Audio By Carbonatix
This past Saturday, May 23, author Libba Bray gave a reading at
Books & Books in Coral Gables. A crowd of fans listened to her
discuss her latest book, The Sweet Far Thing, asked questions,
and then purchased signed copies of her work.
What made the event unique is that Bray was never in Miami.
Instead, she was 1,000 miles away in Brooklyn, sitting in front of
her MacBook Pro laptop, which, equipped with a built-in webcam and the
popular teleconferencing software Skype, beamed her voice and image
real-time onto a projection screen in the Gables. Through a wireless
microphone provided to the store free of charge from publisher Random
House, the audience asked questions while remaining seated. Afterward,
they bought pre-signed copies of The Sweet Far Thing.
“I was nervous,” says Bray, a writer of three best-selling young
adult books. “I’m like the Jessica Simpson of technology.”
Bray’s seven-city Skype book tour, which began in Chicago a week
before it hit Miami, is the first of its kind in the industry, says
Random House spokeswoman Meg O’Brien, and an effort to take advantage
of the Internet savvy of Bray’s mostly teen audience. The publishing
conglomerate — which, despite recent downsizing, is the world’s
largest — has used Skype previously to allow authors to make
appearances at private book groups, but is now introducing it into the
somewhat hallowed ground of the book tour.
At least one reason is money. Book revenues are way down. December
3, 2008, became known as “Black Wednesday” in the publishing industry,
after almost every major publishing imprint announced layoffs, hiring
and pension freezes, and, in the case of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a
freeze of acquiring new works, a move that Forbes magazine
incredulously compared to “a car manufacturer announcing that car
manufacturing is henceforth suspended.”
Random House in particular has been the subject of industry
speculation. In March last year, its parent company, media conglomerate
Bertelsmann AG, known as the “German Warner Bros.,” fired former CEO
Peter Olson and replaced him with 39-year-old Markus Dohle, whose
previous claim to fame was making big money helping small towns find a
cheap way to register cars and collect taxes. Balzacian perhaps, but
not Balzac. Then in December, the company dissolved two of its five
imprints, Bantam Dell and Doubleday.
So now the question is: Will the cost-cutting eliminate the
in-person book tour as we know it?
Miami writer Les Standiford estimates it costs about $1,000 a day to
produce the average book tour. In light of the fact that profit margins
for literary works generally hover between 2 and 5 percent, a book tour
is not an insignificant investment.
“I’m skeptical that any kind of tour — virtual or literal
— sells books by other than already notable authors or
personalities,” says Standiford, who, besides publishing with Random
House, is director of the graduate creative writing program at Florida
International University. “That’s why publishers have finally begun to
pull back and seek alternatives.”
Spokeswoman O’Brien casts Skype tours as another chapter in the rise
of technology-based promotional techniques such as book blogs and
trailers and as “a greener way of promoting a book.”
David Ebersoff, a best-selling author at Random House who also works
there as an editor for celebrity writers including Joyce Carol Oates
and the late Norman Mailer, agrees. “I see [Skype appearances] as
enhancing traditional book tours,” he says.
In the past year alone, Ebersoff says he’s done about 40 call-in
events with book groups to promote his latest novel, The 19th
Wife, for which there’s also a sophisticated website and a YouTube
trailer featuring Ebersoff driving around a town in Utah that was one
of the inspirations for the book. “The author and the publisher have to
work as a team to get the most promotion possible. To expect otherwise
is to be unrealistic,” he says.
Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan also believes the in-person
book tour will survive. “It’s too powerful a tool,” he says. “Even if
there aren’t any direct sales the night of an event, I’ve often found
that due to our intense promotion of the author’s appearance, there is
usually a residual effect where we see an increased interest in the
author’s titles.”
There’s also the author-reader interaction to consider, the
irreplaceable exchanges that occur during live-book signings. Miami
poet Denise Duhamel tells the story of meeting fellow poet Bill Knott
in Boston when she was in college. After waiting in line, Duhamel
handed Knott, one of her idols, a copy of his book to sign, and he
said, “I don’t know why you bought this book. It’s not very good.”
According to her, he then flipped through its pages, crossing out
certain titles and writing new ones with a purple pen. He even
scratched out one poem entirely before handing it back to her with a
smile. “It was one of the best nights of my life,” she says.
Authors too, after all, are also book fans. “My son and I recently
waited in line for three hours to see Neil Gaiman,” Bray says,
referring to the incredibly popular science fiction and graphic novel
author who’s also notorious for his good looks and powerful
readings.
But would Bray have waited three hours just to see a video
projection of Gaiman?
“As lovely as he is, probably not,” she says.
