This afternoon, after working for several hours, I asked Rob if he felt like going to Barnes & Noble. I was hoping to find the newest edition of Mountain Astrologer and to peruse the current releases.
When we walked into the store, there was a guy sitting at a table to the right, a bunch of books stacked in front of him. When I first saw him, I thought his eyes were shut, that he was actually snoozing. Then I realized he was an author doing a signing that consisted of: We’ll give you a table near the door, you stack you books on it, and sell whatever you can sell.
Rob and I stopped at the table and the author said, “Interested in buying some great books?”
Let’s call the author John Smith. In the late 1990s, he sold an unusual novel for which he was reportedly paid a million bucks. The only reason he registered on my radar was because at one time, we shared the same publisher – Pinnacle (Kensington) Books and he and Rob had had some sort of email interaction in the past. “We’re also authors,” Rob said, and introduced us.
No response from John. He has these large, dark eyes that stare and stare, but seem empty of almost everything, like he’s shell shocked or suffering from PTSD- which is what many authors are suffering from these days. He obviously didn’t remember the email exchange he’d had with Rob, in which he eventually tried to convince Rob to buy into his wife’s Acai juice pyramid thing.
“Who was your editor at Kensington?” I asked.
He named an editor whom I had met.
“Nice guy,” I remarked.
No response from John.
“My editor at Kensington died,” I said. That was Kate Duffy. I did 12 books with her.
”Who’re you with now?” he asked.
“Not them,” I replied. What I should have said, what he would have understood, was that my last three books were with TOR/Forge.
“We’re at Crossroad, a small, independent publisher,” Rob said.
I tapped the table. “This is depressing work.” Meaning that signings like this were depressing work.
John’s smile was quick – there and gone. “Yeah, it is.” Yeah, it really is.
I hurried off to the magazine section, remembering one of the first signings I ever did at a Walden’s book in a mall. Four excruciating hours at a table, people coming over, picking up my novel, reading the back cover, asking how long it had taken me to write the book. I sold two copies. I never did another signing like that.
I never found my magazine, either, but did buy Russell Brand’s book, Revolution, and returned to the table where Rob was still talking to John. I flashed the cover of Revolution. “Love this guy.”
“Did you see him on Howard Stern?” John asked.
“Nope. On MSNBC.”
I stood there for a few minutes afterward, listening to Rob trying to engage this guy in a conversation. But John’s face was a blank. He seemed shell-shocked, as if he’d been through a war. I think he has realized he isn’t Stephen King, JK Rowling, John Grisham, or any of the other bestselling authors displayed on the shelves at B&N. He has realized that he doesn’t have a movie platform like King, Meyers, Rowling, and all the other author whose books are so prominently at B&N, that his million dollar advance nearly 20 years ago was a fluke, that he is just another writer with a story to tell that may or may not find an audience.
As Rob and I later walked into the coffee shop to buy a couple of cappuccinos, I said, “He’s a brick wall.”
Rob shrugged. “He doesn’t want to reveal anything about himself.”
“No, he’s traumatized.”
I had wanted to go to B&N to find my astrology magazine but had encountered, instead, my mirrored self from three or four years ago when I stopped by B&N to see how many copies they carried of Esperanza, or maybe it was of Ghost Key. I felt these novels were the best I’d written, complex characters with a mythological backdrop, paranormal and yet real in the spectrum of human emotions. B&N carried two copies of Esperanza and zero of Ghost Key.
When we left the store, I glanced toward John and waved. And I have to say, he’s more courageous than I am, sitting there at that table, hoping that readers stop by and actually buy his books. It’s demeaning that so many of the people who generate the stories, the people who are the fuel for agents, publishers, and bookstores, for an entire industry, go home from a signing like this feeling like crap.
But it is what it is. One way or another, writers write, storytellers tell their stories, and every day new, independent publishers find ways to sell books and promote their authors.
The publishing paradigm is shifting, for sure.
Writing is a solitary business. It’s also a tough nut to crack. You’ve gotten through the shell, you will make progess. But the publishing game itself IS definitely changing. And slightly confusing to be honest. May Good Luck accompany you further!
Writing as a hobby since childhood, I would occasionally fantasize that someday I would be at a bookstore signing event, enthusiastically promoting a story that I wrote, but this is the grim reality of the publishing biz. Unless you happen to strike it lucky (make that extremely lucky) like the abovementioned best-selling name brand authors, it’s bound to be disappointing, as that poor guy at B&N discovered. Also, I find it equally abysmal that a story I spent *years* pouring my heart and soul into, will retail for a trifling $6 or $7 at the bookstore, a price which hardly justifies the time and effort involved. It’s much easier to “publish” on the Internet to the widest audience possible, where stories (regardless of quality) can be virtually immortal as long as cyberspace exists.
Well said, Dale!
Surely it’s a pointless exercise, if you are a virtually unknown author, to do a signing at a big bookshop. I’ve seen this happen at our nearest sizeable bookshop, where it seems almost embarrassing. What they have been doing recently instead is to get an author to sign a few books in advance and then make a display of them for people to peruse at their leisure. I’ve bought a couple of signed books this way.
Thing is, this author had one huge bigseller… but memories are short. The idea of signing books to place in a store makes more sense. We’ve done that in the past.