The book tour

If you're going to write a novel, which is an endeavor of great discipline, you're going to imagine a number of things. First of all, you're going to imagine that your book will be a bestseller, and you'll make enough money to give up your day job at the widget factory to spend the rest of your free time playing golf with Jame Patterson down in Palm Beach. Then you're going to have to believe that your great success means that your hungry fans want to meet you in the flesh and listen to you read from your future classic.

It is nice to dream.

A number of writers have finished their books, and with varying degrees of success (and I'm not sure how many rounds on the links with Mr. Patterson) gone on tour to promote their work. The results, as repaired in The Awl, have been mixed:

No one has heckled me yet, although I did have one guy at a reading come up to me and start asking me questions about the technology of the TM-31 and how it works and it took about five minutes for me to realize what was happening—it was about the time that I noticed how glassy his eyes were—and then he finally just came out and said it: he was a time traveler, too, and he wanted to know if I could do it anytime I wanted or had to use the machine the way I described in the book.

The title of the piece is self-explanatory. It's fun even if you don't have a bestseller in your personal oven: Nine Writers And Publicists Tell All About Readings And Book Tours.