WRITERS RIDE THE ROAD - ADVICE FOR TOURING AUTHORS

From the Cape Cod Times

Sweet is the taste of Jane Fonda's leftover FIJI Water. Sour is your breath the next morning from the mixed drinks in the hotel minibar.
Whether it's being smoothly driven around by an author escort, seeing old friends in the audience or wetting your whistle at the minibar, authors on a book tour have a range of adventures.

For Peter Abrahams of Falmouth, a prolific mystery writer, the worst thing about touring is the exhaustion.
"After a week or 10 days on the road, you enter a vague shadow world, at times really unsure of what city you're in, and worse, not even caring where you are anymore," he says.
He says touring as an author is an expensive business, and the publishers want to get their money's worth.
"Right now, I have an adult and a kids novel out at roughly the same time," he says. "Into the Dark" is the latest in Abrahams' series for children, and "Delusion" is his 20th adult suspense novel.
"The publisher usually sets up two or even three school visits during the day, and then a bookstore signing at night.
"The best advice on touring I ever got came from the publisher of my children's mystery books, the Echo Falls series. Very simple advice. She said, 'Use the minibar.'"

But though book touring has its downsides — from chauffeurs getting lost to showing up for a slide show at a school and finding the projector is missing — there are some positives.
"The great thing about book tours — besides free booze — is you actually get to meet the readers, sometimes readers to whom your books really mean a lot," says Abrahams. "I can't tell you how gratifying that is."
At a book-signing last winter in Toronto, a 12-year-old girl asked, "With all this writing, how do you have a social life?"
"That's the question, all right, but way too late to help me now," he says.

When Anne LeClaire of Chatham, whose novels include "Entering Normal" and "The Lavender Hour," goes on a book-signing tour, she is always glad to see friends in the audience, but she enjoys the whole experience.
"I do like to get out, read the words," she says. "It brings it alive, how much I loved writing it."
When she was touring for "Leaving Eden," which is populated by characters from the South, she used a Virginia accent. She said all but one Southern book reader was generous to her. He told her, "Sounds like you're from the South — Southern Maine."
Sometimes no one shows up, and LeClaire says she is "embarrassed for the bookstore owners and publishers."
A new book coming out next year, "Practice of Silence," will send LeClaire on the road again.
"It will be interesting," she says. "I will be talking about silence."

Kate Whouley of Centerville toured with her memoir, "Cottage for Sale, Must Move," in 2004 and again the next year when a paperback version came out. In addition to working on new fiction and nonfiction projects, she's a consultant who helps with the redesign of bookstores.
"I have a slightly different perspective," she says. "I've worked at bookstores and know what to expect."
She was lucky enough to have people who had read her book at each stop along her tour. Still, "every person who shows up is wonderful," she says. The downside of touring is appearing on morning TV shows, which she says provide an opportunity to make a fool of yourself.
In larger cities, she was chauffeured by author escorts, who sometimes meet a rock star one day and a Pulitzer Prize winner the next. They make everything go smoothly, says Whouley.
When she was in Milwaukee, her escort had just finished taking Jane Fonda around Chicago. Fonda's publicist had requested she have FIJI Water in all touring venues. The author escort had a trunk full of leftover bottles, and Whouley was able to drink Fonda's water.
Book touring comes down to a pretty simple description, says Whouley: "Time on planes and in cars and very little sleep at night."