Lorraine's blog

This article first appeared in Writing Queensland.

Reading Between the Whines
Like most writers, I dream of being so successful that bookstore chains clamour for me to appear at book signings. You know the type of thing, store managers falling over themselves to attend to my every whim. A friend of mine has reached those dizzy heights.

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Well, okay, maybe not exactly those heights, but she has recently given a reading at a branch of one of the largest book chains in America. So how did her reality measure up against my expectations? Let’s just say from now on I’m going to be careful what I wish for!

Patricia J. Delois, known as Patti to her friends, was one of the inaugural Book of the Year Award winners on the British Arts Council sponsored website YouWriteOn.com. Patti is American and lives in the US, but the website is open to anyone writing in English, regardless of country of residence.

The prize was a publishing deal for her debut novel, Bufflehead Sisters. The award didn’t stretch to book promotion, but that wasn’t a problem for Patti. She was lucky enough to have two self-appointed publicists. Heather, a colleague at the library in Maine where she works, immediately arranged a reading. The other publicist is her mother, who combines spreading the word with sales. She has turned out to be a demon trader and sells copies wherever small groups gather. For some unknown reason she is particularly successful at funerals. Such salesmanship is a dying art.

Patti’s reading at the library drew 200 people and she couldn’t have been happier if Oprah herself had been in the room. Although Ms Winfrey wasn’t in attendance, an agent was. The agent later signed Patti and a two-book deal has been finalised with a Penguin imprint for Bufflehead Sisters and the sequel, Penguins in Amsterdam.

Buoyed up by the success of the first reading, Patti did another half a dozen, and local book shops couldn’t get enough stock to keep up with demand. In the meantime her mother was still notching up sales in the cemetery. Then the local branch of one of America’s National Book Chains contacted YouWriteOn.com. They wanted Patti to give an in store reading. She’d hit the big time. Even her mother’s graveyard sales paled by comparison with this.

She had her hair done, dressed for the occasion, and turned up ready to read to the multitudes.

Except that there weren’t any. Multitudes, that is. Heather had excelled herself with pre-reading publicity; posters advertising the event were in evidence all over Maine with one exception – The National Book Chain. They’d been given posters, but no one had bothered to put any up in the store. The result of this was that the very people who should have been informed, the store’s customers, were most probably the only ones who didn’t know.

But not having hundreds of people to read to was the least of Patti’s problems. She was horrified to find she’d been given a table just in front of the children’s area. She has nothing against children, but her books deal with adult themes, like sex and drugs. Some of the important words in her books are only four letters long, but with children within hearing distance, those words were too big to use.

The chairs for the audience were just far enough away to ensure she needed to shout to be heard, so she couldn’t even get away with whispering the naughty bits. There were only seven people seated, all of them Patti’s friends, but with so many passers-by there was always the hope that others might fill some of the empty chairs. Sadly, none of them did.

She read two scenes from Bufflehead Sisters and one from Penguins in Amsterdam, editing as she read to delete the non-child-friendly words. Not that she needed to worry, because what with tannoy announcements, shoppers chatting as they passed, several mothers behind her talking to their offspring and soothing crying babies, no one could hear anything anyway.

Patti has dealt with some odd happenings at readings. At one, a woman asked her what she believed the themes of Bufflehead Sisters were. When Patti explained, the woman told her she was wrong and argued for different themes. As Patti said, she’s only the author, what would she know about the book’s themes? But at the disastrous National Book Chain reading she would have welcomed that argumentative woman as a long-lost friend. At least it would have meant someone with whom to interact. The friends who’d come with her had heard her read so many times she couldn’t really blame them for not paying attention.

In fact, so dreadful was the whole experience, she would have walked out halfway through if Heather hadn’t gone to so much trouble promoting the event.

When I asked Patti if anything had gone right that day, she said that someone complimented her on her hair. So at least that’s something.

Although she feels such humbling experiences are good for the soul, she’s going to stick to readings at libraries and independent bookstores from now on. At least in those places she can be more comfortably humiliated.

But, believe it or not, that experience is not the greatest of her problems. Her other publicist is falling down on the job, or at least her friends are. As Patti says, she’ll have to cut her mother loose. Her contacts keep dying.

If you would like to read Bufflehead Sisters it is available here. My review of the book can be read here.