Touring authors - 02 October 1992

There was a small, maybe quarter column, advertisement in the paper last Monday morning, an invitation to the public of a kind that has become very familiar since the most drastic change took place about 25 years ago, in the promoting and selling of books. This change may be news to people who don't read books and even to many who do but who give very little thought to the reason why they chose this book to read and not that. It used to be that a writer delivered his/her manuscript to the publisher and then sat back, waited for the proofs, corrected them, gave a happy sigh, sat back again and waited hopefully for the reviews in newspapers and magazines.

In the meantime, the publisher got busy with his end of the deal, choosing the typeface, binding, getting the sales people to think up an attractive jacket, then the advertising department going to work on an advertisement to put in the papers. And, when the reviews appeared, if the book was at all well received, there'd be a second ad, quoting in bold type, the most dazzling, favourable phrases, even if the best of them dazzled rather dimly. The publisher had done his part, which for centuries we had always assumed was to promote and advertise and go out and market the book.

Well, a quarter of a century ago – on second thoughts, maybe much longer – all this changed. Somebody, I have no idea who, thought up a revolutionary way of selling books. Let the author, not the publisher, be the principal salesman. This idea would never have occurred if television had never occurred. The author's most strenuous part in the whole business now has only begun when he's delivered the manuscript.

The publisher allows him – please assume her also in all following contexts – allow him a few months for rest and recreation, then he must brace himself to be sent off to 10,16, 20 cities around the country over, usually, a two- or three-week stretch. He will be met by a sales agent of the publisher in every city, he will be housed, hotel'ed, he will be told to be on parade at six, seven next morning and whisked off to a local television studio. It may be, if he's lucky, the local station of a national network, in which case he will appear for an interview lasting perhaps three, four minutes on some such national show called This Morning or Wake Up America. I say he's lucky because the presumption is that he will be talking about his book to several million housewives brewing coffee and husbands shaving. Be with you in a minute, honey, what you saying? The author, chatting there in living, sleepy colour is hoping the wife is saying, "On your way home dear, why don't you stop by Brookingdales and pick up this book, it sounds fascinating."

Well, that is the most impossible dream for any author today. Most authors never get asked to be on a national network morning show and the publishers have a tough time selling the networks on anybody who is not already famous. However, for the next two or three weeks, the author runs, is driven ragged, on local TV and radio shows. He spends most mornings in front of a pyramid of his books, facing, he hopes, long, winding lines of potential buyers who ask, could you make it out to Ted, Carol, Alice and Frank, with congratulations on their joint anniversary. There comes a time when a book store manager takes pity and announces that we regret that Mr Dickens cannot personalise his inscriptions. So he signs his name and signs and signs and grins and grins and signs, and then when that city is done, he's wheeled off to the airport, takes a dinner flight to the next city, is met again, put to bed and told to be up and at 'em at six, and on and on.

I never enjoyed this travelling circus, even though you met hundreds of nice and flattering people. I remember almost 20 years ago, when I saw the itinerary laid out for me, I wanted to beg off. My publisher was, had been for 30 years, a close personal friend. He was sympathetic, he was also very old and this new requirement of the author, flogging his book as they say in England, seemed to him sad and not a little embarrassing. But it was the new system and he had to go with it. My dear boy, he said, that'll tell you how old he was, I agree with you but we've discovered that reviews may be nice to read and encourage some literate, well-off readers to buy, but they don't amount to a damn when it comes to sales. At the end of your two weeks around the country, you will have sold, or encouraged the sale of, 20 times the books you'd ever sell from reviews. He was right.

Well you'll probably guess now what that little advertisement in the newspaper last Monday morning was all about. It was not advertising a book, it was advertising the author and inviting you to come and meet him between noon and two o'clock, lunch hour, at this fine old, fine new giant book store on Fifth Avenue. See him touch him, say a word to him, buy his book and he would sign it for you. This is absolutely routine. Every week there must be similar ads in the papers, three or four times. So New York is so blasé about appearances in stores, tennis stars in sports stores, authors in book stores, that New York is not one of the best places to hustle your book.

Guess the cities that buy more books than anybody. There are what, a few years ago anyway, were known as the big five. So there's the quiz. I play this with my friends and the more cultivated, the more bookish they are, the more they get it wrong. Name the big five where a personal appearance will most help and sell most books. New York? Not necessary to go to New York. Boston, of course. Positively not. New Orleans, the cultural capital of the Deep South. My old, now dead, publisher once said, not only has no one in New Orleans ever bought a book, they have never read one. Well heavens where? All right, I tease you no longer. Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles. There are two remaining cities that turn out and pay out and buy more books and they are compulsory stops. In one of them I once signed 900 books, in the other, 1,000. Wait for it – Houston, Texas and Dallas, Texas.

So, the man who appeared on, off Fifth Avenue last Monday at noon. I dare to say that if he had appeared any day, say, last spring, I mean the spring of 1991, he would have been in an open car, waving to dense thousands of cheering people and driving through a blizzard of ticker tape. As it was, last Monday, a few hundred people went in the store, there was nothing in the people drifting by on the sidewalk to suggest anybody special was in town. The difference between spring of 1991 and the fall of 1992 is the difference between a great big soldier in camouflage desert uniform and a large amiable man in a suit, rather like the president of an insurance company. Now retired, now. however. still addressed as General H Norman Schwarzkopf. Of course they couldn't have rushed his book out in the spring of 1991, he hadn't written it, he was still in the desert. He came home, he retired from the army and was instantly besieged by publishers, begging him for a book, any book by America's new top hero. The promise of it went to a publisher that waved in front of him, I think it was two point something million dollars, as an advance against royalties. They're going to have to sell several million books to get that advance back. Anyway, bully for him.

The general's book is an autobiography and it sees him through his father's footsteps to West Point and his first command in Vietnam and then, of course, what everybody's waiting for – his account of Desert Storm. I just wonder if President Bush is waiting for it. When he, Mr Bush, started his presidential campaign in the spring, he couldn't wait, at every stop, to show himself off as the great decisive wartime president, the man whose judgement and performance during those thundering, tense seven weeks was sufficiently applauded by the American people, to give him a 92% popularity rating, an impossible peak, never before attained since polls began.

Well, as Duke Ellington once said, there have been some changes made. Shortly after the Republican convention, Mr Bush's men discovered from their own polling that people not only were no longer interested in the desert war, but many were beginning to think that Mr Bush's boasting about it was a cover-up for his failures on the home front – education, health care, crime, drugs, homelessness, most of all the economy. But now, who should bring it up as a very live issue and perhaps an electoral bonanza, but the Democratic campaign, Governor Clinton and Senator Gore, on quite new and very damaging grounds. On a charge which, if substantiated, would signify presidential corruption and obstruction of justice.

There is an embarrassing mass of evidence that the president's policy over the protests of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve and without the knowledge of Congress, was a policy of using agricultural loans to Saddam Hussein, to help him manufacture or buy chemical weapons and nuclear equipment, almost up to the outbreak of war and that this amounted to about a $2 billion misappropriation of taxpayer funds. Certainly there's no doubt at all that two days before Saddam invaded Kuwait, the American ambassador to Baghdad told him, in effect, that his grievance against Kuwait was none of America's business – 48 hours later, Saddam had turned, we were told, into Hitler.

We've become so numbed in the last dozen years by scandals in the presidential arm of the government that it may be that people won't care. So whether this issue will fly, as they say, in the face of Governor Clinton's trouble over his escaping the draft, the on-again, off-again distractions of Mr Perot and the overwhelming concern with the economy, we'll possibly never know until the morning or noon or night after the fateful election day of 3 November.

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