nimbly ascended the bestseller lists...
...There was no time for a proper meal—I was taken directly to the suburb of Santa Rosa during rush hour...
...Cavett: Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine...
...If none are on the shelf, let the manager know the author is in town on a tour and urge him to order books...
...Yet, as he implied without his personal appearances it might have been a succès d'estime instead of a commercial blockbuster...
...The program was emceed by Clifton Fadiman, a judge of the Book-of-theMonthClub.lt featured such novelists as Louis Bromfield and Christopher Morley whose works moved briskly after their guest shots...
...after all, Brando was an actor who could ad-lib an entire scene, as long as he knew its purpose...
...Then came Ernest Hemingway...
...She thought no writer could have it both ways...
...On the plane to the Coast I committed certain pages to memory—more or less...
...By the 1920s, publicists were working full-time to get their authors established...
...Matters grew infinitely more complex once hundreds of channels became available to viewers—not to mention podcasts and talk radio...
...it was either glamour or talent...
...They like to hear a talk...
...So why learn your lines and then try to make people feel as if they’re coming to you spontaneously...
...Keep in mind,” the piece goes on, “that an author’s role is that of a promoter...
...According to the Midwest Book Review it will— provided publishers and writers follow five essential steps: 1. Anchor each city with at least one interview on a major network TV affiliate...
...3. Utilize downtime by visiting area bookstores...
...In other words, his speech had to seem ex tempore...
...These gentlemen also enjoyed a new popularity and increased royalties...
...As Director Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) noted, “Marlon felt that in life you don’t know your lines...
...I stepped away from the microphone and was informed that the film to be shown was not Mutiny after all...
...So beware: A) Nothing will turn out as planned...
...First, persuade the apprentice to get rid of his adjectives and forge a fresh prose style...
...Although it can be exhausting, it’s the only way to gain control over book sales and at the same time maximize the cost of a tour...
...Alas, the conditions of the new millennium make that impossible...
...An invaluable tip, and one which I hereby share with my fellow writers: Act, don’t read from the page...
...Appearances on Johnny Carson's show also delighted the publishers of astronomer Carl Sagan, Gore Vidal and, of course, Truman Capote...
...I want to boom Eliot," Pound wrote to a friend, "and one can't have too obvious a pingpong match at that sort ofthing...
...The method was germane to the subject...
...Try to schedule these within a one day period if possible— reducing travel costs and downtime...
...Even then, these gentlemen were late to the game...
...He liked to struggle for the lines because that’s a real thinking process...
...It will be understood that he did not merely read but also acted...
...Cavett was an equal opportunity interviewer, however, welcoming not only egomaniacs but the camera-shy humorist S.J...
...Americans would not see such a singular performer until the appearance of Marlon Brando...
...She was mistaken...
...If a major network affiliate show can’t be landed, cancel that city and move on to the next one...
...Standing behind a well-lit lectern, he read excerpts from his works and induced audiences to exchange their hard-earned shillings for copies of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, etal...
...4. Obtain a minimum of two or three media appearances in each market...
...A celebrated exchange with the latter: Mailer: Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask your question...
...One picture, according to Dorothy Parker, turned women "all of a quiver...
...The first thing Hemingway's new publisher did was circulate photographs of the handsome young man, emphasizing his aura of danger and adventure...
...No doubt authors peddled their papyrus before the Common Era...
...2. Schedule at least one book signing...
...This will guarantee availability of your book in that city...
...many copies were sold and autographed...
...We much prefer to leave merchandising in the hands of the publisher’s sales department...
...Though he liked to strike an original pose, Capote was aware thathe wasmerely the latest in a long line of literary peddlers...
...The technique worked...
...Publishers realized that to move their wares they had to go retro and looked backward to the proven, time-honored method of the author’s tour...
...Here the ability to extemporize served me well...
...Well,” she said in a confidential whisper, “they really don’t like recitations...
...Poetry will follow...
...Jack Paar began it all by inviting raconteurs like Alexander King and Elsa Maxwell to ramble on about their lives...
...Eons before the Book-of-the-Month Club, decades before the invention of the electronic media and the development of public relations, there was the author's tour...
...The plane arrived in San Francisco in the late afternoon...
...I know this firsthand, because recently I was on the road reading from my latest book, Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando...
...Cavett: I have to tell you a quote from Tolstoy...
...You won’t hear any coughing, and you will sell more copies...
...Looking back, I derive considerable comfort from the fact that Dickens, Tw ain, Capote & Co...
...This time out there would be no attempt to read aloud...
...In the guise of Mark Twain, Clemens went on to his own remarkable career of public readings...
...As dramatic as Dickens was, he would periodically cast his eyes on the printed page...
...My tour began with a rising at dawn in New York...
...Third, encourage Ernest to quit his publisher, Horace Liveright, and sign on with Scribner's, a house thatreally knew how to get behind a book...
...Another circuit, Chautauqua in upstate New York, not only featured talks by William Jennings Bryan and Booker T. Washington, it also established the world's first book club...
...Soon the publicity departments of every major publisher were shoehor ning authors onto ever y TV entity in the nation, with the possible exception of the Weather Channel...
...For Twain's purposes the text had to be "limbered up, colloquialized and turned into the common forms of unpremeditated talk...
...The lesson of Dickens' dynamic presentations was not lost on Samuel Langhorne Clemens...
...Vaudeville was better known for entertainers than for literary celebrities, but it was not beneath the notice of Sherlock Holmes' creator Arthur Conan Doyle and the blind, deaf and mute author Helen Keller, who made frequent appearances on the Albee circuit...
...B) This may actually work to your benefit...
...On the Waterfront was now the film of choice...
...Offer to sign any books in stock...
...Mailer: Did you come up with that line...
...I asked her what parts I ought to read aloud...
...Clemens tried that for a few weeks—and was appalled...
...Take food along...
...More about that gentleman in a moment...
...The lady in charge had read the book and said she liked it...
...On April 20,1868, the 55-year-old author fetched up at Manhattan's Steinway Hall...
...Yet we needn’t feel that Art has sold out to Mammon...
...He had just finished a crosscountry tour, tirelessly plugging In Cold Blood on television, in stores, at libraries and readers' clubs...
...Will this sales technique pertain in the new millennium...
...Every time he read verbatim, he lost the audience's attention...
...Twain was joined by other recitalists anxious to establish their names and sell their works...
...Ninety minutes later the limo pulled up at a theater...
...So it did, and others soon followed her dictum...
...The imagist poet Amy Lowell announced, "Publicity first...
...they had changed the program...
...And they should utilize every moment doing just that—promoting...
...The Yale graduate, a comedian by profession and an intellectual by inclination, made the little screen into a public salon for notable writers...
...The "nonfiction novel" was an extraordinary achievement...
...Dickens' first biographer, Edgar Johnson, described one of those carefully choreographed occasions: "It was more than a reading, it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting—without a single prop or bit of costume, by changes of voice, by gesture, by vocal expression, Dickens peopled his stage with a throng of characters...
...Dick Cavett raised the level of colloquy from the late 1960stothemid-1990s...
...Ecclesiastes 12:12 reminds us that “Of making many books there is no end...
...It was too late to memorize the passages I had selected, but they were familiar enough...
...That movie was supposed to unreel after my address to the crowd...
...WHILE THESE excursions have measurable benefits, they can also have some unpredictable liabilities...
...5. Generate local word of mouth by arranging speaking engagements at the local library, Chamber of Commerce or professional affiliations, etc...
...And that was 5,000 years ago, when the hot medium for communication was the Nile...
...In the audience was an ambitious 32-year-old writer thirsty for fame...
...His late evening shows were home to such flamboyant personalities as Jerzy Kosinski and Norman Mailer...
...Plus the book is often given free prominent display that would otherwise cost a small fortune...
...As I began, the mistress of ceremonies whispered something...
...Flush with success and pounds sterling, the Englishman traversed America in the late 1860s...
...Before Parker was 10 years older, the new medium of radio elevated a handful of authors to the level of movie actors and band singers...
...He had been crucially disappointed by the sales of his debut volume, In Our Time, blaming Liveright for a small initial printing, meager distribution and, most sinful of all, a lack of publicity...
...Second, get his name mentioned in all the Paris salons, especially the one headed by Gertrude Stein, the Oprah of her epoch...
...This bothered her...
...Television provided a more potent route to celebrity...
...Now I knew how Mark Twain felt...
...Perelman and the Yiddish novelist and later Nobel Laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer...
...Do what Brando did and “wing it...
...But there was a marked difference between the British storyteller and the American one...
...His reading of the storm scene in which Steerforth lost his life was so vivid and so full of energetic action, that his house was carried off its feet, so to speak...
...I paraphrased them, augmenting my presentation with anecdotes...
...They were drowning one another out, and only a few books broke from the pack...
...Hemingway was not difficult to persuade...
...On tour with an earlier work—Stardust Lost, about the Yiddish theater—I was assigned to address members of a Jewish Center in West Florida...
...None was more assiduous than Lowell's fellow expatriate, Ezra Pound...
...So he committed passages to memory, pausing here, ad-libbing there, seeming to reach for a phrase and then pouncing on it...
...were promoting long before any of us took to our keyboards...
...Charles Dickens, who knew a thing or two about self-promotion, went on the road in Victorian England of the 1850s and '60s...
...Eliot for thejob There was only one requirement: The piece had to be anonymous...
...By the '40s, writers were taking part in quiz shows like Information Please...
...As expected he improved the sales of novels, short story collections and intime, leatherbound sets of the entire oeuvre...
...We writers like to think of ourselves as ivory tower types...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
